Review of Prevention Systems (RePS) in Ireland: Based on the UNODC/WHO International Standards on Drug Use Prevention

Prevention has been a pillar of successive Irish national drugs strategies, with several actions aimed at improving the well-being of young people through delaying the initiation of substance use and providing resources to encourage protective behaviour. In preparation for a new national drugs strategy in 2026, the Department of Health considered how Ireland might develop a more consistent, professionally administered, and knowledge-informed national prevention programme. An important step in developing a national prevention programme will be to establish a baseline for prevention practice in Ireland.

In 2018, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), published the International Standards on Drug Use Prevention. Based on these Standards, the UNODC developed the Review of Prevention Systems (RePS), a standardised tool to assess a national prevention system. RePS assesses the extent to which the drug prevention system of a country or region is in line with the Standards. This assessment helps to identify areas of strength and to prepare a plan for improvement. The RePS tool involves two components, each assessing a dimension of the country’s prevention system. The first component focuses on the quality of interventions and assesses their concordance with best practices for effective prevention. The second component assesses the system as a whole and the degree to which the system is coherent and logical for delivering effective prevention interventions.

Data collection for the prevention interventions assessment part of the RePS in Ireland commenced in March 2025 and continued to February 2026. Ninety-six submissions generated information on 261 unique activities or programmes, of which 222 were deemed to be relevant to prevention and contained enough information for assessment. The evidence used to assess the prevention system was an analysis of key policy documents, a focus group with members of the Drug and Alcohol Education Workers Forum, and a survey with Drug and Alcohol Task Force (DATF) coordinators. Data collected from these sources were analysed thematically and used to make the assessment.

The report found that, while Ireland’s drug and alcohol prevention system has many strength – including strong public health legislation around alcohol and drugs, a network of dedicated local practitioners and community-based organisations, and a significant proportion (41%) of quality prevention interventions that are evidence based or strongly evidence informed – the country does not yet have a coherent and fully effective prevention system. The delivery of prevention interventions is fragmented and variable. Prevention interventions are largely organised and delivered by local organisations, resulting in uneven access and inconsistent quality across regions, with good practices often isolated or sparse within the local ecology of prevention activities.