The Strengthening Families Programme (SFP) was first introduced in Ireland in 2007. To mark the 10th year of the programme here, the National Strengthening Families Programme Council of Ireland (NSFPCI) collaborated with its members to collate data collected on the programme over the decade. It presented the findings at the 8th Conference of the European Society for Prevention Research (EUSPR), ‘Quality in Prevention’, held in September 2017.¹ This has been followed up with the report, Family effects: Strengthening Families Programme 10 year outcomes in Ireland, which was published in March 2018.²

The Sligo Healthy Ireland Project, in conjunction with the Northwest Regional Drug and Alcohol Task Force (NWRDATF), has developed an alcohol-related harm reduction strategy for Sligo city.¹ This five-year strategy will focus on four key areas: prevention, supply (including access and availability), screening (including treatment and support services), and research (including monitoring and evaluation). The overall goals are to address alcohol-related harm; ensure factors influencing alcohol supply are regulated and controlled; advocate for a range of alcohol treatment and support services; and use evidence and research to inform decisions in preventing and reducing alcohol-related harm in Sligo city.

The field of substance misuse prevention continues to evolve. There is increasing interest in environmental prevention and the role it can play in this field, although to date it has remained ill-defined and tends to be poorly understood. In February 2018, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) set out to address this deficit and published their first significant report on the topic: Environmental substance use prevention interventions in Europe.¹ The report is made up of two sections: the first provides an operational definition of environmental preventions (see Box 1 on the right) and a short overview of how it has evolved; the second presents the findings of a survey of prevention experts that explores the current availability in Europe of environmental prevention measures for substance use.

On 20 February 2018, the Western Region Drug and Alcohol Task Force (WRDATF) facilitated an event introducing the Planet Youth drug prevention programme to key stakeholders in the region. Presentations were made by Michéal Durcan and Emmet Major of the WRDATF, as well as Jón Sigfússon, director of Planet Youth at the Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis (ICSRA).¹

In April 2018, An Garda Síochána (AGS) hosted the fifth annual meeting of the Council of Europe’s Pompidou Expert Working Group on Drug-Related Cybercrime in Dublin Castle. The Pompidou Group is the only European multidisciplinary intergovernmental body that provides a drug policy cooperation platform on drug-related cybercrime issues. The meeting brought together a multidisciplinary network of specialists and agencies that are directly involved in the fight against drug-related crime in Ireland, including AGS, the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA), and also in Europe, including the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drugs Addiction (EMCDDA) and Europol. A number of the topics covered are outlined below.

Drug law enforcement via specialised drug units was identified by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drugs Addiction (EMCDDA) as an important route to reducing drug supply in Europe.¹ In 2014, the EMCDDA conducted a follow-up study of their earlier paper with the aim of monitoring changes in the quantity of specialised drug squads and how they are staffed.²