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SUPPORTERS of the Quinn family are to hold a rally in support of the family this weekend – urging the former Anglo Irish Bank to seek the suspension of the contempt orders issued against them this week.
The rally will be held in the Cavan village of Ballyconnell, the site of a Quinn packaging plant, on Sunday evening.
Supporters said they were holding the demonstration to show their solidarity with the Quinn family and to “support natural justice”.
An organiser said attendees would appeal to the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, formerly Anglo Irish Bank, to seek the suspension of the contempt orders issued by the High Court against Seán Quinn, his son Seán Jr and his nephew Peter Darragh.
Both Sean Quinn Jr and Peter Darragh Quinn were sentenced to 90 days in prison for their contempt of previous High Court orders demanding that the family stop any actions which could move its overseas assets beyond the reach of IBRC, to whom the bankrupt Quinn and his group owe €2.3 billion.
Sean Quinn Jr has already begun his sentence, though the whereabouts of Peter Darragh – who was absent for the court hearings which led to his sentencing – remain unknown.
The family’s supporters have called on IBRC to engage with the Quinns, through their lawyers, “to resolve the present impasse”.
They also want IBRC to suspend all further pending proceedings against the family “until the legitimacy of the €2.3bn debt is clarified”.
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A grown up conversation about drug use & abuse in this country? Best of luck with that……..
Herion use has exploded in the last year in Cork but logical ideas to tackle it are few and far between.It will only get worse.
Yes they should, at least users would be able to buy cleaner heroin from the nurses
Maybe it wasn’t always the case, but this fine country is growing up rather fast.
Supervised injection centres you say. Sweet Jesus how much more of taxpayers money is going to be uselessly thrown at this issue. If money’s to be spent then whats needed are centres where the addicts are brought in, basically locked in a room for a few weeks and get themselves cleaned up by a process of cold turkey, along the lines of what happened in Trainspotting the movie. No more of this bloody pussyfooting around the situation with methadone and bloody injection centres being setup purely to provide somewhere nice & warm & comfortable for these junkies and addicts to feed their habits.
Well Criona I look forward to seeing / hearing about the first of these lovely centres being setup on your street or in your own neighbourhood, which I’m sure will happen any day now. Let us all know how that little ‘experiment’ works out for you and your constituents won’t you !!
So you want to base drug policy, which is a very serious public health matter, affecting the lives of so of many men women and children, on what you saw in a movie???
Good chap.
I don’t remember that scene? Is it the one where rents try’s to give up on his own? Eh what?
It’s staggering how many people seem to agree with this prime example of clear, forward thinking on a serious societal issue…..
Totally agree Gary
The Mansion House should be the first ‘Injecting Centre’ followed by the Dáil and any other Politician inhabited space including their own homes, THEN we will see how much they want them really.
@ Garry (and those who agree) You think that when you get these people ‘clean’ that all would be OK? They could lead an existence similar to yours? Your viewpoint is built on fear and has been the status quo for almost 40 years now. This is not your area of understanding.
Here’s why I’m in favour of this: it will get drug addicts into an environment where they’ll try and help them kick their addiction, it could prevent overdose and spread of disease, reduction in discarded syringes, it will hurt the dealers’ wallets, and it could prevent a certain amount of crime and robbery.
In general, I never felt drug consumption should be illegal (don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not saying legalize drugs, nor am I condoning drug usage, I’m simply saying that I don’t think you should get a criminal record for drug consumption).
What’s the opposition’s opinion?
Criona Ni Dhalaigh has the makings to be our best Lord Mayor yet #genuine
By backing Áodhán Ó Ríordáin’s initiative.
I wonder what ideas of her own she has?
OneTrueVoice this is Criona being supportive of the ideas of Aodhain.
Not the time to play politics with with such a serious issue. As a member of a Drugs task force – politics is left at the door!
Great, Malachy, Hopefully Sinn Fein will be equally supportive in the Dail when the government brings their initiative forward.
you guys fight whose idea it is for another three terms of governance while the epidemic grows.
only a troll like onetruevoice could attempt to play tge party political card on whatvis basically a social and health and safety proposal..
Let the NIMBYism begin.
