Louise McSharry

I do think whenever we have our next election, which obviously isn't today or tomorrow, I do think it's going to be interesting to see what strategies parties like Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats who are kind of, particularly the Social Democrats, like Holly Cairns is the most popular party leader in the country.

Like that's according to recent research.

So you do wonder if they ran more candidates, you know, could that result in a bigger shift?

Sinn Féin obviously are up and down, so you wouldn't know, but

it's hard not to think that we would probably just end up with a similar result to what we've gotten before.

Yeah, definitely.

But I think the thing about that is, right, if we think about that, let's just like drill down into that for a second, that idea that there could be people who would have said to Mary Lou MacDonald that they felt more safe during the protests.

We think about an area like O'Connell Street, where we know, and the streets around it, where we know there is a huge amount of, I suppose, what people would call antisocial behavior.

Much of it, a significant portion of it, if not most of it, resulting from drug use and addiction, right?

And we know that like a huge amount of the inner city's antisocial behavior,

is linked to drug addiction.

And in fact, I actually saw this week that Dublin Town, which is one of the organizations for business owners in the city center, were talking about being willing to contribute to treatment strategies for people who experience addiction, because there was such a link between shoplifting and just general problems in the city center that all come from people who are experiencing addiction.

And

I was like, why is it that these business owners can see that that would be the solution?

Do you know what I mean?

That that makes sense.

Like, like rather than kind of pretending that we need to take some like really hard line right wing approach to crime, quote unquote crime and like safety in the city center.

Why can't we look at the very obvious problem, which is that we are not managing people's mental health in particularly in the area of addiction effectively, that it isn't easy enough for people to access treatment, that there isn't enough appropriate care for people who experience addiction.

Like there's so much we could do, you know, from a from a health care perspective.

stance to improve this stuff but that rarely seems to be spoken about you know so maybe people did feel a little bit maybe there are people who felt a little bit safer because because O'Connell Street was full of men from outside of Dublin who were sitting on their big tractors and you know fine maybe like I can I can kind of see that if you're someone who who sees kind of a