Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Justice Plan 2022 commits to the implementation of the Government’s youth justice plan whose aims include preventing offending behaviour from occurring and diverting children and young adults who commit a crime away from further offending and involvement with the criminal justice system. The youth diversion projects, YDPs, are community-based projects that offer that vital support to the statutory Garda youth diversion programme. There are currently 105 YDPs across the State and the youth justice strategy commits to expanding the network to provide cover to every child and young person who needs to access their services. I see Deputy Stanton in the Chamber. He did a great amount of work in developing that strategy, work that is being carried on by my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy James Browne.

Youth justice services were allocated an additional €6.7 million in funding for 2022. The Minister of State, Deputy James Browne, announced on 22 June that more than 50 youth diversion projects will benefit from this additional funding. This funding has been provided to do the following: extend the boundaries of some of the YDPs to increase geographical coverage, as provided for in the youth justice strategy; increase funding to engage with the cohort of referrals who are harder to reach; provide additional early intervention supports; provide family supports to the relatives of those young people engaged with the YDPs; and further develop the Solas Project in Dublin.

It will be of interest to the Deputy that, of this €6.7 million, €780,000 has been set aside to establish a limited number of YDPs this year to cover geographical areas which cannot be covered sufficiently through the expansion of existing YDPs. The projects are funded through my Department but, as the Deputy will appreciate, the funding needs of individual YDPs differ based on a range of criteria such as the geographical area in which the project operates, the number of referrals to the YDP and the number of referrals who are in the hard-to-reach cohort, among other things. My Department offers funding appropriate to the needs of each YDP as determined by standard budgetary process. Funding fluctuates based upon the YDPs' determination of their needs and the budget available for youth justice services each year.

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