Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I am a big believer that we need to take conversations in here right down to that, so whether it involves community work or whatever the sector is, it needs to have insight into what is happening on the ground. Today's presentations are as close to the ground as possible in the absence of young people themselves. I was happy to see the themes that emerged. One of those themes is resourcing while another is societal issues, which have been namechecked by each presentation, be they poverty, trauma and the intergenerational impact of trauma and mental health. It is really encouraging to have a committee focusing on those things instead of the conversations that happened to date, which have focused on the young people as if they are the ones failing in terms of how poverty, mental health and neurodiversity manifest themselves in unequal conditions and young people are then seen as the problem. Today's presentations truly reflect what the issues are in society in terms of what young people have to contend with.

Another theme that came up was the culture of youth work, which has become a bugbear for me. I first encountered what I feel was real youth work when I worked in Bluebell, which Mr. Roe would be aware of, when I ran the drugs services there and the type of interventions that were necessary in a community experiencing not only a significant amount of upheaval but loss of life and violence. There was no fear in working with young people who were experiencing the harshest of conditions. This has been lost somewhat in many youth sectors around Ireland. It goes to what Mr. Perth was talking about, and I might get him to address this, namely, the idea that outreach somehow was not needed anymore when everybody got their centre or space, and that idea of working with people in their own communities, whether that is hanging around the Centra while they are wrecking everybody else's head - that does not matter - or at a bonfire or at whatever corner while people are smoking weed and selling drugs. They are where we need to be but I feel it is not happening enough anymore. Will Mr. Perth discuss the importance of working with young men in particular but also young women who nobody seems to want to work with and, if anything, are at risk of being scapegoated in the conversation about young people? Will Mr. Perth elaborate on how he has engaged with young people in that way?