Ulster Unionist Deputy Leader and Agriculture Spokesperson Diana Armstrong MLA has used Rural Crime Week to warn that organised drug gangs are deliberately targeting rural communities across Northern Ireland, and has called for action on a government report published eleven months ago.

Diana Armstrong said:

“Every rural community in Northern Ireland now knows how easily drugs can be got hold of, and how quiet everyone stays about it. Since raising this earlier in the year I have read the Public Health Agency's report on drug related intimidation, and it is worse than I thought.

“That report found that vulnerable older men in rural areas have been pressurised into travelling to Dublin and back by bus carrying drugs, targeted for the simple reason that nobody would suspect them. Fermanagh is named, though I would be astonished if it were the only place it is happening. It also found that rural sports clubs in the west are being targeted by gangs looking to groom young people, with cross border activity that the report says is apparently not being monitored.

“Let me be clear about who the wrongdoers are. This is organised crime deliberately choosing the countryside because we are spread out, quiet and watched less. The report is blunt about who they look for. Someone with a home, a job and a family has something to lose, which makes them far easier to threaten than someone with nothing.

“That describes a great many young people in farming families right across Northern Ireland. Cocaine builds debt quickly, and once a young person owes money the pressure moves to the whole family. Families have remortgaged homes to clear these debts. On a farm that means selling stock or selling land, and the demands do not stop once you have shown you can pay.

“The Justice Minister wrote in that report that the response needed to be considered with urgency and resolve. That was October. I have asked her what has been delivered since, whether we will have a dedicated route for families being intimidated over drug debts as they have in the Republic, and who is monitoring the cross border activity her own report says nobody is watching.

“To any family caught in this, wherever you are, you have done nothing wrong and you are not the first. Please reach out. The silence is what these people rely on.”