Aisling on the brink as funds set to run out

ONLY a last-minute intervention by the people of Meath and the wider region can now save the Aisling drugs prevention and advisory service which was due to shut down this week after 19 years because of its critical shortage of funds, its founder and director Marie Byrne declared.

In a heartfelt plea, she said: "The people of the county need to take ownership of this great attempt to deal with a growing addiction problem. Otherwise, young people are going to be left to their own devices to deal with their awful problems in whatever way they can. Please don't leave this to the Government or anyone else to pick up because it just won't happen."

For the second time in three years, the group has reached crisis point. It no longer has the funds to keep going and will have to close its doors in January.

Unless the group has a guaranteed €300,000 a year, it cannot expand its staff numbers and increase its services to a growing number of addicts.

"All we are left with after 19 years is to tell the parents 'try to be around your children, particularly at this time of year and watch out for them - they are vulnerable and they need you'," Ms Byrne said.

"We have some very frightened young people at the moment. They are saying to us 'where can we go for help?' Some of them are extremely at risk and we have no answer for them."

The service, based in Navan, has been providing assistance to children as young as 10 who are experimenting with cannabis and solvents. "There are no old addicts. We have people mainly from 15 to the 20s and 30s and we lose some of them through death. Some of the younger ones are addicted to cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine and alcohol," Ms Byrne said.

Now, from the Aisling group's viewpoint, a new drug - methamphetamine, commonly called ice - is hitting the streets, bringing with it a terrible and destructive aggression which has devastated communities in the United States.

"People can no longer stand on the sidelines and look on as a whole drug and addiction culture is allowed to take control. They can't afford to ignore this any longer. We need to tell parents, teachers, everybody who is in touch with the young people that they have to intervene earlier to support children, because that is what they are, to come off drugs. Their families need support to cope with the dreadful problems addiction bring," she said.

The group was founded by Marie Byrne in 1988 in an attempt to set up a prevention and advice programme for people with drugs and alcohol dependence problems. Since then, Ireland has developed one of the worst drug addiction problems in Europe. Aisling has recognised the need for its service to grow with the problem and, after its foundation, it had sufficient money to run the kind of service it was offering.

However, in order to put in place a proper recovery programme, it had to have professionally trained staff. To keep the service going, it had to have a rolling fundraising programme, something which has put the resources of its staff and supporters under continuing stress. Marie Byrne makes the point that the group needs to be assured that it will have adequate funds available to continue its work.

It ran out of money in 2004 when Government funding stopped. Only the intervention by the then Minister for Education, Noel Dempsey, and then Minister for Health, Micheál Martin, ensured the survival of the group by getting a financial lifeline for the service. The group could not get adequate funding from the then North-Eastern Health Board and it was left to the two ministers to come to the rescue.

The money the group got was tied into a condition that it be used only in marginalised RAPID areas. "We were tied into dealing with these areas only while, at the same time, we could see the need to deal with addiction over a much wider area of the community," Ms Byrne said.

"That's why we see the need to have the funds coming directly from the community itself. We recently had a form printed in the Meath Chronicle asking people to pledge whatever they could afford to Aisling. Indeed, if each reader of the paper gave just €1, the accumulation would give us enough to keep going. We need to be independent of Government funding because trying to get funding from there is surrounded by so many caveats and conditions, it is made nearly impossible for us to keep going," Ms Byrne said.