The sentencing of a 32-year-old Grangebellew man for a serious sexual assault on a woman in 2020 to four years in prison has been welcomed locally, however, Mayor Michelle Hall feels this is an opportune time to improve mental health and addiction services in the town.
oseph McArdle jumped on a woman who was out running by the River Boyne in a broad-daylight attack on July 26th 2020, and was sentenced to five years in prison, with the last 18 months suspended.
The woman told gardai she thought he was going to strangle her or stab her or throw her into the river Boyne and when she began screaming he put his hand over her mouth.
A marathon runner, she said she was now afraid to go running alone.
The court heard McArdle had a long standing problem with alcohol and cannabis abuse.
"The gardai worked hard on identifying this man and the sentence is to be welcomed, and with the new Zero Tolerance strategy for gender-based violence, this could be doubled to ten years,” says Mayor Hall, who has met with senior gardai recently to discuss making Drogheda’s streets safer for women.
"The time has come to tackle the root of this, of the addiction and mental health issues in the town, with wraparound services for people like (McArdle), who will come out of prison rehabilitated, and will not offend again.”
She says it not good enough that offenders are going into prison addicted, and with no psychiatric support, and tackling the problems at source, in good time, could prevent assaults like this.
"We do have to look at why we needed an Implementation report; we need to tackle the root causes of addiction and mental health issues that are occurring in the town,” she says. “We go out and do the litter picking, and what we are finding it piles of drug paraphernalia, needles, broken bottles, cigarette butts and we can pick them up as much as we like, but we’re not addressing it.”
She says ‘sharps boxes’ are needed around the town for safe disposal of needles to protect people.
"There's no point in ignoring it, and the have a child stab themselves with a used needles, or have someone stand on one, or a dog get injured,” she adds. “And also we need an awful lot addressed – Drogheda is not an unsafe place, and these type of attacks are still rare – but we want to know that if there are mental health or addiction issues, people are accessing support, so we can prevent things like this happening again.”
The needle exchange programme, which was provided by the HSE, ceased operation on 10 May 2021. Currently, no needle exchange programme is being provided at the Red Door Project and there are no clean needles available to people who need them.
Additional funding has been pledged by the Geiran report for the Red Door services.
