Mr. Stephen Sharpe:

Senator Ruane touched on the whole neoliberal approach to youth work and about measurement. As for certain aspects of UBU, there is a responsibility on the youth work sector to ensure we are focused and doing what we need to do but they are missing the essence of it in what they are trying to capture at the moment.

I will give an example from the Bosco centre. Going back ten years, we had an after-schools programme, a youth work programme and an early school leavers programme. We can have a young person coming in from the age of six or seven years and he or she can go right through to 18 and 19 and be engaged in the programme with the same workers. Ms Boyne is sitting beside me. She is up in Dundalk and will be a qualified youth worker in a couple of weeks. She has been in the Bosco since she was seven. We have a gym run by a guy called George McCabe of G-Force Fitness. George was the first young person I worked with in the centre when I went in there 18 years ago as a youth worker. There was that continuity of service, contact and relationship and that is being dismantled. We lost a huge chunk of our after-schools programme. Our early school leavers programme is gone. Now we function with two youth workers and a project leader. It is a lack of acknowledgement of what we do as a sector and its importance in the lives of young people. Our work is now more reactive than proactive. It is constantly reacting and trying to clean up issues. We are trying to support families and young people. Personally, in the Bosco, we talk about being youth workers, working with young people, but it is much broader than that in terms of families and advocacy. There is so much involved in it. There are definitely issues around resourcing. And it is about recognising that the ground starts to inform the policy. Sometimes, I look at some of the national organisations and it does not seem to fit with what I see. I can only speak for myself but there is definitely a gap.