Children being corrupted by ‘buck mad’ situation in Dublin’s Oliver Bond flats, Dáil told

Children living in the Oliver Bond flat complex in Dublin’s south inner city are witnessing people “comatosed on the stairs” after injecting drugs and “sexual favours being given”, Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh has told the Dáil.

The Dublin South Central TD said the situation in the Liberties complex has “gone absolutely buck mad” on Thursday.

Mr Ó Snodaigh said children are passing people queuing for drugs in some blocks of flats “morning, noon and night”.

“There are people queuing up there in suits for their fixes, people in high viz jackets,” he said.

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The Sinn Féin TD said the cry from residents in the complex had not been heard “thus far” and the problem of open drug-dealing was on a scale he had never seen before.

“Children’s lives in particular are being corrupted. When you start seeing this day in, day out, when you have to go to school in your uniform and you’re passing people who are comatosed on the stairs because they have injected, where you see sexual favours being given on the same stairs, where you see sh*** and pi** or the work from the drug dealing on those stairs,” he said.

“When you pass a queue of 20 or 30 people on your way to school and you come back and the exact same queues are there again, when you’re trying to sleep at night and there’s tooting of horns, where they’re demanding delivery.

“That’s day in, day out and the good people in that community and in other communities and flat complexes where the same problem is, they’re leaving. They want out, they’re the ones who are transferring.”

Mr Ó Snodaigh said “various, different drugs” were available, including crack cocaine, cocaine, heroin and ecstasy. “You name it, it’s available,” he added.

‘Crack house’

He said there was commentary around people not moving into some Dublin City Council flats and that open drug-dealing was “the very reason”.

“Why would you move in where your next door neighbour is strung out morning, noon and night and allows their flat to be used as a drug den, a crack house,” he said. “It’s exactly the way it is portrayed in those dramas that you see on television, it is at that scale in Oliver Bond at the moment, in some blocks.”

In response, Minister of State Dara Calleary said the Minister for Justice Simon Harris and the Government were “very conscious” of the distressing impact that this criminal activity was having on residents and the community around the Oliver Bond complex.

Mr Calleary said more than a quarter of all drug seizures in the Kevin Street Garda sub district during last year were from the complex. He said gardaí had informed Mr Harris there had been a large number of drug and cash seizures recorded there in recent weeks.

He said the complex receives a high concentration of policing on a continual basis while there are also designated assigned patrols. He said additional gardaí would shortly be allocated to the community policing unit at Kevin Street station.