Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

We are funded to work with people aged from ten to 24. We need to work with people younger than that for various reasons. By the time we get them into the centre and work with them, much of the behaviour is already entrenched and we end up fighting for the rest of their teen years. Puberty, in particular from the age of 12 to the age of 15 or 16, is an incredibly difficult time. It takes years of work to build a relationship with young people. Good youth work happens when that relationship is ongoing, has been consistent over a period of time and we know the families, the parents and the kids from when they were young. I do a lot of street work so I get to know the smaller kids quite young because I see them on the street but we are not allowed to actually work with them until they are ten years old. I find it incredible that that is the case. To be honest, we do not have enough funding to be able to do that work with these young people, so it is a combination of not being allowed to work with them and not having enough funding to work with all the young people who present.