Setting the record straight on Oasis

YOUR article ‘Protests staged against cuts to community group’, on page 6 of your March 16 edition, claims, based on a statement issued by the HSE, that the decision to close the Oasis project was “made jointly between themselves and the Dun Laoghaire Drug and Alcohol Task Force”. 

This is incorrect: neither did the Task Force participate in making this decision, nor did the HSE statement referred to claim it did.

Oasis was a mainstream HSE project funded directly by it. The decision to withdraw funding from Oasis was made by the HSE following a review of the project, which the HSE commissioned.

The Task Force works closely with the HSE Addiction Services in planning and developing services, but both have autonomy with respect to their separate funding decisions.  During 2015, the Task Force undertook its own services review and re-organised its funding recommendations accordingly. However, there has been no recent overall cut to the global grant available to it. As a result of its own review, the Task Force has established a new Youth Prevention Programme to provide professional, community-based interventions for under-18s with drug and alcohol problems in the community. 

The annual amount allocated to this programme will, by 2017, be four times that assigned to Oasis by the HSE in 2015.

Following the closure of Oasis, the Task Force engaged with the HSE and other stakeholders with a view to ensuring that the grant previously made to Oasis would not be lost to the area. This engagement is ongoing and in general the HSE has been positively disposed to suggestions that were made. 

In recent months, some political representatives have approached the Task Force, offering to assist on this issue. In general, following discussions, they took the view that the issue is best dealt with in a de-politicised environment. This attitude has been helpful, particularly taking into account that the issue concerns vulnerable youth, and obviously it would be wrong to involve vulnerable persons in a political process.

There is no doubt that, since 2007, the community sector in general and local drug projects in particular have been badly hit by public expenditure cutbacks, and managing these cutbacks has pre-occupied the energies and workloads of community bodies and their leaders. However, the task of planning, developing and reviewing services is not exclusively a resource issue, and whether resources are plentiful or scarce, there are times when new strategies, and new services, are required to deal with changing problems. Inevitably this means that some services close, while others remain open. Thus in other fields, for instance, foster care has replaced children’s homes, and community mental health care is gradually replacing institutional care. 

Similarly, the youth drug problem has changed substantially in recent years and the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Drug and Alcohol Task Force, through constant review and assessment, remains committed to keeping up with these changes, thereby ensuring its energies and resources are deployed, both strategically and with sensitivity, in responding to these grave problems.

Information on the Task Force at www.dlrdrugtaskforce.ie

Barry Cullen is a co-ordinator with the Dun Laoghaire & Rathdown Drugs and Alcohol Task Force.