Ms Sin?ad Harris:

I manage Ronanstown youth service which is under the remit of Crosscare. Mr. Greg Tierney is our senior youth work manager. The title of our presentation today is "Leave No One Behind", so it is looking how society is moving on but we are still dealing with those young people who are being left behind. For me and the community in which I serve and work we can see the impact the pandemic and previous years of neglect and lack of appropriate and adequate services to address the real need has led us into a crisis in young people’s mental health. This is highlighted when we look at the sustainable development goals, SDGs, which all Government Departments have signed up to and think how attainable they are in a local sense. The world continues to move and grow and everyone is looking at and talking about climate action, climate change and climate justice and all we can see is young people who cannot function on a daily basis in today’s society. I ask myself whether they are going to get left behind, who is going to look after their needs and how they can make an impact locally so that they can change the future for them and their community.

If we look at the community of north Clondalkin where CAMHS is operating a skeleton service, waiting lists are two years long. Jigsaw left our community in 2019 and promised a satellite service. To date, this has still not materialised. The young people we work with have no access to real-time, easy accessible, fit for purpose youth mental health services. Young people need quick solution-focused access to mental health services. There is no under 18s dual diagnosis. A young person presenting with dual diagnosis will find it nearly impossible to be seen by a professional.

Young people in lower socio-economic communities are getting left behind because of a lack of services available to them and their families. We have noticed in the youth service that we can only hold these young people for a short time. They are becoming dependent on the staff and we do not have the training or experience to deal with clinical issues. We have nowhere to send these young people and access to private counselling or therapy is not an option.

What frightens us working in the community is that in 2007 and 2008 we had a spate of copycat suicides among our young people. It is now 2023 and while the community has engaged in the conversation around mental health and, in general, society is more aware of and open to the topic, our young people are still not receiving any additional services. If we cannot provide the generations of the future with basic coping skills and safe places to talk what hope do we have of enabling them to make longer societal changes around climate action and climate justice when their basic needs are not being met? When there are no services for them to turn to, who will look at the trauma they have encountered in their lives or who will be able to put building blocks in place so that in the future they are equipped with skills to deal with life?

I want to take this opportunity to highlight a few issues and remind people of some reports and resources that have been published around youth work. In 2012, which is a long time ago, there was a report on the economic value of the sector. It indicated that for every €1 spent on youth services the State saves €2.20. This report, Assessment of the Economic Value of Youth Work, was prepared by Indecon and published by the National Youth Council of Ireland, NYCI. What our sector is lacking is resources to be able to fund this type of valuable information. We know that youth work makes a real difference in the lives of young people and the communities they live in, but this report provides hard evidence that youth work is also value for money and makes economic sense. In 2023, the NYCI pre-budget campaign highlighted that an extra €12 million investment in youth work could provide so much but, instead, the sector got an increase of €2.4 million.

We are also asking for the professionalisation and recognition of youth work by the State and for funding and salaries to be brought in line with our counterparts in the public sector, for example, in Tusla and the HSE.