Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Some of us were very lucky to play football, very badly, in Mountjoy Prison recently. I would probably hate to see rap sheets of the guys we played against. I also hate to point out that we lost very badly - twice. The fact is we were probably dealing with people who are very different from when they were charged and when they were involved in criminality probably many years beforehand. What we need to see with regard to youth diversion are projects that are a means and way we can absolutely divert people away from what will be very costly to them to their victims, and to society as a whole. I have seen the huge work done by the High Voltage Project, which now has an early intervention piece, that operates out of a house in Cox's Demesne, Dundalk and also the teen youth diversion project operating out of the Muirhevnamor Community Youth Project. It is like all of these projects. We talk about brilliant people who are doing brilliant work but it is about the resources and at some stage we are coming too late to the problem.

The Minister of State spoke earlier about criminality and then he started speaking about drugs. Unfortunately for a significant part of the country, it is all about drugs. As I said to the Minister, there needs to be a real conversation around the issues out there, in particular issues that are happening in working-class areas where it is a hell of a lot worse as regards drug debt intimidation and other issues which are impacted more by having fewer gardaí.

People from soccer teams have come to me suggesting that we need to increase pressure in the next while because we just have too many bad examples of what are reasonably sized drug dealers, who, as I said last week, at times have had houses seized by CAB, which has carried out some serious operations against them. However, they are still in operation and they provide the bad example, particularly in these working-class areas that are suffering high levels of deprivation.

We need to get real and we will engage with the Minister of State. However, there has to be a two-way engagement, a real conversation and a real plan. That means we need to go out there and assess the problem that we are dealing with because I do not think anyone has been serious about this to date.

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