Urban Development
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-20
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

This morning, a powerful piece on "Morning Ireland" about drug-related intimidation described how families are confronted by drug dealers who say that their child owes them a certain amount of money and the family now owes this money and they will terrorise the family until it gives them the money. One woman said that 50% of the time, she feels a knot in her stomach as a result of stress. Another woman said that every time a car comes down into her cul-de-sac at night-time, she thinks: "Are they coming for me?". In another case, these gangsters turned up at a person's door with crowbars and tried to break in when she was there alone. This is a thing that is happening across the city. The report highlighted the work of the Whitechurch addiction support project, which is supported through the Drug Related Intimidation and Violence Engagement, DRIVE, initiative. It has done excellent work supporting 75 families in the past year. However, the kicker came at the end of the report when we heard that the funding for this DRIVE project is now over and this work will end in the next month. It seems incredible that at a time when the Government is promoting this project nationally, funding is being taken away from local projects to assist families in dealing with this intimidation.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-20