James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am very happy to have this opportunity to address the House on the progress which is being made within the criminal justice system on interventions and initiatives to divert vulnerable young people away from criminal activity and to assist them with options for a better and more fulfilling life.

I was pleased to be able to publish the Youth Justice Strategy 2021-2027 on 15 April 2021, which is the successor to the Youth Justice Action Plan 2014-2018. I acknowledge the work of the previous Minister of State, Deputy Stanton, for his work in initiating the youth justice strategy. It is often easy to focus our efforts on the immediate, quick-fix solutions and to try to address long-standing socioeconomic issues affecting the most disadvantaged areas of communities and society with short-term programmes. The youth justice strategy is an opportunity to take a broader, more detailed look at these issues and to address the challenges.

Youth justice is not an isolated term. There are complex, interwoven, underlying reasons why children and young people come into contact with the criminal justice system. These reasons are many and varied, from sociological and economic pressures to psychological factors. Recognising that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to these issues is a key aspect of the strategy's methodology.

While we still need to focus attention on children in contact with the justice system, we must also examine more closely why a proportion of young offenders go on to become adult offenders, and how this can be better addressed. Research shows strong links between youth offending and socioeconomic circumstances, as I indicated, as well as child and family welfare issues. Offending behaviour cannot be considered in isolation. A key focus of the youth justice strategy is considering how youth justice policy might be more closely aligned to other child and youth policies and to promotion of community and local development.

Ideally, we should be engaging young people at risk before they enter the justice system. Young people should have the benefit of a no-wrong door experience. If a family or a young person engages any service, there should also be accessible pathways to other services and supports that they might need. We have all heard the saying: "it takes a village to raise a child", and one of the key challenges we face at the moment is the fragmented delivery of services. The general scheme of the landmark policing, security and community safety Bill that the Minister for Justice published recently, recognises that community safety is not just the responsibility of An Garda Síochána alone, but of the wider community itself. This approach is also at the heart of the youth justice strategy, recognising that seeking positive outcomes for young people who interact with the justice system is a whole-of-government, and a whole-of-community responsibility. To complete the jigsaw, all the pieces in the puzzle must fit together. More, better services and better interagency co-operation at local level will deliver better, and more sustained outcomes.

The strategy includes consideration of the full range of issues connected to children and young people at risk of coming into contact with the criminal justice system. They include early intervention and preventative work, family support and diversion from crime, court process and facilities, supervision of offenders, detention, reintegration, and support post release.

The strategy strengthens and expands the role of the Garda youth diversion projects, GYDPs, which are a fundamental support to the operation of the statutory Garda diversion programme and which provide a vital ingredient in enhancing community policing partnerships. The strategy also promotes appropriate linkages and alignment with other community-based initiatives, including those supported by the Probation Service. Bringing the full range of relevant interventions together in a coherent and holistic response to youth crime will support the objective of diverting young people from crime and anti-social behaviour. It expands the remit of the GYDPs to provide a broader range of services for communities, families and children at risk, including family support and early intervention with children aged eight to 12 years, as well as developing enhanced approaches to engaging with children and young people that are harder to reach, who may have more entrenched patterns of offending.

A key priority in the strategy is tackling serious and ingrained patterns of offending. This means engaging more productively with the very small proportion of young people who are habitual offenders. That is complex and painstaking work and will require that we adopt a never-give-up approach to challenge and assist young people to turn their lives around.

There are currently 105 GYDPs nationally and the intention is to further develop this service so that it is available to every child in the State who could benefit from it, through an ongoing expansion of existing services and the foundation of new projects where necessary. Funding for GYDPs has increased every year since 2015. A total of €15.3 million was provided in 2019 and €15.6 million was provided in 2020. Some €18 million in funding has been provided for 2021, with a further allocation of €3 million for the Greentown pilot initiatives and the bail supervision scheme. These are cutting-edge measures to tackle serious offending.

The bail supervision scheme provides nationwide availability of its internationally recognised approach as an innovative programme for engaging with those with entrenched patterns of offending, supported by the research evidence into policy programmes and practice, REPPP, project in partnership with the University of Limerick. The scheme is designed to achieve bail compliance and the service is already being expanded beyond the initial pilot in Dublin to Cork and Limerick.

