Michael Moynihan: The evidence is there. The urgency is there. Where is Cork's injection facility?
Drug use and open dealing are now features of city life in certain parts of Cork City.
Readers’ perception of the drug problem in Cork City is probably dependent on their own personal experience, naturally enough.
Occasional visitors to the city may not have to step over people shooting up in the staircase of a city car park.
They may not be in the habit of parking up behind a quayside hotel at 9am, only to see someone sitting on the adjacent footpath, injecting himself in the groin — sights encountered by this writer on different occasions.
Others will have similar stories.
It should be acknowledged these are just the more visible manifestations of drug use in our society.
It isn’t always as open: cocaine use is rampant in Ireland, for instance, but is rarely seen on the streets, though gardaí dealing with incidents of road rage might differ.
The extent of cannabis use in our urban areas can easily be established, mind, as walking the city streets can quickly become an education for the nostrils.
The problem with the open use and sale of hard drugs is something different.
The fact such scenes occur should give us all pause, because they tell us something about our society — that we have serious problems which need to be addressed at source.
At the same time, encountering such scenes is not an incentive to visit or remain in the city.
It would be foolish to think experiences such as those mentioned above do not become a consideration when a trip to the city centre is being weighed up.
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Drug use and open dealing are now features of city life in certain parts of Cork City, even though the locales can be movable.
For instance, in May, those at a meeting of the UCC Area Neighbourhood Safety Forum heard drug-dealing was an issue along French’s Quay, and had grown worse following the completion of the Séamus Murphy Bridge at Proby’s Quay nearby.
At approximately the same time, drug use and dealing became an issue in the Turner’s Cross area, further out from the city centre.
Locals blamed the increase in such activity on the increase in Garda patrols in the city centre, which were in turn pushing drug activity out towards the suburbs.
What is truly jarring is that a potential solution to the problem seems glaringly obvious, even if it remains maddeningly out of reach.
Late in 2024, a safe injecting facility was opened in Merchant’s Quay in Dublin, and between then and May this year, the facility has had 22,000 attendances, about 350 visits a week.
Its chief executive Eddie Mullins has said: “There is no question that lives have been saved,” and the facts bear him out.
There have been 380 interventions in drug overdoses, all of which were non-fatal.
It is no surprise that the facility’s licence was recently extended by 12 months to June 2027, which begs the question: where are the injection facilities for Cork and other cities?
There is no doubt it is needed.
Last May, Cork TD Pádraig Rice told the Dáil that Cork “urgently needs a similar facility". Recently, the Oireachtas Committee on Drug Use heard 40 years of evidence show these are effective.
“They reduce on-street drug use, reduce the spread of infectious disease, prevent overdoses, and connect people to addiction services.”
The Taoiseach is in agreement with Mr Rice. In June, Micheál Martin said that Cork “absolutely” needs an injection for drug users in the city.
“I would be in favour of that, but the issue will be location, and it is not for me to identify where the ideal location is,” he said.
“But certainly, we have to be innovative in helping people to come off addiction and deal with addiction.”
Despite the political support mentioned above — and the endorsement of such a centre by practitioners in the sector — Cork is years away from an injection facility.
Sadly, that is not mere pessimism.
As recently as February, Eddie Mullins of Merchant’s Quay told this newspaper: “With the best will in the world, it would take five years from agreement to have one in Cork, to get through planning, to selecting a service provider and finding a location.
“It definitely won’t happen in 12 months, and it won’t happen overnight.”
The evidence for his view is depressing: there was a nine-year wait, after all, between approval for the centre in Dublin and its opening in late 2024.
In Cork, the timeline looks just as leisurely: the HSE engaged experts at UCC to conduct research into drug-related deaths, drug misuse, and drug trends in Cork City as part of an effort to establish a supervised injection facility in the city.
That was over three years ago.
The lack of such a facility means missing out on the advantages associated with its operation.
An interim review of the Merchant’s Quay project determined services had been accessed by people at highest risk, improved client health, improved local amenity, and built bridges to treatment and support within six months of operation.
The review also stressed successful interventions in overdose situations: lives have been saved, as stated by Eddie Mullins.
That is encouraging, because lives are being lost in Cork due to problem drug use.
Last May, UCC published research which found there was an average of 35 deaths in Cork city each year due to problem drug use between 2018 and 2022.
That means Cork approached one drug-related death per week for four years.
If that is not a crisis that requires immediate action on an injection facility, what is?
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