Ciaran Smith:

I would like to thank the committee for inviting us here this afternoon and for giving us a tour before the meeting. We are representing the Ombudsman for Children's youth advisory panel and are here tody to talk to the committee about our work. First, we want to talk about our Pieces of Us series of reports which form a part of the Ombudsman for Children's Office, OCO, submission to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. The youth advisory panel started work on the children’s report to the United Nations in early 2021. Along with the OCO, we designed a survey which was sent to every school and over 100 youth groups in Ireland. We asked what children under the age of 18 thought was good, bad, and what they would change about life in Ireland. Over 5,100 children answered the survey. We took the key findings from the survey and created questions that the OCO staff could ask in focus groups. We helped to design the focus groups and select the children that would take part to make sure that the questions were age appropriate and that the OCO was talking to children we really wanted to hear from.

The OCO staff held 23 in-depth focus groups with over 100 children from all across Ireland including young children in early years’ services, children from Traveller and Roma backgrounds, children in detention, LGBTI children and also children in conflict with the law. After each focus group we co-analysed all of the data that the OCO collected. We decided what should be in the report to the UN, what it should look like and what it should be called. We called it Pieces of Us because we felt connected to every single person and story in the report, and that it represented all the children in Ireland.

The youth advisory panel then went to the United Nations and presented Pieces of Us to the Committee on the Rights of the Child.

When we returned from Geneva, we also held meetings with Government officials to make sure they knew what children were saying. When the committee gave Ireland its concluding observations we knew that we wanted to find out what children thought about them, so we held a massive children’s conference in Croke Park to get children’s opinions on what they thought the Government should do to implement the concluding observations. This event was called Pieces of Us – What’s Next? Again, we designed and delivered every part of the conference and the report, including analysing all of the data and designing the report.