No, the Citizen’s Assembly was not told that Illegal drug sales account for half of juvenile crime

I saw[ this article](https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0902/1403041-citizens-assembly-on-drug-use/) posted the other day and I was amazed at the figure. It was noticeable that none of the articles that made this claim attributed it or quoted it. So I did a quick search for the figures and found an Irish Examiner article from May of this year that had figures from 2020.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41139808.html

> Total juvenile offences fell from 19,513 in 2015 to 16,301 in 2020

> Total juvenile drug offences jumped in the same period, from 1,019 to 1,926

> Of the drug offences, cases of sale or supply rose from 167 to 382

Illegal drug sales accounted for 382 out of 16,301 juvenile cases in 2020. 2.3%. Now it’s possible that this figure has gone up 2500% in three years but that seems very unlikely.

So I went to look at the recording of the Citizen’s Assembly for the day. The claim seems to be based on a comment made by Dr Sean Redmond. The actual quote is

> about 1000 young people in the state are involved in much more serious crime linked to adults, and this includes drug sales. We think that these young people are responsible for about 50% of all juvenile crime.

This is a very different claim than what RTE and a number of other media sources reported. You can listen to his segment here.

He also talks about how juvenile offenders should be treated and why a soft touch approach is appropriate in many cases.

by theseanbeag