Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

I wish to respond to some of the things Mr. Collins said regarding the justice and youth work money. We all work for projects that to a large extent get money from the Department of Justice. The Department is very clear that it is its money and it is very clear about the cohorts of people it wants us to work with. Our Rua Youth Justice project, which is part of the Solas Project, is about working with young people who are considered by An Garda Síochána to be unsuited for diversion. They are before the courts facing multiple charges and are not in another project. The criteria are very clear and An Garda Síochána selects the young people we are to target. We have 20 young people from the Drimnagh and Crumlin areas in Dublin 8 and Dublin 20. I have no difficulty with that because they are a group that were not worked with previously. The real difficulty for me is that more money is provided by the Department of Justice to work with young people caught up in possible early offending than there is by the Department of children to work with young people before they get to that stage. There is a tension there and the real difficulty is that the Department of children and the Government more generally do not actually value youth work as a source of support for young people in general. The young girl in the park in Killinarden is not on the target list of a justice project because she is only eight or nine and she probably has not, or could not, have committed offences because she is too young. There is a sense that youth work in working-class and other communities is not valued. The huge support that voluntary youth groups gave in the past has disappeared to a large extent so there is a huge vacuum there. The issue is not that youth justice projects should not be targeting who they are targeting because it is justice money. The real difficulty is that there is no general approach to youth work. I do not know how many young people live in Killinarden but it is a good few thousand. The reality is that the vast majority of those young people may have little or no contact with youth workers.

On the issue of parks, we put hundreds of thousands of euro into providing really good playgrounds for children up to the age of seven. The parks are also really great for older people like me to have a walk and to walk my dog in. However, we do not set aside any space in our parks specifically for teenagers, unlike a lot of other countries do, so obviously, a group of teenagers in certain public parks is a source of annoyance or leads to a sense of danger for some people. They will say, "Oh, there is a gang of young people in the park." So many times we go to policing forum meetings and all that is talked about is gangs of young people hanging around the park or the shops. At the last such meeting in the city centre, I said that the only people committing crime in the whole of the inner city must be young people because that is all the forum ever talks about. All that people want to do is keep moving them on. When we are designing parks, we need to include spaces for young people. In other countries we see facilities such as table tennis tables, basketball courts, little football areas and other facilities that young people can use free of charge. We do not really provide for teenagers at all. All we want to do is drive them out because other people do not feel safe around them. That sends a really bad message to young people and results in some of the stuff that Mr. Collins talked about, with young people destroying resources in their own communities because they feel there is no space provided for them.