Dr. Patrick J. Burke:

I will kick off with youth information. There is a stream of funding from the Department specifically for youth information, but it has not increased for many years. In order to deliver, it needs to increase because it was under review. That review has taken place but has not been published yet. We are very hopeful that it will because, as the Deputy said, it has become very important that young people know where they can go to find information they can trust and to be accompanied on the road of learning to understand how to develop a skill around looking at sources of information and then making decisions based on good quality information.

We have human beings who are youth workers by profession but they are also extremely well networked among themselves. They constantly undergo training at a national level but also European level, through ERYICA which is a European network that looks after youth information. All of that infrastructure is there but there is not adequate funding. They are on reduced hours - sometimes only half the time doing that and half the time doing something else. That is really critical. The work with SpunOut has been hugely important in that it has the potential to reach a huge number of young people but we lack a budget for advertising to buy Google ads to promote it online. We lack a person dedicated to the technology needed to support that in SpunOut.

We lack human beings; I think we only have 16 in the country who are really dedicated to this work, which is tiny. Not every county has a dedicated person. This is a critical piece. This institution is dedicated to making sure we have good citizens who understand how to engage in democracy. All of that is about the heart of youth information. That is what these youth information officers do on a daily basis. It desperately needs to be funded. I encourage the committee to do what it can to promote the need to support youth information.