Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 9 October 2025
Committee on Drugs Use
Kinship Care and Care: Discussion
2:00 am
Mr. Wayne Stanley:
I will follow on from Mr. Peelo's point about early prevention models. To go back to the final point in our opening statement around upstream services, there is the potential to go into schools to meet young people in what, many times, is their safe space, to have an initial conversation with them. I referenced Dr. Peter Mackie, who talks about it being the whisper before the conversation. It is speaking to those children in their safe space. They give the potential to identify that something is going wrong at home and we then offer support. It is not that social workers or anybody else rushes in. There is an offer of support to the family. One of the issues in any area of social work or social policy is upstreaming is usually really expensive because you are trying to hit thousands of families in the hope that you hit one or two who are going to end up in crisis. This is a way of doing something that is really broad but also really targeted. I encourage the committee to take a look at that. Conversations about it are starting to happen in the Department of housing around youth homelessness. In terms of this cohort of young people, and getting the support to families early, it is a really useful model.
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