Oireachtas Committees Dail Éireann — 2026-07-09 ============================================================ Marie Sherlock (LAB), Dublin Central I thank the Minister of State. That is certainly very welcome. I say genuinely to the Minister of State and the senior Minister in the Department that there is a real opportunity to show leadership and to prove their credentials by getting things done with regard to this particular issue. Our committee heard hundreds of hours of evidence from 82 witnesses since April last year. It was an incredibly extensive look at all the issues. The reality is that the Minister of State outright rejected our recommendation of decriminalisation. There was an apparent misrepresentation of what the citizens' assembly actually said and she conflated decriminalisation with legalisation. --- 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/2026-07-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-09