ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DRUG TREATMENT CENTRE BOARD
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DRUG TREATMENT CENTRE BOARD, TRINITY COURT, DUBLIN 2
Dia Dhiabh a cháirde.
We gather in celebration and in gratitude for the thirty-five years of service of the Drug Treatment Centre Board. My thanks to Sheila Heffernan for her kind invitation to today’s event. It gives me a welcome chance to say thank you for three and a half decades of vital work in the notoriously difficult field of substance abuse. Many thousands of individuals and families have cause to be grateful to you for the treatment, counselling, support and hope you have brought to lives skewed out of kilter by addiction and drug abuse. Each time that you have helped someone to make the transition from being a problem to a problem solver or a problem solved you have strengthened the individual, the family, the community and our country. No words of mine could do full justice to the extent of your achievements since those early days back in 1969 but I hope that on this day when we look back over those years and see the difficult journey already successfully travelled, you will find the self-confidence and renewed sense of vocation necessary to face the awesome scale of what lies ahead.
I am sure that it is the dearest wish of everyone here that in thirty-five years from now there might be no more need for a drug treatment centre, but brutal reality tells us that is most unlikely. In a dismal trend, the number of addicts seems to be growing rather than diminishing, the variety of drugs is also growing and the predatory industry which feeds addiction and abuse grows more sinister, more violent and more powerful. Nearly 100,000 client visits annually is surely evidence of the depth of need as well as your commitment and energy. Unpack the stories and a bleak landscape of poverty, disease, crime and stunted personal development emerges. This most insidious enemy can get a powerful grip on a family, a street, a community. Little lives are blighted even before they are born and so much human potential is utterly, needlessly wasted. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by it all, to be unsure of our power to overcome. That is why your steady, scholarly, professional presence is so reassuring and so essential. You offer hope to the individual of a good, fulfilling life beyond addiction. You have the experience to help construct the pathway to that life and the sensitivity and patience needed to introduce clients to their own power, their own possibilities.
This Centre, the oldest and largest treatment service in the country, has developed, changed, adapted, learnt and taught. The services have widened and deepened, drawing in family and community as you seek to address the weaknesses and harness the strengths of the client ‘s context. Today’s sophisticated and integrated range of supports and services is very different from what was available in the early years but there is a unifying value system that underpins the Board’s work throughout the years. It is to be found in the constant pursuit of better and more effective solutions, the respect for scholarly research, the primacy of training and education and the tenacious belief in the capacity of the human person to choose change and to transcend mistakes and misery.
You provide a handrail that gives practical, credible effect to this elusive thing we call hope. For that, you deserve the thanks of the entire public for what you do and for the choice of this particularly demanding work as your life’s vocation.
I wish each of you well and in particular I wish each client who uses your service what you and they would wish for themselves - healthy lives, happy lives, their talents building up self, family and community. Behind you are 35 years of achievement and ahead a road your work makes us all less afraid of.
Thank you all very much.