Ms Mary Cunningham:

For me at the core of the issues we are talking about are not happening in isolation. When we talk about funding, we talk about the restrictions of UBU. We talk about the bureaucracy. We talk about the impact on the workforce in terms of staff and volunteers. We talk about young people potentially being excluded from targeted schemes. We talk about youth work working and therefore every young person in the country should have the opportunity to engage with it.

The bit that is completely missing is the oversight, a framework, a strategy. Professor Devlin and I have been around for a long time. As we were walking over, we were saying what we need is a youth work development plan. Exactly 20 years ago Ireland developed a youth work development plan. All the stakeholders were involved. There were conferences where everybody - the State, young people, youth workers and organisations - signed up and we were all in agreement with it. Then, like so many other strategies and policies, almost none of it was implemented. When James Reilly was Minister, a national youth strategy was launched. Again, there was stakeholder engagement. We want to be given the opportunity. We are stepping up to the plate to say we will have our say. What came out was not quite what we would have wished, but we could have worked with it. Not a single bit of it has been implemented.

It is not really another strategy as such that the sector needs, that youth work needs. What needs to be done is there. Historically it has been there. Issues relating to data, premises, universal access, a development unit and work force development are all there and were there 20 years ago. If it had been implemented, we would not be sitting here answering whether the sector is in crisis because it would not be. There is an urgent need for a strategic look at youth work in Ireland.

The Senator asked if there are models we can look to. There are and of course we should be looking at them. However, Ireland is held up as a model of good practice because we have many things that other jurisdictions would envy. We have a legal definition of youth work. We have the primacy of the voluntary sector identified in terms of delivery. We did have the national quality standards which the sector embraced because we were involved in their development. Something works but then it is stopped.

Loads of data have been gathered but not a single person has seen the data gathered through that entire nine-year process. It is not that we have not been doing some of those things but it needs to be joined up and then of course the funding would come alongside that. We need to develop a scheme to make these boys accountable because we do not know what they are up to and it is destroying youth work as youth work and preventing organisations from doing what they need to do to meet the needs of young people. There is an urgent need for a development plan and action plan. I do not care what it is called. It needs to be implemented and we need a mechanism for monitoring its implementation. There needs to be accountability not just in the sector but at ministerial and official level to ensure it is implemented.

We need something similar to what has happened in other sectors such as early years where there has been a whole-system approach to addressing what has been an historical deficit over many years. That is what youth work needs. We cannot fix this problem like the game where things just jump up and you bash them with a hammer. That is where we are at. Even if we fix the paperwork, something else will happen. When we hear all this, we wonder if a volunteer would go next or near it. Other areas really value what youth workers do and the skills and the knowledge they have. They have sustainable funding and can offer long-term contracts with increments and pension contributions. Why would a newly qualified youth worker not go there? We are at a tipping point and it is urgent that youth work is looked at strategically.