Ms Saoirse Brady:

That study is quite old. I think it was from 2011 but a lot of the principles still apply. We are conducting research at the moment on the link between social deprivation and disadvantage and the criminal justice system, because if we look at the Pobal deprivation index, those issues still underpin a lot of the reasons young people end up in the youth justice system. We are in the midst of a homelessness crisis. We are in a cost-of-living crisis. We see child poverty rates going up. We are not dealing with addiction. What we would like to see is prevention and early intervention measures. Looking further upstream, we have a huge amount of investment in youth diversion, and while that is welcome, we need to see further investment in youth work. Very often, the substantial investment in youth diversion comes at a cost to what used to go into youth work and we need to look at investing in those communities, investing in mental health services and investing in addiction in particular.