Michael Moynihan (Cork North-West, Fianna Fail)
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I will take the point about youth and youth affairs. I met the Minister, Deputy Naughton, last week to congratulate her on her appointment. I look forward immensely to working with her and have had many engagements with her in the recent past. I think it is important that we understand and we can value the outcomes of people being involved in the scouts, Foróige or Macra na Feirme, or whatever form of civic engagement people have and how it stands to them in life. When we talk about schools, there is a certain matrix or measure of outcomes that can be seen. I take the point about investment in youth services.

There are a number of very good initiatives in the shared island funding. One of them is the Middletown Centre for Autism in south Armagh. That is a hugely impressive piece of work that the shared island initiative has been funding. It just goes to show the capacity of what we can do in the shared island initiative and what we can do right across the island when we pool resources. I am sure the Deputy has visited the centre and has seen the excellent work being done there. We are talking about the funding of the shared island initiative to ensure we are targeting it. People from that centre in Armagh have visited every school in the Republic as well as in the North and have shown the benefits of it. The Deputy may have been there when they were asking for more investment for their specific asks. They were setting up that initiative 20 years ago, when I was chairing this committee.

We have a number of programmes on the education side that we will continue to fund under the shared island initiative. There is the RAISE programme and the teachers’ research exchange programme, known as T-Rex, as well. If we are to do right by the future of education, we have to continue to engage and ensure teachers are trained, advised and given the best possible resources. There is great scope as well under that scheme. I know that across government, the shared island initiative has the ability to offer further funding to the likes of the autism centre and those who have the expertise when it comes to visual impairment. The shared island initiative has looked at a number of other issues. A group from north Cork brought children from the North of Ireland to New York. They were talking about how to defuse a bomb. They are now looking at how we can use the shared island fund to look at deprivation and education in Belfast, Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Derry and how that can be funded. They have a philanthropist group in New York they are looking at. I have been very engaged with them and have seen the amount of work they have done. That is something that should certainly be done from the shared island funding because it would bring a huge focus not just in our own State but right across the island.