Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity strategies we urgently need to use to divert young people from criminal activity. Children who are lured into criminal activity should still be afforded the opportunity to reach their full potential. Our young people are our future and we must invest in them. Unfortunately, some have been lured into criminality. I have seen that happen in my own city. They look around their communities and see disadvantage. They are longing for the instant material benefits a life of criminality can bring. They want to buy the nice watch, the nice jacket, expensive trainers and have the status they believe their involvement in criminal activities brings.

Unfortunately, this is true in my home city of Limerick, as it is in other parts of the State. In some areas, drug dealers and senior gang members use teenagers on bikes, horses and e-scooters to deliver drugs and receive payments for that. Teenagers are vulnerable to being groomed into the criminal lifestyle. When we consider that 18- to 25-year-olds are the largest group in our prisons, it is clear early intervention is crucial.

The intervention should come from knowing your community garda but there are far too few of them and far too many communities where community garda numbers have been decimated by successive Governments. Criminality thrives in areas with deprivation and that lack sports complexes, youth clubs and facilities. The investment we make now in our young people in our communities will pay dividends in the future. We need to give these children a sense of hope and the opportunity to achieve. That involves access to education, job opportunities and the prospect of owning their own homes. The drug dealers who corrupt these children are a plague on our communities. They are anti-community. They offer nothing positive and are a scourge on the hard-working people on these local estates. It is the hard-working people in these areas that keep the communities going despite the presence of these criminals. Too often our working-class communities have been let down by successive Governments through lack of funding and lack of support for community gardaí. There is simply not enough of them. Young people in these communities are being left behind as a result.

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