Mr. Paul Perth:

I agree with the last speaker on trauma-informed services and I want to include the gardaí in that. Everybody working with the public needs to be trauma-informed and working through a trauma-informed lens.

May I just paint a quick picture of a night on street work? Probably two weeks ago, we went out with two artists and we were introducing them to some young people in the area. There is a new playground in west Tallaght, and when we walked in the artists counted 19 young people there from the ages of 8 to 11. It was dark. They were all playing together. Some of the stuff we picked up on - again, through a trauma-informed lens - was that it was quite volatile and there was gender-based violence. These are eight-, nine- and ten-year-olds. There was bullying, fear and intimidation. There was racism. We had to sit with a young Traveller girl, eight or nine years of age, and console her for 20 minutes. There was no regulation. The loudest and the strongest survive. That is what we encounter all the time when we allow young people just to play, coming from a trauma background and a background of addiction. Many of them come from backgrounds of addiction, poverty and deprivation. There is nobody there. I said it in the report. It is a cosmetic approach. The parks are fantastic, but when you allow these children just to walk into the park and play on their own, there is nobody there to nurture them or impose some kind of regulation. Those are the effects of trauma we are seeing.