The Greentown initiative is a broad, community-based programme to support children, families and communities most affected by criminal networks, and its development is strongly supported by An Garda Síochána. The initiative won the European crime prevention award in 2020, having been selected ahead of competing projects from across the European Union. The Greentown report recommended the design of a programme to include interventions with children and their families to help them withstand the influence of criminal networks. The Greentown programme has been designed by the REPPP project team with the input of leading international expertise on crime and criminal networks, together with Irish scientific, policy and practice expertise in child protection and welfare, drugs and community development. Pilot applications of the Greentown programme, developed by the REPPP, commenced in two locations in 2020 and will run for three years. The learning from these pilots will then be incorporated into mainstream GYDP practice.

This specially-designed intervention programme was developed, as I have mentioned, with international expert advice, to tackle coercive control of children by groups which entraps them in offending situations. Funds are already available for the initial pilots from the Dormant Accounts Fund, with a total of €4.2 million allocated over three years. The implementation of the Greentown pilot programme is part of the strategic objectives of the youth justice strategy. This implementation process began with the establishment of the governance and strategy group and the youth justice oversight group. Both groups are chaired by my Department, which will provide oversight arrangements for youth justice initiatives to ensure that there is a cohesive response in practice to the needs of particular cohorts of children and particular communities.

The measures in the strategy are premised on the need to maximise opportunities to promote positive behavioural change and desistance from offending. This will require a sustained commitment to collaborative working between State agencies and community partners, as well as a commitment to prioritise resource allocation to address factors connected to early involvement in criminal activity and more serious offending patterns.

The strategy document, as published on my Department's website, includes a comprehensive implementation statement, laying out the key objectives and actions of the plan, and the lead agency for each deliverable. The strategy commits to the publication of an annual implementation update. However, I can share the following update of actions that are already in progress. Since the launch of the strategy in April, we have established dedicated inter-agency oversight and co-ordination groups at national level, led by my Department. We have established a stakeholder advisory group, which I chair, to ensure that we maintain a strong working relationship with the community sector as we go about implementing the strategy. We will shortly convene a REPPP advisory group, which will engage with the wider research community to inform implementation of the strategy and further development of youth justice policy.

Very shortly, we will open a public consultation process on approaches to diverting young adults in the 18 to 24 age group away from crime, with a view to developing more effective measures that will lead to behaviour change. The aim is to steer young adults away from repeated offending, and towards more positive life choices. Statistically, the 18 to 24 age group accounts for a significant volume of offending, so we need to engage more effectively to promote behaviour change as well as confronting the immediate effects of criminal acts. By the end of the year, we will open a detailed consultation with stakeholder groups on updating the Children Act to ensure that our legislative provisions on youth justice support effective systems based on the best available evidence.

We will not stop there. We protect victims and increase community safety by reducing future offending.

Prevention, early intervention and diversion are key elements of this approach. The youth justice strategy is a medium-term plan to tackle these challenges in a way that will lead to substantial and sustained improvement for both young people at risk of involvement in criminality and, importantly, the victims of crimes.

In line with a commitment in the programme for Government, an expert forum on antisocial behaviour, which I chair, has been established in the Department of Justice. This forum is considering the effectiveness of existing legislation and will seek to propose new ways forward, including new powers for An Garda Síochána, if required, and additional interventions to support parenting of offenders. The group includes representatives of the Department of Justice, An Garda Síochána, the Probation Service and a range of community and other stakeholders. The antisocial behaviour forum has already delivered a community-based approach to tackling the misuse of scramblers and similar vehicles, with almost €200,000 in funding secured. I have formed a subgroup of the forum to comprehensively examine issues surrounding knife crime and knife carrying, the first meeting of which was held on 20 September.

These are the practical responses that I want to encourage. The strength of a community-based response is that it is directly informed by an awareness of the root causes of criminality and antisocial behaviour, and how that manifests in local communities. I view the youth justice strategy as a mandate to lead to early intervention, diversion, family support and a whole range of supports for young people at risk of crime and antisocial behaviour, and to protect victims from crime. As Minister of State, I am determined that the Government will deliver on this. I thank the Ceann Comhairle. I will now hand over to the Minister of State, Deputy Hildegarde Naughton.

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