Professor Maurice Devlin:

I thank the Senator for a couple of very good questions. Much of what has been said in response is worth teasing out further but I will come in on the question of a comparator or a place to which we might look. There is not, unfortunately, any one place that has got it right and to which we could simply look. It is not surprising, perhaps. It is partly because youth work as we understood it originated in these islands and there is not such a strong tradition of it on the Continent, especially in the southern parts. It has emerged much more recently but people are taking to it the more they learn about it. There is an irony whereby there have been huge strides at institutional levels of the European Union and the Council of Europe in recent years in recognising the value of youth work and seeking to replicate some of what they have seen going on in Ireland and the UK at the very time when, particularly in the UK and more particularly England in recent decades, a thriving youth service sector based on youth work was being dismantled. We certainly do not want to learn from that experience. As in education and many other areas, we could learn much from Finland’s approach to youth work and youth work education and training.

Some of us here, both through training and in practice, have connections with different parts of the EU, where they do not necessarily use the term "youth work" but talk about social pedagogy or social animation and they use similar approaches based on young people's voluntary participation, which is essential. There are aspects we could learn from but what is so frustrating is that we are better placed to get it right than anywhere else. I am not just talking about here, south of the Border, but on the island of Ireland. Ms Cunningham said earlier that youth work transforms lives and I am here because as an 11-year-old, I was a founder member of a local youth group in an abandoned school building in County Derry. I am very conscious of the North-South dimension of all that we do and of not just the need, but the opportunity, to do more on a North-South basis post Brexit.

Unfortunately, the UK is not in the EU any more. The Senator asked specifically about the EU but we could certainly learn from some of what is happening in Scotland in terms of integration of youth work with other approaches to community learning and development, in particular. Some of what is happening in Wales is really valuable in terms of strategically seeing youth work as part of the overall education provision and practice in the country and acknowledging youth workers on a par with formal educators and teachers. As for some of what is happening in the North around the acknowledgement of the workforce responsibilities of the lead Department, to give one example, in recent times we have seen the fast-tracking of routes to professional qualifications for people who do not have them because of the urgent need and the recruitment and retention issues that others referred to earlier. Indeed, those issues came up time and again when this committee spoke to practitioners at a previous meeting. In the North, there is a much more systematic approach to gathering, maintaining and publishing statistical data and other types of information about youth work, whereas here, there is no repository for such data. This is one of the great tragedies.

It is 40 years since I got my first job in social research for the national youth policy committee, chaired by former High Court judge, Mr. Justice Declan Costello. There are so many stories I could refer back to about how, if different options had been chosen and if politics had not come into it so many times along the way, we could be so much further ahead at this stage. There is a terrible lack of institutional memory because of the way the Civil Service runs in this country and particularly because of where youth work sits within that. There used to be an old joke about there being no economists in the Department of Finance but the same applies to youth affairs. There are great civil servants, great individuals who are absolutely doing their best in the jobs they are in but there has been no serious attempt to resource those civil and public servants with the kind of expertise needed. There has been a recent recruitment drive and there have been sporadic ones over the years but there needs to be a dedicated unit, wherever it is located, that gathers knowledge, curates it, analyses it systematically, looks out to the wider world and also digs deeper here, in all the right ways, within youth work and out to the various domains that youth work engages with and adopts a genuinely evidence-informed, strategic approach. We do not have that really.