Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Ms Kathleen O'Toole, the Irish-American who we employed to produce The Future of Policing in Ireland report for Government, made a presentation a number of months ago. I accept that was only about policing, but some of it is connected with the issues that we all experience and see in our towns and villages. Ms O'Toole cited examples of what she did in Seattle, Boston and New York that worked. They put together interdepartmental task forces. Instead of going into an area where there was deprivation, a drugs issue or lack of educational opportunities, they went into an area and took 1,000 people. There were five or six different departments sitting around the table and they specifically looked at those 1,000 people and asked what could they do for the mothers and what could they do for the husbands. They asked if they needed work and training. For example, they saw that there were two young fellows in a family who had problems with alcohol. They looked holistically at a community, decided what needed to be done to help that community, and all got together and collectively did their little bit, specifically, targeted for one set of people. Ms O'Toole cited the example of a particular area in New York where there was particularly high crime. The angle that they were coming from was crime. When they looked after this group of people for six months, the crime rates reduced by over 1,000% because all of the people were getting the supports and the service that they required to have a better quality of life. Ms O'Toole's other recommendation was that it should not be led by the Department of Justice and Equality and An Garda Síochána.

When we launch the new national action plan for social inclusion in May to which all committee members will be invited, I would like for us - mine is only one Department, it depends on co-operation and I would be grateful for anything the Chairman can do to help - to get a number of Departments to pick a number of areas and use task forces so that we can see if the approach works here. If it does, I would like us to have a national programme of holistically looking at issues that range from something as small as our younger people maybe growing up not knowing how to cook for themselves and teaching people skills, to providing education, helping people with addictions, talking to people with social anxiety, helping mothers who have not worked for years to have the confidence to do it, and all the factors that might be affecting particular issues, specifically, as the Chairman stated, the intergenerational issues. Last year we started the programme to look at jobless households. We are only doing it on a voluntary basis because we cannot do it in any other way but, because people do not know any different, they are not volunteering to come in and work with us. We need to look at it in a different way.