Ms Moninne Griffith:

On regional access, we support over 30 LGBT youth groups. We are not in every county, I am afraid. Some of these groups are very small. The funding is through the National Office for Suicide Prevention, NOSP, which provides funding so that a youth worker has four hours to run a weekly or fortnightly youth group. It is patchy, but the young people themselves talk about how important it is and what a lifeline it is to have access to peers and to support.

There are two different communications plans. One is targeted at young people, because it came to our attention that even young people who were self-harming were not accessing services. We have good relationships with mental health services, but when we explored it we discovered that there was a double stigma and that they almost expected to have really bad mental health because they are LGBT. At the moment we are working together with some of our partners in the mental health area. Spun Out, Pieta House, NOSP and Jigsaw have all come together with Thinkhouse PR, which is a youth PR company, and we are carrying out in-depth focus groups with young people to get to the bottom of this problem. We will then look for a further investment so that we can start communicating outwards and telling young people that this is not okay and that they do not have to suffer like this. Services exist, and we can provide access to them for these young people. That is one of the communication plans.

The other plan relates to parents. Our experience is that LGBT young people are coming out at a progressively younger age, especially trans young people. For parents in Ireland, it can be very difficult and very challenging, so we are trying to access those parents at the moment to make sure that they know about our services and our partners who work with us. Anyone on Facebook at the moment will see that we have a big advertisement which targets parents. Facebook partnered with us on this project. There is a bot and a video, and parents can be brought in so that they can access the information. Further down the road we hope to work with family resource centres, FRCs, nationally so that we can get that information out there about the services that are available locally and nationally so that young people and their parents know that they do not have to go through this alone and that the supports and services are available.