The fight against the drugs crisis has reached a crossroads. Many of the measures called for by anti-drugs 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 once-ravaged community.
While there are remaining questions around the main form of medical treatment (the controlled dispensation of methadone) and the quality of long-term rehabilitation, there is still a sense of remarkable progress in little over a year. The expectation is that the new Government will honour its pre-election 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 working-class areas co-operation 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 estate-management 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 mid-1980s 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 self-esteem. 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 long term 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 estate-management 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 working-class 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 law abiding citizens who were under siege by the drug dealers in their own communities?
Mick Rafferty, the co-chairman of the Dublin Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign - an alliance of trade union, community, church and voluntary groups - has been a community worker in the inner-city for over 25 years