*Senator Timmy Dooley (FF). Photograph: Joe Buckley
A CLARE SENATOR has hit out at “middle class people” helping to support the criminal drug network through their use of recreational drugs on a social basis.
An ongoing feud in Ennis remains the focus of an ongoing Garda investigation with calls across political circles for more resources to be pumped into the Clare Garda Division.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, Senator Timmy Dooley (FF) added weight to the previous call from Cllr Johnny Flynn (FG) for the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) to be deployed to Clare to help stamp out the drugs trade which is rampant in parts of the county.
He outlined, “We need the specialists that will target the ring-leaders, those making significant amounts of money from the sale and supply of drugs, there’s a chain of command and some of the people operating on the ground are harmless by comparison but there are people higher up the food chain that need to be targeted and we need to address that”.
Ennis is not an outlier when it comes to the presence of crime and drugs, Senator Dooley maintained. “Ennis is no different to any county town, this is happening across the country, we’ve to be careful that we don’t create the impression that Ennis is lawless because it is not, there have been a couple of incidents in every county town but drugs is a huge issue and it’s in every rural village”.
This matter is more prevalent through the commonality of drugs as a “social activity,” the Mountshannon native claimed. “It’s important that people realise that there are middle class people who will for recreation do drugs at the weekend as part of their social activity but behind that activity whether wittingly or unwittingly they are supporting a criminal network that then creates the situation that we’ve seen here, that’s why people need to reflect on how they spend their leisure time and what they consume”.
“It’s a nationwide problem but communities are being flooded with cheap drugs, the regular drugs and these synthetic drugs that are having a massive impact, some people will consume them and it will not affect them but others will have lives destroyed by it, we’ve got to have a broader conversation in society about what matters and what doesn’t, a lot of sensible people think because they can handle it that they can handle the drug every now and then and that they are doing no harm but they are because they are supporting a criminal network and a regime that is making drugs freely available and others less fortunate fall into a trap and sadly that has a huge negative impact on themselves and the lives of their families”.
