Ms Dannielle McKenna:

I thank the committee for the invitation to join it today. I am the youth service manager of the Rialto Youth Project and with me today is Mr. Jim Lawlor. Youth work came to Rialto in the early 1980s and, since then, the project has always approached the practice from a social justice, community and youth development model. In Rialto, we have embedded models that operate from social justice which are collective, work on collaboration and aim to bring about social change.

Through this model, we have learned and know that youth work works and is liberating. It is creating a foundation to understand what is going on for young people as they grow through their adolescence. It is a critical time in a young person's life. They are developing socially, emotionally, physically and sexually. It is a time for them to try or not try things, explore, figure things out, make mistakes and learn. That sounds attainable, and it could be except that we live in a society that is unequal. That inequality means that when young people come through the doors of the youth project, they are walking in with a bag of trauma that is ready to knock them over. That bag now includes a housing crisis, more poverty, an unequal system, a cost-of-living crisis, unemployment, a mental health crisis, addiction and violence, among many other things which brutalise young people and mean their lives can be devastating. At times, youth workers spend the day keeping young people alive and supporting them to get through the day.

Youth workers are in the communities with young people, responding within a system of waiting lists for services, unequal access to services, a lack of services and red tape. The youth work field is seriously struggling because it attempts to respond to all the needs that are wider than youth work within a climate where resources are limited, there is no strategic vision for young people or the field of youth and community and the Departments are failing. We have gone away from the original fundamentals of youth work and become a safety net for and first responders to young people in crisis and pain.

Through that, we still believe in creating a needs-based response because we know the cards have been stacked against young working class and other marginalised young people in Ireland and the inequality they face everywhere they turn. Youth work tries to do the job of many, but we need a more joined up wraparound system that builds a solid bridge between Departments, rather than operating from independent silos that are failing young people. Instead of existing within a failing economic state that is causing real harm to young people, we need to invest in the youth and community fields.

We cannot forget the impact of austerity or the decisions that were made by the State to safeguard certain interests and decimate communities. In 2011, the decision was made to make these cuts and discipline the field. This continued to put us in our place year after year, placing obstacles in the way with a value base that is being driven by a State that does not offer the critical social education that moves us towards a more radical youth work practice. Instead, the value-for-money and UBU outcome-based models emerged and young people became numbers. They became lots of numbers. The conversations became about documentation and they changed from the impact of youth work to counting how many times young people walked through the door of a project. It is no longer about how you support a young person to finish secondary school or build their confidence to become more self-directing in their lives; it is about target groups and time.

Youth work works because it is built on a system of values and integrity. However, it has become a space where governance is attached. In the field, it currently diminishes the critical thinking, passion and creativity of young people; the foundations of youth work. The approach to youth work is being commodified and individualised when it needs to be kept focused on collective action for collective social change. We know there are lots of statistics about how many young people and children are in homeless accommodation. There are statistics on how many children and young people are early school leavers, on waiting lists for mental health and medical supports and for how much trauma they are living in every day. We need the Departments to come together and develop a more strategic wraparound approach to support the young people who are most at risk.

The subject of youth work is critical. It needs to be understood, valued and invested in. This State needs to value it. The field has not been brought to its original funding pre 2008 because we now have the cost-of-living crisis. If we look at other investments, in 2022 the annual funding budget for youth was €73 million but private schools got €111 million. Where is that investment? Privatisation and priorities need to shift. How would youth work look if it existed in an egalitarian system where young people were seen as equal rather than the neoliberal capitalist system where youth and community work has become about employability and social enterprise? Youth work exists because of inequality and the State needs to take the issues young people and the sector face seriously and invest in and resource projects to support young people to meet their needs.