Mayo communities are not alone dealing with substance abuse ^Featured

Pictures Michael McLoughlin

The new harm reduction initiative means that people can contact their Mayo based community liaison officer, attached to the Western Region Drugs Task Force, to start putting in place a tailor-made response to their concerns.  The Initiative is being rolled out across Mayo, Galway and Roscommon.

“Very often, when communities are confronted with a drug or alcohol problem the first reaction is ‘what can we do about this?”said Pat Conway, WRDTF community liaison officer for Mayo. 

“This initiative is aimed at helping communities prevent the develoment of drug and alcohol problems in the first place, and then, giving them the advice, tools and supports they need to deal with misuse in a way that suits their situation best.”

“The services we are announcing today are really about giving communities control and ownership of something which they too often think is out of their control,” he continued.

The design and thinking behind the initiative is based on tried and tested models already proving successful in towns and areas across the three counties.  In Mayo, Achill has been ahead of the game and has concentrated on raising community awareness of the connection between misuse of substances and mental health, for example.

The Harm Reduction Initiative has six simple steps:

1. Contact:     Make contact with the community liaison worker (CLW).
2. Start-up:    Set up a working group and meet with the CLW.
3. Assess:      Find out what’s needed in your community by survey, meetings, focus groups.
4. Team:        Tell the wider community and put together a community team.
5. Work:        Set goals and actions. Identify resources. Get to work.
6. Review:      Review everything after a year.

Support.ie is a one-stop website for people who want to find out in one click about the huge range of support services available to them in the West of Ireland.  To make it easy to navigate, the services are grouped into 16 categories. 

Alternatively, people only have to put in the name of a town and all the services available within the area will pop up.

Pictured from L/R Karen Gavin (Community Substance Misuse Council), Pat Conway (Community Liason Worker, Mayo & North Roscommon), Martin Lee,(Chairperson, Western Region Drugs Task Force) and Nora Fahy (Chairperson, Project Match Castlerea) and Lorraine Campbell (Project Match, Castlerea).