Ms Saoirse Brady:

A multidisciplinary team works with the young person if they are in the family home. There is a slightly different system for people who are in State care. In the family home, team members will assess the likelihood of that young person re-offending. They will look at their suitability for the scheme. They will also look at what underlying factors led them to offending in the first place. They will look at whether they are in school or training. They will look at the family supports that are in place and whether there are substance misuse issues or mental health issues. They will also identify if there is underlying trauma that has never fully been identified in the first place or addressed afterwards. Then the team will maybe meet the family and the young person two to three times a week. Team members will go into the family home and carry out the interventions, including therapeutic interventions. They will engage with the school or a youth training programme to see if they can get them back in. There are a couple of examples that we can give. Representatives from Extern spoke in the audiovisual room here before about a young person who had committed a string of serious offences and had quite a number of charges. The team went into the family home and identified that the young person had experienced trauma, had a mental health issue and an underlying misuse issue, and had been out of the family home. After the interventions, they ended up back in school and becoming a star pupil. The mother had never worked before and did not feel confident in her parenting. By the end of the process, she had gone and got her first job. She felt like she had the skills to deal with the younger siblings who were also going down a similar route. It is something that can have a ripple impact, not just for the young person themselves, but for the rest of their family and for the wider community. That young person disassociated from the peers they had been associating with when they were committing the offences. This kind of process can be transformational.