Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael)
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How do I follow all of that? I first learned the value of youth work under Alan Cleere as manager of the YMCA a long time ago. Coming into the YMCA, I had never had any exposure. I was not in a youth club growing up. I did not know what youth work was until I was impacted, so to speak, by Alan, who is now team leader of the Rialto community drug team. At every management meeting, when we would talk about the use of the building, Alan and Nicola, another exceptional youth worker he worked with, would say the YMCA is the Young Men's Christian Association, and the "Y" stands for "Young". They would ask what we were doing and how we were resourcing. I always thought they championed youth. I am very caught by youth work being a social movement because I encountered it as a social movement and caught the vision of it being about that.

I come from the Just Society wing of Fine Gael and am very much influenced by the late Mr. Justice Declan Costello. I must read the report. It makes me sad that visions and foundations were put in place and we are now looking at decisions that were made that almost put a commercial value on something that was so fundamental to the nurturing of our young people. I suppose I am trying to capture a vocabulary and something out of today's meeting that I can champion and work on influencing, given my background and experience.

One of the big takeaways from today's meeting for me is the idea of elevating youth work as a profession. If we talk about the definition of a social worker, pretty much everybody in society knows what that is, but if we mention an occupational therapist or psychologist or an assessment of needs, which we often talk about at this committee, I am not sure youth work is understood. Mr. Gordon told us that one in four young people in Ireland engage in youth work. I would nearly bet that that figure is disproportionately reflected in different communities. It is not one in four of all young people. It is perhaps three out of four in particular communities because of the necessity. I wonder, in that, if there is a vision we can grab that shows how fundamental youth work is in nurturing young people. Back in 1998, I joined the YMCA. We did not have the terminology or the understanding of intergenerational trauma, trauma-based care and nurturing, cherishing and influencing. We did not have any of that, but we still did it. We did it by instinct. Perhaps it was a mothering instinct; I do not know. We knew we had roles there as role models. What always struck me was the number of young people who wanted to be youth workers when they grew up because of the experience of encountering exceptional youth workers. I suppose that is where my head is at in asking what we can take away from today. I would love to sit and listen to Senator Ruane for ages more, as I always do.

I get the point about the justice piece and the terminology of criminalising people. It diverted away. What we need to do is to get into the preventative work, to catch young people before they are enticed and groomed away from where we want them to be. In other rooms in this building, the Committee of Public Accounts sits, and we have Estimates, where it does come down to bean-counting. The quantity is not an accurate measure, because an afternoon spent with one young person could be life changing, rather than with 30 young people doing whatever, which could equally be life changing. Quantity can never be a measure, but how do we set those metrics and how do we change that? I will stop there and perhaps come back in later.