That the purchase of the Guinness mansion, Farmleigh, in the Phoenix Park for anything close to £25 million should even have been contemplated by the Government is evidence of our collective skewed politics.
Collective because Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats are those in Government who did the contemplating, because it was Fine Gael that first thought this should be contemplated and because Labour and the Greens seem to think this is quite dandy. And even, dear oh dear, The Irish Times editorialised yesterday urging the purchase.
At the very best this mansion could be used for the entertainment of foreign dignitaries, for splendid Euro-bashes, for the even greater indulgence of the Aosdana types, for exhibitions of paintings and of period furniture and for occasional "community" wheezes which might give an egalitarian gloss to the venture.
The Irish Times yesterday suggested it might become "a new home" for the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. Isn't the very existence of that Department silly enough? The purchase of Farmleigh is a further representation of the profound inequity at the heart of our political culture.
Probably from the upstairs windows of this mansion some of the blighted western suburbs of Dublin may be viewed. Here some tens of thousands of people live in communities marked by rates of unemployment of more than 50 per cent, a virulent drugs problem, the incarceration of hundreds of its young manhood for crimes largely connected with drugs, early school-leaving and all other forms of social, cultural and economic deprivation.
If the £23 million the State paid was invested in one or a few of these communities, it could transform the lives of its inhabitants. What conceivable benefit could there be from spending £23 million on the Guinness mansion compared to the benefit that would be bestowed on a deprived community by such largesse?
A particular project to which a spare £23 million might be diverted concerns Mountjoy Prison. In 1996, amid great fanfare and self-congratulation, the Department of Justice and its then minister, Nora Owen, opened a drugs rehabilitation unit in Mountjoy. This came after years of complaints that nothing was being done there about the rampant problem of addiction among its prisoners.
Survey after survey had shown that a very high proportion of Mountjoy's inmates were drug addicts on entering the prison and persisted with their drug habits while there. No serious attempt was made to deal with the addiction, largely because of problems concerning the medical service in the prison, which the Department of Justice felt powerless to resolve.
But in 1996 we were led to believe this was all to be changed. At last, a drug rehabilitative programme was to be put in place which might mark the beginning of a real attempt to deal with the abuse phenomenon in Dublin as a whole. After all, almost all the hard drug-abusers ended up in Mountjoy at one time or another, and if their addiction could be dealt with while in Mountjoy, there was the prospect that the problem city-wide could be addressed.
We were told that a special unit was being opened in Mountjoy, providing proper rehabilitative treatment and then isolation from the main prison for those who wanted to stay off drugs in jail. There seemed a real chance that many of the inmates might be able to break out of the drug culture and resume drug-free lives on release.
Of course, this initiative on its own would not have been able to resolve the problem. Treatment facilities would have to be available on a scale far greater than was contemplated. But more fundamentally, the deprivation which was the source of the hard drug addition in the inner city, in Darndale, Coolock, Neilstown, Killinarden and the other impoverished areas of Dublin and Cork (hard drug abuse is largely unknown outside these areas and virtually entirely unknown in middleclass areas), would have to be confronted.
But the Mountjoy initiative seemed like a start.
The programme got up and running in July 1996. It consisted of an eight-week course, two weeks of detox and six weeks of rehabilitation. Sounded fine, as far as it went. Disappointingly, only 10 prisoners could be accommodated on the programme at any time; this out of a prison population of over 800 prisoners at any one time and a population of about 2,000 over any one year.
A year after the programme began Dr Des Crowley, the medical officer to the drug treatment unit at Mountjoy, compiled a report on the project. It was published as an appendix to the report of the working group on a Courts Commission on a drugs court in February 1998. Dr Crowley's report found that of the 41 inmates who underwent the programme in the first six months, 24 had returned to drug use, that is 58 per cent.
Dr Crowley's report states: "The drug detox unit has proven to be a huge success . . . However, once the prisoner is placed in a less secure and regulated environment (on completion of the programme) in terms of illicit drug availability there is a huge potential for this prisoner to relapse." It continued: "The aftercare is still inadequate and the patients find it difficult coming from an intensive detox programme to a much less disciplined after-care follow-up".
Dr Crowley found: "Most of the patients discharged to the community have returned to drug use". He followed up by noting: "It is alarmingly obvious that an extension of the drug treatment facilities is required at Mountjoy Prison in the very immediate future."
It almost beggars belief that such a programme should have been put in place without an adequate aftercare programme and a full comprehensive service right from the beginning. All the more so given that for years before 1996 the visiting committees at Mountjoy and other prisons had been complaining about the absence of such a programme. It is more than disappointing to discover that the programme launched amid such trumpeting in July 1996 is so inadequate.
The investment of £23 million in a proper drug programme in Mountjoy, with proper aftercare arrangements both within and outside the prison, would go some way towards dealing with the drugs crisis. Of course, that would go only part of the way. Probably close to £1 billion needs to be spent on these communities to eradicate the true causes of drug abuse. The diversion of the £23 million the State paid for Farmleigh to an improved drugs unit in Mountjoy would have been a sweet irony, for wasn't Farmleigh built on the foundations of another drug addiction?
Splurging £23 million on Farmleigh, itself a monument to exploitation, is not just a wilful abuse of public funds. It is a signal that the displays of period furniture and the like loom larger in the pantheon of our priorities than the alleviation of basic deprivation, even on the very fringes of Farmleigh.