Mr. Fearghal Connolly:

It is easier to explain anecdotally by outlining our experience of how it happens due to specific young people causing the maximum number of problems in a community. There is a generic youth service that deals with young people and runs youth clubs, social education and so on, but there are specific young people in a community who come through very traumatic childhoods and they act that out in their teenage years. We ran the targeted response to young people, TRY, programme. It was very specific. It involved people who had come through a similar background and environment. A lot of them had come out of prison, educated themselves and got involved in youth work. Those young men and women then went out into the community to work with the sorts of young people I have described. Deputy Devine described them as feral, but I think we have an idea of the young people we are talking about. That programme had great success.

Again, this is anecdotal. It had been run through Sláintecare for two years and, unfortunately, the Department of justice came in and said it was being put back into mainstream youth work. That was a mistake because it got gobbled up with the rest of the generic youth work. We need to target specific programmes, such as the TRY programme, to work in communities and they should be allowed to do their work in that way, which is targeting the young people who are causing havoc in communities.