Mr. Brendan Cummins:

I will have a go at answering on causes, consequences and how a service can address them. I got a sense from the presentation or walk-around last week. When trying to break the intergenerational effects of substance misuse, the earliest possible intervention is in the early years setting. It is about very early identification of speech and language issues and young people not meeting general milestones, and then getting in. We are in a unique position to address them. With the proper resources in early years, we can bring in speech and language therapists and OT therapists for young people so that when they start to engage in education, the internal frustrations are already addressed.

There is nothing worse than a four- or five-year-old who has loads of what I will call unintentional neglect. The damage is done. There is no mammy or daddy who wants to neglect her or his child. They are not consciously doing it; it is just the adverse effects of addiction in the home. They may not be able to communicate well or may have learned communication skills very differently from other young people, or their communication skills might be what we would see as negative. If they were 14 or 15, we would call them antisocial and then they are up before the courts before you know it. If they are going to school at four or five and cannot communicate their frustration, it will come out in behaviour.

We have identified a gap between early years and youth work as well. We have developed our own afterschool service which provides very intense support to bridge that gap. With intervention at early years stage, we are building relationships. We have said at the youth work committee that ten is sometimes too late for a youth work intervention. We need to build relationships with young people much earlier so we can support them and have challenging conversations with them. When they are ten, starting to be involved in criminality or experiment with drug use, starting off with smokes, a joint or a few cans in a field, those relationships are already built. The idea is that there would be one good adult through the life cycle of a young person into adulthood.

I do not think that it is one-size-fits-all. We are talking about the journey of addiction and recovery. There are levels of intervention that go with that. We have youth work, early years, family support, the role of the education system, the role of the council and the role of every other Department that is intertwined in a young person's life. It is not a quick answer, sorry.