Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I want to start with a comment the Garda Commissioner Drew Harris made about the report to the Policing Authority. It is reflective of the debate we are going to have. Commissioner Harris said that we should have done better by young people who were "in the main, vulnerable children". That says everything about the report.

The motion touches on some serious incidents that happened between 2010 and 2012. It is obvious to anybody who has read it, or who has read about the failings of the Garda youth diversion project, that there were governance failings of a serious nature, which one could only call systematic and institutionalised failures on behalf of the programme and the police themselves. Some of the offences that were committed and never prosecuted through the criminal justice system were heinous crimes. It was a catalogue of failures from the beginning to the end for both the victims and the children involved.

Other Deputies have touched on this, and this is not to demean or trivialise the people who were the victims of these crimes, but I was shocked to read, in the motion, that 57 of the children accused of offences have died since 2010. Those children are gone. They must have lived chaotic lives if that was the outcome. Everybody will agree that is shocking.

There are 105 youth diversion projects in Ireland. I will refer to two with which I am familiar in the area of Neilstown where I am from and where I grew up. There was not a lot to do there for young people. There were no community facilities and some people got in trouble with the police and so forth. The GRAFT and VALLEY projects are in operation in the north Clondalkin area and their rate of reoffending is extremely low. Those programmes engage with many people who are referred by juvenile liaison officers. These projects have been good at diverting people away from the criminal justice system.

There are also late night football leagues in Dublin and other counties, another initiative of the youth diversion project. Late night football leagues exist in 16 counties and they are positive. They provide indoor and outdoor football facilities for children and young people particularly on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays between 8 p.m. and midnight. They have been successful in getting young people away from vulnerable situations.

We need to go further than the motion. We must look at the grave inequalities in society and issues which disproportionately affect working class communities. A mistake that people in society make is to demonise young people. It is wrong to associate anti-social behaviour with young people because young people then grow through their early adult years thinking that everything they do is anti-social. What the banks did to this country is much more anti-social than the behaviour of young people. We need to challenge the inequalities in society and that is something that will not be done by a motion or an inquiry. That has to be done politically. It is good that we are having the debate and, hopefully, the failures of the police will never happen again.

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