Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I move amendmentNo. 1:

To delete all words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following:

"calls on the Government to submit to Dáil Éireann, within one month, a comprehensive plan of action which will deal with the many difficulties and challenges faced by young people in Ireland today, set out firm completion dates for action, measurable performance targets and assign responsibility to specific Ministers and Ministers of State."

I regard this motion as a gross abuse of Parliament. It will have no impact of any description on any issue that genuinely affects young people. Essentially, this intellectually bankrupt and exhausted Government, which is bereft of ideas and incapable of producing legislation, is conjuring up a motion to fill the entirety of today's business because the alternative was to simply adjourn the House. This motion clearly indicates that, after more than ten years in office, Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats have passed their sell-by date. They are engaged in a cynical act of gesture politics. It also represents the final surrender of the Green Party to the Fianna Fáil mentality. The Green Party, fresh-faced and bushy tailed to Government, does not have a single legislative proposal to bring before the House which would introduce the badly needed reforms it and other parties have identified in the past five years. This is a spurious, self-congratulatory, meaningless motion which is devoid of substance. Essentially, it says the Government is great and talks to young people and deserves a pat on the back for all the good things it is doing. It randomly refers to a series of concerns to young people, as if by listing them, hey presto, the magic political wand is waved and these problems are resolved.

The House should encourage many more young people to be involved in politics than those to whom the Minister of State referred. A very small proportion of young people participate in politics or are aware of or involved in Dáil na nÓg or the commission for young people, the bodies to which the Minister of State referred. The overwhelming majority of young people are hugely cynical of politicians and the political process and have little faith in the capacity of Governments or the House to address the needs they confront. Most young people, if they took time to read the Minister of State's speech, would wonder what on earth we, as legislators, are doing wasting our time engaging in a debate on a motion of this nature.

The motion is, however, interesting in one respect. It shows the limited vision of the Government, which pretends to know the problems facing young people, even if it does not appear to have many answers as to how to address them and is incapable even of identifying a range of issues which need to be addressed. It is interesting to note the issues the Minister of State chose to omit. Street violence and anti-social behaviour are the scourge of many young people on Friday and Saturday evenings in the centre of our cities and towns. It does not appear to occur to the Minister of State that these problems need to be addressed.

It is of concern to many parents of autistic children that proper services and educational facilities are not available for their children. This issue directly affects young people and their future lives and capacities in adulthood yet the Government has fought battles in the courts to resist having the State provide to the parents of autistic children education within an applied behaviour analytical, ABA, framework. The Government and its predecessor have wasted hundreds of thousands of euro in legal costs trying to resist establishing the educational facilities sought by parents and have defended the indefensible in the courts in the context of young people with special needs or behavioural difficulties who require specific forms of education. As a consequence of its stance, badly pressed parents have been forced to litigate.

The motion refers to Government action in the area of drug abuse. While resources have been invested in this area, not enough is being done. It was interesting to read in a good supplement to yesterday's edition of the Irish Examiner dealing with the drug crisis comments by the Minister of State with responsibility for drugs strategy, Deputy Pat Carey, in which he promised yet again to provide a variety of facilities. In dealing with drug abuse, methadone appears to be the principal weapon or treatment mode in the armoury of the State. Some people have been on methadone for seven, eight, nine or ten years and addiction to this drug has replaced addiction to other drugs. The Minister of State, Deputy Carey, admitted that young people on methadone will continue to take the substance into adulthood because of the lack of residential rehabilitation places and structured after-care.

I recall being present in the House in 2001 when the then Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition promised to provide the necessary facilities to address the problem, a promise the current Government continues to make. While we need to tackle prevention head on, we should also ensure that drug addicts have treatment urgently made available to them when they finally seek it and do not find themselves placed on waiting lists for months while their lives continue to be destroyed. It is possible these individuals will lack the capacity to avail of treatment by the time it becomes available.

Other issues the Minister of State appears not to believe require addressing include the housing crisis facing many young people, the Government's complete failure to ensure social housing is available and the excessive expense of getting on the housing ladder, an issue which, in the context of first-time buyers, the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, was finally battered into addressing in the dying days of the general election campaign when he promised stamp duty reform. Much more needs to be done. Young people are under severe pressure to find affordable housing, an area on which the Government has utterly failed.

Children affected by domestic violence come within the Minister of State's brief. There is a complete lack of counselling facilities for children caught in these circumstances. In the context of providing refuges for the victims of domestic violence, it is extremely difficult to find accommodation in refuges when a woman who has been a victim of domestic violence is accompanied by a male child in his teenage years. What is being done to address this problem, which is not even mentioned in the motion?

In the context of our court structures dealing with children in need of care and protection District Court judges are crying out for a court welfare service to undertake independent assessments to facilitate the court in making decisions in the best interests of children. In the context of marital breakdown, the courts do not have a welfare service attached to them to facilitate judges to determine the appropriate orders to make with regard to parenting, for example, on questions such as which parent should be the primary custodian or carer of a child or what arrangement should be made regarding child access. In the event that, on the one hand, there is concern that a child could be at risk if left alone with a parent while, on the other, it is also believed that the child should maintain a relationship with the parent in question, supervised call-in centres similar to those established in England, other parts of Europe and the United States are not available to facilitate child-parent access arrangements. The Minister of State, by the very wording of the motion, has indicated the Government's lack of insight and policy in terms of tackling a broad range of serious issues.

