stated that the Green Party does not consider the issue as one that should divide its members or society. The party has also called for greater transparency in politics, arguing that political donations in Northern Ireland should be made public. Northern Ireland is the only region of the United Kingdom where political donations are secret. The party has said it wants a citizens' assembly to examine if drugs should be decriminalised to reduce deaths. In March 2021, then deputy leader and now leader of the party since August 2022, Malachai O'Hara, said legalisation and harm-reduction models should be considered as the "current approach is obviously not working". In 2020, drug deaths in Northern Ireland were recorded at 218 according to official figures. This was an increase from the official recorded figure in 2019, which stood at 191 drug deaths in Northern Ireland and 92 in 2010, indicating the figure had more than double in a decade. History In the Northern Ireland local elections of May 1981, Peter Emerson, Avril McCandless and Malcolm Samuels stood as the first candidates to use the Ecology label in Northern Ireland and gained 202, 81 and 61 votes respectively; the first in a large urban area, the other two in smaller rural constituencies. Emerson had previously stood in the same area in 1977. In May 1983, the Northern Ireland Ecology Party was launched at a press conference held in the Europa Hotel, Belfast, with members of the British and Irish Ecology parties in attendance. At the same time, the three parties put forward one combined policy on Northern Ireland, the first time that UK and Irish political parties had held a common Northern Ireland policy. In 1985, ecology parties throughout the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom changed their names to Green Party. The party became a region of the Green Party of Ireland in 2006. These arrangements are said to demonstrate the Northern Ireland party's cross-community nature, as the Green Party claim to be the only party that actually lives the Good Friday Agreement through its operational set up through north–south and east–west links. In 2007, a Green society was established at Queen's University Belfast. In 2010, the LGBT Greens NI were established: a policy group and lobby group specialising in LGBT community issues within Northern Ireland. The LGBT group dissolved in early 2012 as their main aim—pushing for the inclusion of same-sex