They both enjoyed the odd doobie as a student but that’s where the similarities between Mo Mowlam and Eoin Ryan end.

While the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has hinted that it should be decriminalised, the Government’s new ‘drugs Czar’ is adamant that there will be no relaxation of the cannabis laws while Fianna Fail is in office.

His boss, Minister for Justice John O’Donoghue, was even more forthright when he stated that. “As long as I am in the Justice portfolio there will be no watering down of the fallacious distinction between so-called soft and hard drugs.

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