A. Jamie Saris

An uncertain dominion: Irish psychiatry, methadone, and the treatment of opiate abuse.

This paper investigates some productive ambiguities around the medical administration of methadone in the Republic of Ireland. The tensions surrounding methadone maintenance therapy (MMT) are outlined, as well as the sociohistorical context in which a serious heroin addiction problem in Ireland developed. Irish psychiatry intervened in this situation, during a time of institutional change, debates concerning the nature of addiction, moral panics concerning heroin addiction in Irish society and the recent boom in the Irish economy, known popularly as the Celtic Tiger. A particular history of this sort illuminates how technologies like MMT become cosmopolitan, settling into, while changing, local contexts.

Icon and structural violence in a Dublin ‘underclass’ housing estate

This paper deals with the complex relationships between, and some of the everyday practices that go into, remem- bering and forgetting within a conflicted political field. The object of this analysis is a set of murals in an eco- nomically and socially marginal housing estate on the out- skirts of Dublin, and some of the social activities that they either commemorate or pass over. This analysis requires an ‘archaeology’ of a sort, in the sense that both virtual and material layers have to be scraped away, not to reveal some deeper truth, but to outline the field of forces that create truth-effects within this context (Foucault 1973a, Rabinow 1996). If this process is conducted carefully with due regard for local knowledge, however, the rewards are high. An obscure wall in an unfashionable Dublin suburb that most people in the capital have never been to (and that many people would never want to visit), displays multiple and conflicting configurations of violence, resistance, community, ownership, even hope. To understand this wall, though, an entire local world needs to be outlined, and the connections between this local world and national and transnational forces need to be appreciated. Perhaps appropriately, the analysis begins and ends with a defaced tabula rasa.

Estimating the prevalence of opiate use in Ireland and the implications for the criminal justice system

Drawing upon innovative research methods this article provides the first Irish estimates of opiate use based entirely on non-medical data. These estimates are based on the report Baseline Findings from the ROSIE Study by Comiskey and Cox (2005), commissioned in 2002 by the Irish Governments National Advisory Committee on Drugs (NACD). In order to place these estimates in context we first provide a background to the probation and welfare service in Ireland; we then provide a picture of known opiate use to date; and finally we introduce the methods we used to provide new results on the prevalence of opiate users in Ireland.