Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank Fianna Fáil for tabling this important motion. We have not discussed juvenile crime in the House for some time. Many of us were waiting for the audit to be completed and the report released. To a large extent we are still talking in a vacuum because we have not got our hands on the final report yet. While it was completed some time ago, all kinds of excuses were used for delaying the release of the report - double-checking it, going to various people to see beforehand and then going to the Policing Authority. The authority has had its hearings and I do not know why the report still has not been published. Why do we not have all the details involved in this?

For a long time I have been conscious of this issue in my constituency and as a public representative. The same applies to most constituencies but particularly urban ones, where there is a sense at community level that nobody is taking the issue of juvenile crime seriously. This has been the case for a long time. I was digging out stuff on the matter and found newspaper articles I had written 25 years ago. Little has changed in that time. We have the hangover from our historical failures relating to children.

There remains little understanding of the principle of prevention, even in more recent times. That applies particularly to the Department of Justice and Equality. That Department deals with very high profile matters - the Garda, the courts, the Prison Service, etc. However, if we were clever and fair about things, the emphasis would be on prevention at the earliest possible stage. It is almost a cliché to say that teachers can identify in junior infants the kids who are likely to end up before the courts. The kinds of issues that result in a young person going off the rails and getting involved in petty crime, such as anti-social behaviour, far too often lead on to involvement in much more serious crime. Those circumstances can be identified at a very early stage.

It took us a long time to come to the conclusion that we needed a Department and a Minister dedicated to children. When that was finally established, there are still major problems with the whole preventive area. For example, the CAMHS waiting lists for young people are shocking. Many of these young people have mental health problems and experience family dysfunction. There is a lack of family support services. This is not rocket science. To tackle the problems of crime, we need to start at the earliest possible stage. That means putting in family support in cases where there is dysfunction, mental health problems and severe problems of poverty which lead to all kinds of social issues. There is a major failing in the provision of family support services.

There is also failure when it comes to health services and mental health services, in particular. The other safety net that used to exist was having a reasonably well-functioning school-attendance service. Failure to attend school is one of the earliest indicators of a problem in a young person's life. The service is pretty well non-existent in certain areas at this stage. I recently tried to check out how it allocates its limited staff. There seems to be no rationale to how the staff are allocated through the school attendance service. Staff are allocated to areas where it is clear there is little need while limited staff numbers are allocated to areas with obvious need. Those early safety nets that should be in place do not exist or are seriously lacking in many areas.

When it comes to the justice area, many of us are aware of a sense within communities of growing lawlessness among young people and shoulder shrugging by the authorities because they simply do not know how to deal with it. That has been the case with the Garda increasingly in recent years. Previously the local inspector or superintendent would deal with a young person who was causing trouble. They would call down to speak to the young person; they would call their parents or call the parents in. If necessary, they would then take action.

That system changed a few years ago and we now have the national office. With the development of the national office came an appreciable deterioration in services locally. I regularly attend four different safety forums in my constituency with gardaí, local authority officials and community representatives. The constant refrain at those meetings relates to what to do about the young people who are out of control. They are driving motorbikes, scramblers and quad bikes. They are involved in horses, stealing cars, threatening behaviour and damage to public property - all kinds of serious enough anti-social activity. That is having an impact on their community and there is a sense of helplessness on the part of the authorities. One would hear of cases being referred, that there is a new system and that it not the same as it used to be. There are always excuses. Of course the failure to respond to those early stages of young people getting involved in trouble does them a serious disservice with their issues not being picked up. The approach of prevention is not in practice there.

Those young people have been allowed to go on to get involved in much more serious crime. The message that sends to their peers is absolutely appalling. There are many communities in which decent young people from decent families who want to do well in life look around them and say to themselves that they are stupid. They think they are stupid for not getting involved in crime because they see their neighbours or lads they went to school with getting involved in crime and having plenty of money to spend. Increasingly in recent years, there has been an awareness of the fact that gardaí were not tackling these problems and, as a result, there has been a very substantial increase in the use of minors as both drug runners and dealers. The more senior drug dealers knew from experience that young people were untouchable and above the law. That was the strong sense that pervaded.

The failure of the Department of Justice and Equality to deal with the problem of juvenile crime has created many different victims. There are many people paying a price for this. This is not just an academic issue or a question of figures, it is real-world stuff. The victims of the 8,000 crimes that were not dealt with properly are paying the price, as are the young people who should have been met with the proper response and prevented from getting involved in more serious crime. Their future victims will also pay a price for the failure of the Department. Communities are also paying a very serious price because a sense of lawlessness has now taken firm grip in many of our communities which must be dealt with as a matter of urgency.

Obviously, key to all of this is the need to make reparation for the failures of the Department and An Garda Síochána. There is an urgent need for An Garda Síochána to address this problem and to respond directly to the victims. Compensation issues also arise. There is a real need to restore a reasonable level of coverage and staffing at community garda level. Figures I obtained recently show that the community garda service has been decimated in recent years. Unless we put our money where our mouth is and commit to supporting community gardaí and getting this service right, nipping these problems in the bud and restoring a sense of law and order in communities across the country, we might as well throw our hands up in the air and walk away. This represents a huge failure. We need details on particular areas and the extent to which there was a failure to do their job on the part of gardaí in particular districts.

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