BS more pandering to the criminal classes. I suppose the next thing will be that they will give each of these burden on society a fifty euro note at the end of each visit to save them the bother og robbing your mothers handbag or the hassle of having to risk grabbing phones from kids to sell to other criminals. Junkies➕ drug gangs➕ city council all involved in a cycle of criminal collusion ➕ equals BS to me. Round them all up and place them all on spike island, problem solved without colluding in the drug trade.
Ah yeah sweep a pertinent & unrelenting societal issue under the carpet. Sure that’s bound to work wonders. Lets continue the failing “war on drugs” nonsense, its bound to come good at some stage!?
The approach that you are advocating; prohibition, is an abject failure that costs the taxpayer millions each year with no visible results.
If we provide injection centre with free heroin they’ll have a place to go away from the public and businesses, so no more used syringes on buses, in parks and playgrounds. Don’t get hung up on providing drug addicts with free drugs; we already provide them with methadone.
They’ll have clean heroin that will be free so it will disrupt the drug trade.
Because it will be free, there will be little sense in robbing tourists and citizens to get a fix.
There will be clean needles onsite, thereby preventing the spread of HIV.
If we have them all together in designated centres, we can learn, educate and eventually better understand and treat addiction.
We need to change our approach; the problem is getting worse.
With all due respect, circular logic as espoused by yourself is compounding the problem. We need to look at addiction as a public health issue and not a criminal issue.
What Vin said.
Good to see some progressive thinking on this from the politicians. Seems like ireland is slowly moving out of the dark ages in regards to social issues.
Denis you seem to have given this a fair bit of thought. Can you fill us in in the details of your plan. I’ve a few questions.
How many times does someone have to do drugs before they get sent to spoke island?
How do you know who is taking drugs, do you blood test everybody in the country, or in your plan is it just the poor who get tested?
What drugs is this internment for?
Even if you limit it to heroin, How do we pay for detention of the tens of thousands of drug users in the country at a cost of €65k per year each?
How do you get out of spike or is it a life sentence?
The proposal for supervised injection centres sounds far more sensible to me.
VinHeffer89 your comments make perfect sense but thats why it wont happen, our muppets in the Dail would see to that! Talking sense???….no we cant have dat in here!
It’s just reactionary nonsense in pursuit of green thumbs. “Reopen Spike Island” has been doing the rounds among populists here for years. It’s tiresome.
A lot of what represents us wouldn’t have the wit to see that what we’re doing is futile. If they admitted that it is pointless, they couldn’t hammer the “tough on crime” mantra.
Even from a cold, fiscal, cost-benefit point of view; injection centres are the way to go anyway.
@VinHeffer, I agree that we need to look at addiction as a public health issue but if a heroin addict or any other drug addict commits a crime then it needs to be looked as a criminal issue. I’m so sick of people being excused from court sentencing by the shield of ‘oh, he came from a terrible background and is on drugs’. As a society we all do not have to care about drug addicts, people are giving opinions on this site because that’s how they feel and should not be judged by doing so.
@VinHeffer89
Can we not TRY the ‘Tough on drugs’ policy before you declare it has failed.
There is no evidence it has ever been tried other than as a talking point.
Tough on drugs is basically a zero tolerance of drug taking as opposed to our current system where is ACTUALLY used to excuse certain crimes in court.
Tough on drugs means building more detention centres and proper sentencing of ALL drug crime with NO namely pamby excuses accepted and long sentences imposed for dealing, not suspended or probation.
When we have tried the above THEN declare it hasn’t worked.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m in no way trying to defend the criminal actions of heroin addicts, just to be very clear. If we treat addiction as a public health issue we will significantly reduce crime and disrupt the drug trade. That’s my argument.
I’m judging no-one. I am expressing my exasperation at a situation that has steadily gotten worse as the years progress and at the fact that some people are intent on perpetuating an obviously failed approach. I’m judging no-one.
@ John;
The “Tough on Drugs” approach has been taken in America for years. It’s failed; 5% of their population are in prison, many on drug related charges, and drugs are still widely available. In South-East Asia, they’re so “Tough on Drugs” that they’ll kill you if they catch you selling drugs. Yet SE Asia is crawling with drugs.
With the resources that the USA has and it failed there, how do you think that we could do any better?
The USA is not comparable to Ireland because in Ireland we have very generous Social Welfare payments (not food stamps) we have equal access to education that is actually MORE targeted if you are from a poor area and we don’t as yet have a strong racial discriminatory history.
