Ms Susan Menton:

I want to talk about integration. Before I do so, I refer to the Youth Work Act. The latter covers people up to 25 years of age. We should be allowed to work on that. That has been in place since the early 1990s or whenever. Perhaps we should even go beyond 25. That case management should be allowed to happen without having to have loads of contact hours recorded for the UBU scheme and all the other complex funding.

Senator Ruane spoke about neurodiversity, neuro interventions and stuff like that for young people. St. Ultan's is an integrated project, and we do not say that lightly. We have different professionals working with young people. One of the things we do is to bring services into St. Ultan's. As we mentioned here a few times, young people right down to very young children are frightened of going into formal settings such as medical centres, etc. Their parents have their own life experiences and many of them are still young people themselves.

Youth work, community work and integrated services like St. Ultan's are trying to respond to generational disadvantage. That will not happen by boxing everything off into little boxes. It must be interdepartmental. The latter is extremely important for all of us in this room. We work in an integrated way on the ground but the Departments do not. A lot of negotiation needs to happen. We need to fit into one Department for this and another Department for that. It is really frustrating and time consuming for those of us who are trying to work on the ground.

Mr. Cummins mentioned case management. Ideally, that is what many of us need. We need family case managers who are able to manage entire families. None of the funding streams allows us to do that. From an integration point of view, as organisational services we have always done it really well on the ground and then Tusla or someone comes up with the idea of meitheal, which is absolutely brilliant, but sure we were doing it for years. I suppose it formalised the service and allowed us to do it in a more formalised way.

The earlier intervention with young people is obviously the best way to go. While we are doing it with young people, we need to be doing it with the parents and families as well. I am not sure how that can happen. There needs to be some sort of family case management system there. In our model, we can show that young people benefit more from having that earlier intervention. We work with the integrated youth services of Cherry Orchard and the equine centre family base is very involved. We do a huge amount of interagency work together. Different services have different expertise. We cannot do everything and so we need to rely on interagency work.

Cherry Orchard has been in the news a lot recently for all the wrong reasons. Considerable investment is needed. Interagency work is needed. Agencies and organisations on the ground need to be able to do multiple things and not just to be boxed off for youth work or whatever. We need to be able to do stuff across sectors in an integrated way. Families, parents and young people will gravitate towards certain services and it comes back to the relationships that they have with organisations. We bring to St. Ultan's services such as speech and language services and therapeutic services. Ideally CAMHS, GP services and all the other services that we need would be linked directly into the service.

Earlier intervention is crucial for anything to work for us. If there was one thing this committee could do it would be to ensure proper funding for case management. Ms Kearney and I were talking earlier and we were saying that we know what we are doing but just need the funding. We do not need to be boxed. We do not need the outcome of a policy to be prescribed. We just need to be given the money and let us do the job that we know we can do really well. We are all qualified and trained. Many of us have gone back to Maynooth, Dundalk and other colleges to train. Just let us do it.