Mr. Paul Perth:

I thank the committee for inviting us to speak today. We are here from the Connect 4 Project, which is a street work project set up almost three years ago by South Dublin County Partnership and the Tallaght drug and alcohol task force. It has just received a further two years of funding after a successful independent evaluation of the pilot. We have five dedicated workers on the team currently based in west Tallaght, parts of which are known to have extreme disadvantage and unemployment. Indicators point to educational disparities between large pockets of west Tallaght and national levels of educational attainment.

The concept of "street work" can mean different things in various contexts and we have spent considerable time defining what it represents for us. As we map our target area and assess the changing needs of the community, we continuously adapt our strategies and goals to better address the needs of the young people we engage with. Who do we work with? Young people aged from ten to 24 are our remit. As with many youth workers, it is nearly impossible to include a range of different ages. I refer to seven-, eight- and nine-year-olds, mothers, fathers and grandparents. This is our reality. In recent times, we have seen many changes in the youth work approach. This includes language, and a change from "centre-based" to "outreach" and from "the hard-to-reach" to "the harder-to-reach" and even "the extremely hard-to-reach". The term "at-risk young people" has become "the most-at-risk young people", and so on.

We pose the question of whether young people have always been so hard to reach or if the new generation of young people is becoming more disconnected? Are they choosing to exclude themselves or is it actually us disengaging with them? We need to be critical about this question as a sector. Our experience has shown us that the vast majority of young people are actually not that hard to reach. Usually, in fact, the young people who may need external supports are the most visible in our community. These include the groups at the shops and those in the areas we like to call "hotspots". Over the past several years, it has become clear to us that reaching these cohorts is actually the easy bit. The challenge for us is keeping them engaged long enough to allow us to form any kind of meaningful relationship, one that allows us to break down the barriers that many have erected to keep themselves safe.

We believe these barriers stem from years of neglect by the State and carry through to the present day. There has been a lack of investment, not only in youth services but in other vital services needed in our area, and similar, that would allow our children to begin to heal from the hurt and pain they have suffered for years from many different sources. These include physical and domestic abuse, poverty and intergenerational addiction and trauma. Our local schools are starved of services such as art, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists, all of which are crucial to the development of young people, many of whom are impacted by the issues associated with disadvantaged and under-resourced communities. We recently spoke to the principal of a local primary school who regularly refers children for neurodiverse assessments. It is not unusual for her to witness a child going through the whole of primary school without receiving an assessment. That is six years. This is before children move on to secondary school, where they must start the process all over again. These children are being grossly let down and many of them are ending up on the merry-go-round of the criminal justice system.

I love youth work. In its current state, it plays a vital role in the lives of many young people. We are, however, observing a growing trend in our community where youth work is increasingly constrained within the criminal justice system. We strongly believe that young people should not be criminalised before they are introduced to quality youth services. Youth justice plays an important role in our communities, but it must coexist with the core principles of youth work and street work that would allow each approach to complement the other.

Despite being a globally recognised practice, street work is still perceived in some contexts as radical or unconventional. We believe this perception needs to shift to allow for a more inclusive approach to youth work. In the past few years, our approach has demonstrated a positive impact not only on the young people we engage, but also on the broader community. We have proved our adapted and trauma-informed approach has enhanced a sense of feeling safer within our community. As we engage with young people in their space, we have created a more pro-social atmosphere locally and used our relationships to introduce many different agencies and events into our community that have never been there or have been missing for many years.

In the past two years, the community has witnessed some significant investments in our public parks and the facilities within them. We wholeheartedly welcome these investments but our observations paint a vivid and troubling picture of the social environment in west Tallaght, one where investments in infrastructure and facilities seem to be missing the deeper and more complex issues that affect families and young people. The physical improvements like playgrounds, BMX tracks and sports facilities are, in essence, a cosmetic approach, one that addresses the surface-level needs but fails to tackle the underlying issues that stem from intergenerational trauma, systemic marginalisation and the lack of trust in institutions. We need to start conversations about social infrastructures. Communities that feel left behind by the State, excluded from decision-making processes or underserved in terms of mental health, quality healthcare and educational and psychological assessments for children with learning differences often internalise feelings of worthlessness and frustration. This frustration can manifest in self-destructive behaviours like vandalising community spaces as a symbolic expression of their perceived place in society.

We have no doubt about this. In fact, we have proved it. When young people are nurtured in these spaces, the outcome for them and the community as a whole can be significant. As history shows us, creating these spaces without providing the services to support the community that uses them will result in the same old rhetoric we hear year after year. I am sure we have all heard it. We have heard it said that, "We built them playgrounds, they got the best of everything, and then they wrecked them." It is with great sadness that I can report some of these facilities are burning as we speak. It is clear to us that we are failing as a society to meet the needs of the communities that need the most.

Our work also gives us an opportunity to divert young men away from the clutches of organised crime and provide them with a temporary moment of refuge. I emphasise the word "temporary" because it is clear to us that these moments are short-lived and these vulnerable young men must return to an environment where they are dominated by older individuals whose only intention is to exploit them in the drugs trade. The issue of exploiting vulnerable children and young people for criminal purposes goes against what is promoted by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This explains that children and young people must be protected from exploitation and harmful situations. The current situation is having a knock-on impact on parents and siblings who live in terror as they are forced to pick up the pieces or assume responsibility for the inevitable time when an outstanding bill is owed. This rarely comes to the knowledge of the Garda because, out of fear and the natural instinct to protect the family member, the victim and their family can never step outside what we call the code of the street.

We also witness local services and volunteers fight tooth and nail to hold on to the little funding streams they have. This can create unhealthy competition between local organisations, which play an integral part in holding the community together and who can blame them? From the outside looking in, it looks like the community has self-sabotaged and maybe it has but we know the damage it causes is a true reflection of how it feels about itself.