A person coning from a family who has never worked is almost certain to be given far more money and support than ANY poor person in America, hence if they turn to crime or drugs then society cannot be said to have failed them only they and their parents have,
We should try a bit of stick to go with the ‘carrot and stick’ approach IMO
But the very system you’re proposing has failed elsewhere, in places that have vastly greater resources to throw at the problem than we do, why would it work here? Zero tolerance fails everywhere it’s pursued. If we followed that approach we’d have to build more prisons; a lot more to cope with the amount of people we would be locking up as opposed to treating the addiction problem. Prison, also it would seem, compounds the problem as they’re also riddled with heroin.
Yes, their parents may have failed them; it’s often what happens to children born to addicts. That doesn’t mean society should as well because that’s what we’re doing by continuing with an obvious failed approach.
You keep saying it failed here but we have never tried ‘Zero Tolerance’.
New York implemented a proper ‘Zero Tolerance’ approach and it turned the city from a violent no-go area into one of the safest metropolis on the planet. It DOES work if implemented properly.
And it will fill our prisons to bursting point , which are crawling with drugs. Then they’ll be released and the cycle continues. What costs more? Building and staffing new prisons, legal fees coupled in massively increased law enforcement or injection centres? The latter idea will definitely benefit the taxpayer.
Building proper state of the art prisons that don’t require huge staffing levels and lock down criminals properly in conjunction with proper no nonsense long sentences would be more of a deterrent than Molly Coddling addicts who will continue to bleed the state dry till they themselves die.
There’s no talking to you; you aren’t willing to engage with an idea contrary to what you’ve seen done before.
Haven’t seen proper deterrents in Ireland, EVER !! That has been my point, No other capital city would allow the scandal of junkies shooting up on the quays like we do without prison being a reality. You are welcome to have one of these clinics on your doorstep using your taxes, I don’t want one near me OR my taxes spent on them. I’m sick to death of paying tax that is wasted on low life junkies
Do you think their free legal aid is free?
Do you think their methadone programs are free?
Do you think it’s free to put them in prison?
YOU; the taxpayer, pays for this already. And it isn’t working. You are saying “more of the same, except tougher”. That involves spending MORE of your tax, okay?
Prison is too expensive because we didn’t invest in proper low maintenance low staffing prisons.
Legal aid is a scandal, should only be available once per person then no more.
Lawyers and judges conspire to keep fees turning over by proper long sentences not being given (admittedly more prison space needed)
MOST IMPORTANTLY methadone should be given for a maximum of 12 weeks, if an addict is serious about kicking the habit it will happen in that time span.
Hence I am sick of my tax being wasted by all these people, not just junkies.
A primary surplus is when you are taking in more Revenue (tax) than you are paying out in expenditure before loan repayment and interest are calculated. So if Deputy Murphy is correct then we need more prison space) are worse than
The injection centres will probably be mobile to begin and could park in the middle of O’ O’Connell street for convenience.
as well as giving them injection centres why not give them the drugs as well. wonder is there anywhere near her that’s vacent. that won’t Belo g changing her tune
You mean like Switzerland where 60% of all drugs are provided my pharmacies and burglary has been halved?
I hear you have a wee flat at the side of yours, meself, tomo & johno are en route!
Don’t forget the pies.
We already give them drugs!
What do you think methadone is? Ice cream?!
Junkies love ice cream
We need to stop calling them “junkies” as well. Attitudes need to change across the board to implement this properly.
We need to see it as a public health issue.
Belo is off the gear bud, get yer bleedin fax stray
Ah Vin, i was making a little joke. should we stop calling cannabis smokers stoners & drinkers juicebags? I dont think so, or care.
Damien the word has a whole different meaning. What if you had a child and they got strung out on Heroin and we called him/her a junkie? I am sure it wouldn’t be nice.
So what happens if people dont use these injection centers? In the moment, I dont think an addict is going to stop and think “Ah jaysus, Im not in the injection centre lads, cant be at this”
Why wouldn’t they use them?
Free heroin, warm and secure, medical aid and a professional to administer heroin as opposed to being on the street begging and robbing to scrape coppers together to line the pockets of some lowlife to get a bag of heavily cut gear?
They may be drug addicts but they’re not stupid; which one sounds better to you?
I see where your coming from, but its not offering much privacy is it? Heroin isnt the most sociable drug, people aren’t going to sit around feeling comfortable having the laughs while shooting up? Also, what happens after they’ve taken it? Just rolled into a corner somewhere until they come around for the next dose?
