Mr. Hugh Greaves:

Yes, it is done consciously. We are aware of this, and in our local area we have tried to link up all the local, statutory, youth and social services with An Garda Síochána in a network to try to pool the experiences and information we have as much as we can. The general data protection regulation, GDPR, has made that difficult to do in a constructive way. It has got in the way of people sharing concerns and we have had to cite the Children’s Act sometimes in respect of that taking precedence over the GDPR issues in serious cases. We have tried to undertake our efforts in this regard in a local setting but a vacuum still exists. Someone needs to lead on this at a level that involves different communities to say that this is the main issue and that children are being criminalised before they get to secondary school.