Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In 2016, there was a very unfortunate incident of incorrect racial profiling within An Garda Síochána. It was raised at the level of the Department of the Taoiseach. There was a need to bring in a person from Tusla under section 11 or section 12-based interventions that An Garda Síochána could make. The point is that the Garda and Tusla came together very quickly to be able to make better assessments than the one that was made on that occasion. The Commissioner is quite right that the success of the Garda youth diversion programme is astoundingly good, but what we persistently end up with is a group of young offenders who are the most active offenders but also very much the most vulnerable children in the community.

We have the joint agency response to crime, JARC, for adults and we have constant calls for a JARC for young offenders, bringing the Garda youth diversion programme, GYDP, up to 21 or 24 to be able to target resources very effectively at a smaller group of people who have very challenged behaviours and very challenged lives. A lot of the referrals that the GYDP gets are “one child, one time” or “one child, a very small number of times”. If the Garda has the quasi-judicial power to make a decision for referral, there must be some mechanism to be able to check that that is so, rather than just information sharing. In particular, a solution along the lines of “If they come to our attention again, we will find out what happened last time” is by definition insufficient and there must be a stronger way of linking that back in.