Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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Excellent. My second question is on youth services. We have a funding system whereby youth services are funded with two streams. There is a justice stream and a Department of children stream. An analysis has to be done of those two streams. Many projects have both streams coming in.

There are different models across the country, In Dublin, we have the old City of Dublin Youth Service Board, CDYSB, model, which was a subcommittee of the ETB that ran direct services. There was an active process of divesting those and making them community-led. They have been left now as separate companies and the CDYSB no longer sits on any of those boards. The CDYSB also previously had a distribution role in funding. The Department sent it funding which it distributed. Now we have gone to a different model whereby there is more of a support agency rather than a final decision-maker on distribution of funds. There are big agencies like Crosscare and Foróige in other parts of the country and they are able to manage administration, legal fees and governance issues better than a small operation.

I have met with Finglas Youth Resource Centre in our area, solely funded by the witnesses' Department, not by justice. There is another justice project in the area and there is a lot of engagement between them. The difficulty they have is they are implementing the pay restoration and will have to lose a staff member towards the end of the year, despite budgets increasing in recent years. There needs to be a look at CDYSB projects that are stand-alone youth services, the support we give them and the huge burden of responsibility on the voluntary directors of the boards to manage staffing and so on. Has consideration been given to the viability of those projects, particularly the CDYSB ones in Dublin?