The House should be dealing with legislation today given that the Government has been in office for almost six months. In my previous 21 years in the House, I have never seen an Order Paper of the nature of the current Order Paper which does not list a single Bill as waiting to be dealt with in the House. The Government has utterly failed to deliver on any aspect of its legislative programme, as published on 25 September, or to produce a single new Bill, as agreed to and promised in the programme for Government in June last.

It is interesting, when dealing with a motion on young people which will achieve nothing, effect no change and impact on no one, to examine the legislative programme. I recall that I was shaving while listening to the Government Chief Whip, Deputy Tom Kitt, speak on the "Morning Ireland" programme on Tuesday, 25 September. During the interview he promised the Irish people that a great, exciting legislative programme would be brought before the House before Christmas. It is an extraordinary achievement that two months later and six months into the lifetime of the Government none of the 17 Bills listed in the legislative programme has been published. This demonstrates a lack of commitment, seriousness and energy and a desire to be in power for power's sake, rather than to address issues.

Some of the Bills promised directly affect young people. A serious issue exists for young people at third level colleges with regard to the level of student grants, the costs of being in college, the cost of books and the availability and cost of accommodation. The Government has promised a student support Bill. Although third level fees have been abolished, students must make additional payments to colleges at the start of the academic year. We are debating a nebulous motion about young people, but the student support Bill, which was third on the priority list mentioned by Deputy Tom Kitt on 25 September, has not been published. The employment agency regulation Bill, which will affect young people, was also promised before Christmas, but it has not been published.

The adoption Bill to ratify the Hague Convention on foreign adoptions has been promised since 1999, but we may celebrate a decade of that promise before we see the Bill, despite the fact that major problems in that area need resolution. Our adoption laws are still largely based on the Adoption Act 1952 and a series of amending Acts which fail to address a range of issues that should have long been addressed. These days many of the couples who are fortunate enough to adopt under our domestic adoption system agree to an open adoption system as opposed to a closed system where everyone's anonymity is preserved. However, our legislation makes no provision for this.

Some young people who have been adopted wish to trace their origins. A series of promises have been made with regard to putting in place a legislative framework to facilitate them while also protecting the privacy of natural parents in appropriate circumstances. That framework has been promised for years and was originally delayed because of a Supreme Court decision which was delivered four and a half years ago. There is no serious intent in what we are doing today. Where is the adoption Bill? We should be debating that Bill, if not the student grant Bill.

Another neglected Bill is the one the Taoiseach this morning forgot, the DNA Bill. It was promised by the Ceann Comhairle when he was Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. It was promised by Mr. Michael McDowell when he was the Minister and it has now been promised by the current Minister. What relevance has that Bill for young people? It is relevant because we are one of the few countries in Europe that does not have a DNA database. If a young woman is sexually assaulted and raped on the streets of Dublin, there is less likelihood that the perpetrator will be identified than in most other European countries or any state in the United States, because we do not have a DNA database. This affects the lives, security, safety, well-being and particularly the future psychological well-being, of young people, yet our Parliament has been promising this legislation for approximately ten years.

Much of what I have been saying has to do with the failure of the Government towards young people generally and the farce of this motion. That farce is particularly well illustrated in respect of the failure of the Government to deal with issues affecting not just young people born in Ireland. This is neatly encapsulated in the Government's failure to put in place proper policies to deal with young people who come here seeking political asylum. The Government has presided over the HSE's loss of over 300 young people from residential care and has no idea where they are. It is a Government the Supreme Court stopped from deporting three children in the past three weeks in circumstances where its behaviour was regarded as illegal.

Tomorrow morning, the Government proposes to deport Adijat Okusanya who came to Ireland alone in 2004 at the age of 15. She has completed her leaving certificate and commenced a course in business and accountancy at Tallaght IT. This articulate young girl who has adapted to our Irish education system has lost all contact with her family and should be allowed to remain in this country. Her remaining here would benefit the country, but the Government proposes to deport her back to Nigeria tomorrow where she will have an uncertain future and no certainty of employment. I am informed that if employed, she fears she will be expected to provide sexual favours in return to her employer.

If we want to have credibility in the United States when discussing young illegal Irish people there, we need to make a radical change to our treatment here of young people, who may be illegals. Many came here seeking political asylum and to escape from circumstances that were not under their control as children. They have made this State their home, been responsible members of their local communities, successfully got through our examination system and have much to contribute. The Minister of State has some hours to look into the situation of this young girl. I urge him to do so and to confirm to the House by the end of this debate that the young lady in question will not be deported tomorrow.

The Government must end the lunacy and deal properly with the predicament of non-national parents of Irish-born children. Where young people are born in this country and are Irish citizens and entitled to remain here, we must put in place a system that does not require the type of advertisements and notices that were published recently and that result in their parents having to register annually to be allowed to remain here. It is time we adopted a child and family-centred humane policy that is not locked into bureaucratic idiocy.

See this speech in context