Mr. Karl Ducque:

For ourselves, it is the criteria you need for youth justice. We have criteria as part of the targeted response with youth programme but the Solas Project also has a project called Rua. It is the referral process. The young person has to be so far gone that mainstream youth services will not engage with him or her, so he or she will be already too far gone before we can even engage with them. You need to lift the criteria and look at the referral pathways in. We do not use referral pathways. We use self-referral. We build relationships on the street with the young people where if they want to work with us that is fine. Some of them will turn around and say “Fuck off. I don’t want to do anything with you”.

This goes down to addiction services as well. There are people dying out there who would go into an addiction service tomorrow but they do not fit the criteria because they are still on street drugs, smoking weed or whatever.