Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I did not intend to speak on this issue but Deputy McDonald referred to anti-social behaviour. It is an issue we all encounter and it can be difficult to address, particularly during the pandemic. We get reports of people complaining of large groups of young people gathering and so forth. There are two ways to deal with that. We can blame the young people and take a coercive approach, which I do not believe works. On the other hand, we can recruit people directly from the community to work in community and youth outreach projects. This is an area in which we have failed spectacularly. In fact, I believe we have gone backwards and made situations worse when we could have improved and dealt with them in a way that does not cause problems and conflicts in the community.

I can think of several such youth outreach projects in our area that were simply closed down. Often people who were from the community and knew the young people might not always have had certain formal qualifications and that was sometimes used as an excuse to get rid of them. Inevitably, the situation worsened when the projects were closed down. The people who were in the projects would say that there would be an anti-social problem in an area if a project closed down and, lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. As well as looking at the policing side of it, we need to consider seriously recruiting youth and community outreach workers from the community on a significant scale.

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