Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I think Dr. Lambert was talking about the scared straight programme. That was the idea. It was talked up for years in America. It was the idea of taking kids in to prison. You can imagine what the interaction would have been. They found when they checked the percentages that a huge amount of those kids did not end up engaging. However, while there was a whole pile of kids that were probably never going to anyway but the other kids who went in would hear dreadful things from these guys and feel emasculated. What happened was they went out and felt a compunction to commit crime to big themselves up again so it did not work in any shape or form.

I know what Dr. Lambert is saying about the Garda bus and I understand that point around stigma but sometimes that is a decent enough interaction with the gardaí, which can be very positive for both the gardaí and the kids and their relationship. It is something positive. I understand there is a best practice way of doing it but a bigger issue is the Garda not engaging enough in those types of projects. We were talking about early intervention. They are now talking about youth diversion programmes working a lot earlier. All this stuff is not done at an early enough stage.

The witnesses have dealt with the majority of what I wanted to talk about. I will ask a question about EMDR specifics. I was completely taken away by this. I will let Dr. O’Shea talk rather than me wittering on.