I think we’re starting to split hairs here.
They’ll be safe, off the street, away from the public, less likely to rob the public, less likely to leave used syringes in public. In terms of how their individual buzzes will go, I have no idea, but obviously it’s better than shooting up in an alley….
I don’t think it’s meant to be fun. It takes the whole of the addicts life and simplifies it down to their basic need for heroin. No more scoring, robbing, fixing where or whenever. Strict routine that allows them to focus on the absolute drudgery of being an addict. In effect it’s quite a cruel process. But if you want to reduce addiction and the visibility of addiction, it’s one of the only ones that’s proven to work.
Do you not think its going to be their individual buzzes that determine the success of injection centers though? All well and good to get these places up and running, what happens if the users dont want to be surrounded by medical professionals and the likes? Or feeling the paranoia that I would imagine would be there.
As opposed to the lovely atmosphere of the street?
I think injection centres is one step, free heroin another and then the direct access to addicts for health care workers, psychologists, social workers and addiction specialists will help those who want to get off drugs. A lot of these people come from backgrounds of abuse and neglect and have little prospects. If we are to get them off drugs it must be towards offering the chance to have a meaningful life. Abusing drugs is often a rational choice to alleviate trauma and depression. Drug centred approaches to addiction will only solve part of the problem.
Fair point! I agree it would definitely help those who want to be helped. I would imagine its the users that have no intention or want to get off drugs that are causing the problems though: Not caring where they use, leaving needles around, robbing etc. But I do understand its one step at a time :)
Has the basis of being a good idea. However like everything else in Ireland, she’d want to release a listing of where these centres will be, because the nimbyism will be something to behold.
-I think she is showing leadership and not cowering to the norm like FF/FG have done to the church,banks etc over the last century or so. If SF can show this type of leadership and leave their terrorist past behind then they will get my vote.
- the argument of cost does not stack up. How much does these ruined lives of addicts cost to society (crime etc) and the families. How much does it cost society where a child is reared by addicts? 10k, 100k? Can it even be measured?
This was Áodhán Ó Ríordáin’s initiative.
Nice to see Sinn Fein getting behind it and claiming it as their own.
John – I said nothing about drug policy. Policy covers the entire drugs issue, everything from its supply, to its use, to its resultant effects on society. What I said was about ONE aspect of any such policy…..namely that of getting Addicts off the drugs. So in answer to your question, NO I don’t propose basing drug policy on what I saw in a movie. However I DO propose basing a certain fairly important aspect of any such policy (namely getting addicts off their drug habits) on the age old concept of good old hard-nosed Cold Turkey intervention treatment. The very same concept upon which the scene in the movie I referred to purely as a reference point, was based upon.
To get addicts of drugs you first have to get rid of the drugs and that is never going to happen.
Gary, heroin addicts go cold Turkey regularly, when they can’t get any. But guess what, they go and get some again as soon as they can.
The only way cold turkey works (and it is a hard cruel process compared to weaning), is when the addict WANTS to give up.
Forcefully locking people in rooms against their will, will serve to be a horrible experience for them, if that is your goal, but it won’t reduce drug use. Mind you, the misery caused could well increase it!
That’s fair enough. But put the injection centres in Foxrock.
Biggest cause of drug addiction has been shown to be… AUSTERITY and that has been shown in Greece especially as well as a rise in HIV cases.
Doesn’t seem to be the case in South East Asia or Africa where the standard of living is significantly lower than EU countries with their ‘austerity’.
The 1st world doesn’t know the meaning of harsh living standards. Resorting to drugs is always a personal choice.
Poverty is what you are familiar with, but being new to poverty is a blow to the ego… and self esteem.
and the nation wants health care, education and work. get with the plan… headline grabbing so and so.
Like the Mayor’s basic idea of ‘having a grown up conversation ‘ on drugs but also on various other social issues.
Wouldn’t be holding my breath,though…
Panem et circenses.
Who’s paying for these junkies that the drug dealers are making money for ? Fk the lot of them
Now pay up!
I am with Christy Burke we desperately need quality residential and community effective treatment as a priority not just tolerating a life spent on drug maintenance for this group in our community
Even if we don’t get around to this ‘conversation’, the word is out that we have an immature attitude to this situation.
have your say