Source: Irish Times
Contact: lettersed@irishtimes.ie

OPINION
Drugs battle has reached a crossroads

Remarkable progress has been made in the battle against drugs in some areas
of Dublin's inner city. It is now time to address fundamental questions
such as management of workingclass estates and the whole question of
community policing, argues Mick Rafferty in the first of two articles

The fight against the drugs crisis has reached a crossroads. Many of the
measures called for by antidrugs community activists, and adopted by the
government after the murder of Ms Veronica Guerin, are beginning to bite.

Measures such as the establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau, a better
resourced Drugs Squad, the setting up of local task forces in the areas
most affected, the commitment to provide satellite treatment facilities,
all form part of a new more integrated approach.

Just this month a jubiliant Health Board official was able to tell members
of the Inner City Organisations Network that they had no more people on
their treatment waiting list. While this is not true of other affected
areas, it is still an event to be celebrated by a onceravaged community.

While there are remaining questions around the main form of medical
treatment (the controlled dispensation of methadone) and the quality of
longterm rehabilitation, there is still a sense of remarkable progress in
little over a year. The expectation is that the new Government will honour
its preelection commitments and sustain and intensify these measures.

Two other major issues connected with the drugs crisis, which have not been
examined in as much detail as street dealing and treatment, are those of
community policing and estate management.

These issues were explored by the Lord Mayor's Commission on Drugs, the
report of which was published at the end of June. It is only now, with a
pilot community policing scheme about to commence in the north inner city,
that these two measures are emerging in a major way. Community policing
means many different things to different people.

In many Dublin workingclass areas cooperation with the police does not
mean helping to solve all crime. It means selective tolerance, in contrast
to the doomed concept of zero tolerance.

Similarly estate management has different meanings.

For the local authority, it might mean handing over all estatemanagement
functions to the local community. But there is a suspicion among locals
that they will be left with the dirty work of forcing out the undesirables
without the proper level of support from the authorities.

It is important to attempt to reconcile these different perspectives. The
drive for local estate management is coming from two distinct sources: on
the one hand, the Department of the Environment a few years ago pointed to
the escalating costs of maintaining the public housing stock and its
environment. Since then the growth of the heroin problem, and the resultant
antisocial behaviour in some of the affected estates, have provided the
local authorities with additional reasons for looking for alternative
management of their estates.

On the other hand, the drive for local estate management has come from the
grassroots, from the tenants themselves, because they experience lack of
maintenance and development of their estates and houses. They argue that to
get even simple things done they must wade through a huge bureaucracy.

The authorities might also, in the first place, consider the underlying
reasons people in so many working class blocks of flats and outer suburban
estates feel neglected and abandoned. One major factor, in my view, is that
until recently Dublin Corporation did not see itself as promoting the wider
social and economic interest of its tenants. The corporation's role was
perceived as merely that of a landlord and in some cases an absentee landlord.

There were other factors that led to this feeling of abandonment and
powerlessness in these areas. The fact that many were developed without
adequate facilities reinforced the marginalisation of many families.

As these areas became caught in the downward spiral of environmental blight
and economic isolation many tenants considered them a place of transition
to move out of as soon as possible. This attitude was stamped on people's
minds in the mid1980s when the government introduced a hefty grant for
people to move out of local authority houses.

Instead of encouraging a social mix and a vibrant community these policies
and attitudes had the opposite effect. The strong, the educated and the
economically viable moved out and those less likely to develop resilient
community structures were largely left to fend for themselves.

These areas were left without articulate advocates or effective means of
expressing their grievances. Decent citizens found themselves frustrated
and powerless. Thus there was a breakdown in personal and community
selfesteem. It was not until the Department of Social Welfare's Community
Development Programme got under way in the late 1980s that the issues of
local leadership and resources began to be addressed in these areas.

Their endemic problems were again brought into focus by the development of
local area partnerships under the Programme For Economic and Social
Progress. These partnerships have pursued actions at a local level that
attempt to address longterm unemployment and at the same time attempt to
improve the quality of life and environment of those people on the margins
of society.

The time seems ripe now to address the mistakes of the past. There should
be no expectations raised that estatemanagement initiatives on their own
are a panacea for all the ills of these areas, particularly the heroin
problem. It will take time to address the legacy of years of bad estate
management.

Many local contributors to the Lord Mayor's Commission on Drugs have said
they do not want to begin to take responsibility for their areas without
full support from all the agencies and authorities responsible for services
and development in their area. They say local estate management begins with
these authorities listening to what they have to say, and responding to
local priorities rather than pushing their own agendas.

Those not familiar with the extent of the degradation which some
workingclass areas have experienced due to the drugs crisis may feel some
discomfort at the notion of decentralising local authority decision making
to "suspect" local people. These locals would simply respond by asking why
did these people not express the same discomfort when the young people of
their areas were dying in their dozens?

Why, if people had been marginalised and made powerless by the very
structure of their estates, could not the forces of law and order, the
guardians of the peace, come to the rescue of decent lawabiding citizens
who were under siege by the drug dealers in their own communities?

(Mick Rafferty, the cochairman of the Dublin Citywide Drugs Crisis
Campaign an alliance of trade union, community, church and voluntary
groups has been a community worker in the innercity for over 25 years)

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