Mr. John Gilmore:

Just to pick up on a few issues. Deputy O'Reilly raised the issue of the importance of confidence building in young people. I can tell the committee quite confidently that as a 25 year old man, I would not be able to sit in front of the committee were it not for the interventions of youth work. I am sure Mr. Patrick Burke would have said the same thing 30 years ago in his youth club. It provides the mechanisms and the confidence. The youth workers with whom we work are doing fantastic work. In regard to youth information centres, an issue raised by Senator D'Arcy, they are hugely important. In Donegal we have seen the amalgamation of youth cafés and youth information. In some ways many of our colleagues in the sector are not engaged in youth information as their core work. It is the core work of Youth Work Ireland. We are the largest provider and the largest youth work organisation and it is a core and a key element. One of the arguments is that young people get information online. Therefore, why does one need to support youth information work? There is a huge amount of information online that is not very good information on what youth information co-ordinators and workers can do. Working in youth cafés or in integrated services might not necessarily be the old hatch system we do not operate any more in Youth Work Ireland but they are able to sign post them to good information. In regard to online work we have a strategic partnership with another national organisation, SpunOut, of which the committee may be aware. We engage with it at national level to ensure that work goes on in this world wide web era.

With regard to how to get young people registered to vote, SpunOut's initiative coming up to the children's rights referendum worked well. It registered 3,000 young people through that campaign. Deputy Ó Ríordáin spoke about the fantastic work being done with the schools with regard to the constitutional convention. Our Vote@16 approach is very different. We get very different feedback from young people. A national campaign is being run currently by the National Youth Council of Ireland at Vote@16, in co-operation with European counterparts through the European Youth Forum. The message from that is very much that young people are in favour of voting at 16. There are many other issues we could discuss in detail, but I will hand over now if anybody else wants to add to what I have said.