FARMLEIGH A POINTER TO STATE'S LACK OF CARING

That the purchase of the Guinness mansion, Farmleigh, in the Phoenix Park
for anything close to pounds 25 million should even have been contemplated
by the Government is evidence of our collective skewed politics.

Collective because Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats are those in
Government who did the contemplating, because it was Fine Gael that first
thought this should be contemplated and because Labour and the Greens seem
to think this is quite dandy. And even, dear oh dear, The Irish Times
editorialised yesterday urging the purchase.

At the very best this mansion could be used for the entertainment of foreign
dignitaries, for splendid Euro-bashes, for the even greater indulgence of
the Aosdana types, for exhibitions of paintings and of period furniture and
for occasional "community" wheezes which might give an egalitarian gloss to
the venture.

The Irish Times yesterday suggested it might become "a new home" for the
Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. Isn't the very existence of
that Department silly enough? The purchase of Farmleigh is a further
representation of the profound inequity at the heart of our political culture.

Probably from the upstairs windows of this mansion some of the blighted
western suburbs of Dublin may be viewed. Here some tens of thousands of
people live in communities marked by rates of unemployment of more than 50
per cent, a virulent drugs problem, the incarceration of hundreds of its
young manhood for crimes largely connected with drugs, early school-leaving
and all other forms of social, cultural and economic deprivation.

If the pounds 23 million the State paid was invested in one or a few of
these communities, it could transform the lives of its inhabitants. What
conceivable benefit could there be from spending pounds 23 million on the
Guinness mansion compared to the benefit that would be bestowed on a
deprived community by such largesse?

A particular project to which a spare pounds 23 million might be diverted
concerns Mountjoy Prison. In 1996, amid great fanfare and
self-congratulation, the Department of Justice and its then minister, Nora
Owen, opened a drugs rehabilitation unit in Mountjoy. This came after years
of complaints that nothing was being done there about the rampant problem of
addiction among its prisoners. Survey after survey had shown that a very
high proportion of Mountjoy's inmates were drug addicts on entering the
prison and persisted with their drug habits while there. No serious attempt
was made to deal with the addiction, largely because of problems concerning
the medical service in the prison, which the Department of Justice felt
powerless to resolve.

But in 1996 we were led to believe this was all to be changed. At last, a
drug rehabilitative programme was to be put in place which might mark the
beginning of a real attempt to deal with the abuse phenomenon in Dublin as a
whole. After all, almost all the hard drug-abusers ended up in Mountjoy at
one time or another, and if their addiction could be dealt with while in
Mountjoy, there was the prospect that the problem city-wide could be addressed.

We were told that a special unit was being opened in Mountjoy, providing
proper rehabilitative treatment and then isolation from the main prison for
those who wanted to stay off drugs in jail. There seemed a real chance that
many of the inmates might be able to break out of the drug culture and
resume drug-free lives on release.

Of course, this initiative on its own would not have been able to resolve
the problem. Treatment facilities would have to be available on a scale far
greater than was contemplated. But more fundamentally, the deprivation which
was the source of the hard drug addition in the inner city, in Darndale,
Coolock, Neilstown, Killinarden and the other impoverished areas of Dublin
and Cork (hard drug abuse is largely unknown outside these areas and
virtually entirely unknown in middle class areas), would have to be confronted.

But the Mountjoy initiative seemed like a start.

The programme got up and running in July 1996. It consisted of an eight-week
course, two weeks of detox and six weeks of rehabilitation. Sounded fine, as
far as it went. Disappointingly, only 10 prisoners could be accommodated on
the programme at any time; this out of a prison population of over 800
prisoners at any one time and a population of about 2,000 over any one year.
A year after the programme began Dr Des Crowley, the medical officer to the
drug treatment unit at Mountjoy, compiled a report on the project. It was
published as an appendix to the report of the working group on a Courts
Commission on a drugs court in February 1998. Dr Crowley's report found that
of the 41 inmates who underwent the programme in the first six months, 24
had returned to drug use, that is 58 per cent.

Dr Crowley's report states: "The drug detox unit has proven to be a huge
success . . . However, once the prisoner is placed in a less secure and
regulated environment (on completion of the programme) in terms of illicit
drug availability there is a huge potential for this prisoner to relapse."
It continued: "The aftercare is still inadequate and the patients find it
difficult coming from an intensive detox programme to be much less
disciplined after-care follow-up".

Dr Crowley found: "Most of the patients discharged to the community have
returned to drug use". He followed up by noting: "It is alarmingly obvious
that an extension of the drug treatment facilities is required at Mountjoy
Prison in the very immediate future."

It almost beggars belief that such a programme should have been put in place
without an adequate aftercare programme and a full comprehensive service
right from the beginning. All the more so given that for years before 1996
the visiting committee at Mountjoy and other prisons had been complaining
about the absence of such a programme. It is more than disappointing to
discover that the programme launched amid such trumpeting in July 1996 is so
inadequate.

The investment of pounds 23 million in a proper drug programme in Mountjoy,
with proper aftercare arrangements both within and outside the prison, would
go some way towards dealing with the drugs crisis. Of course, that would go
only part of the way. Probably close to pounds 1 billion needs to be spent
on these communities to eradicate the true causes of drug abuse. The
diversion of the pounds 23 million the State paid for Farmleigh to an
improved drugs unit in Mountjoy would have been a sweet irony, for wasn't
Farmleigh built on the foundations of another drug addiction?

Splurging pounds 23 million on Farmleigh, itself a monument to exploitation,
is not just a wilful abuse of public funds. It is a signal that the displays
of period furniture and the like loom larger in the pantheon of our
priorities than the alleviation of basic deprivation, even on the very
fringes of Farmleigh.