Street brawls in Cork prompt renewed calls for supervised injection facility

Lord Mayor and the head of the HSE's regional drugs services respond to spate of antisocial behaviour on St Patrick's Street

The street brawl that erupted on St Patrick's Street in Cork around 6pm on Monday is just the latest in a series of antisocial behaviour incidents on the main streets of Cork City. File picture

Ireland’s first supervised injection centre for intravenous drug users should be piloted in Cork, civic leaders and addiction experts have suggested.

Lord Mayor Colm Kelleher said the delivery of a medically-supervised injection facility (MSIF) on Leeside should not be dependent on the delivery of Dublin’s proposed centre, which has been stalled by planning challenges.

“It’s high time that we, as society, realise and accept that there is a serious intravenous drug problem here and that we need to put solutions in place to solve it,” he said.

Cork's Lord Mayor, Colm Kelleher: Supervised injection facilities 'are a very important part of the jigsaw.' Picture: Michael O'Sullivan

"Such supervised injection centres are not a silver bullet, they won’t solve everything, and they will require extensive wraparound services for the drug users.

“But they are a very important part of the jigsaw.” 

His comments come after a spate of violent brawls on the city’s streets, some of which have been fuelled by drugs and alcohol, the withdrawal of some tinfoil-wrapped products from some shop shelves amid concerns over heroin use, and complaints about open drug dealing and consumption on some city streets.

David Lane, the HSE’s head of drug and alcohol services in Cork and Kerry, said that while there is a greater need for a MSIF in Dublin, several key stakeholders in the Cork region have backed the delivery of such a facility in Cork.

Securing the estimated €1.5m annual running costs and a suitable location will be two of the biggest challenges in delivery, Mr Lane said.

“No matter where we look at locating it, we will have people who don’t want it there, or anywhere near them,” he said.

We are in the middle of a process now of examining and digesting what happened in the planning process for the Dublin facility to identify the various issues in the hope that we could avoid something similar happening here. 

However, he said there is growing support for such a facility in Cork, with international evidence showing that MSIFs save lives and have knock-on benefits.

“Facilities like these can make all the difference to a person caught up in addiction, in terms of saving lives, breaking the cycle of chronic addiction, improving the quality of life and health of drug users, but they can also help to improve the city centre environment, and improve people’s experience of using the city centres,” he said.

David Lane, the head of the HSE's drug and alcohol services in Cork and Kerry: 'Facilities like these can make all the difference to a person caught up in addiction.' Picture: Gerard McCarthy

“Facilites like these can deal with a lot of the challenges that city centre businesses have to deal with every day. There are win-wins all round.” 

Mr Kelleher, who was widely praised last July for speaking publicly for the first time about his brother’s recovery from heroin addiction, told the Irish Examiner at the time that Ireland needed to start talking about supervised injection rooms as part of the solution to the heroin problem.

He contacted Health Minister Stephen Donnelly about MSIFs earlier this year but raised the matter with him again in recent weeks.

He said the department of health has in recent weeks written to him to say that it is actively pursuing the development of a MSIF, and funding for it, in Cork.

“I leave office in about two weeks but I won’t be backing away from this issue. I will continue to pursue it until we get one in Cork,” he said.