Carl Kinsella

Well, I think the bottom line when it comes to the war on drugs is that drugs won.

Drugs won the war on drugs, emphatically.

Resounding victory for drugs.

And I think that to essentially continue with what we've been doing thus far in terms of criminalisation just fails to acknowledge the reality of drugs.

Drugs are very commonplace in Irish society.

I think it's quite notable that there are certain echelons or certain

cohorts in society who can discuss drugs and take drugs without any real sense of jeopardy whatsoever.

I think it's actually certain classes of people who tend to be targeted for criminalisation when it comes to drug possession.

Yeah, I think much less so.

And I think it's notable, you know, both Micheál Martin and Jim O'Callaghan have come out and said that Ireland is already taking a health-led approach to drug use.

But if you look at the stats from last year, you'll see it's actually 8,287 prosecutions or charges for drug possession.

And if you break that down, that's actually one every hour, every day.

So if you even think about state resources in terms of guarded time, in terms of court time, you know, we're losing a lot of time and a lot of resources to, you know, charging and prosecuting something that in many cases is not necessarily harmful.

You know, you refer to risky behavior, but of course, you know, as Donika made the point, alcohol is usually risky, gambling is usually risky, vaping is risky.

You know, there are all these things that we are very permissive of in society.

And we don't, you know, it's actually very hard to critique drug use in a way that is then logically consistent with the other mores we seem to have.

I'll stick up for Dublin a little bit.

I think in terms of the conversation around regeneration of O'Connell Street, it's interesting to kind of start with the GPO because if you're walking down O'Connell Street, it's not as if the GPO jumps out as the problem.

Like the GPO is the nice part of O'Connell Street.

And I think that it is sort of a risk, as Dunica pointed out, to make this major investment like a huge redevelopment