Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. This debate was postponed on a number of occasions and it is good to see it finally take place. I have copies of a number of speeches the Minister has made on various matters relating to children and youth affairs. Will she give feedback to her administrators? The font is so small that one need a magnifying glass to read them. If she could, for future reference, increase the font size, it would be helpful.

I welcome the opportunity to debate these issues. The Minister mentioned the relationship between the justice system and the care system.

I have mentioned to the Minister on a number of occasions that I am very concerned about the number of young people who have experienced both the care system and the prison system. There is a relationship between the number of children who experience the care system, end up in the prison system and experience homelessness. I know that in the past we have discussed the potential need for legislative change to underpin aftercare services in child care legislation and ask the Minister to make this a priority. It is an issue, particularly when there is an increasing number presenting as homeless; therefore, it should be taken into account.

A second issue relates to St. Patrick's Institution. We all welcome the announcement that no child under 18 years will be detained there, as well as the closure of the institution, following a report from the Inspector of Prisons. To be fair, there were numerous reports on it during the years. Ms Emily Logan, a former ombudsman, expressed very severe concerns about its operation. Although it is welcome that we are moving forward on this issue, no more than we require a banking inquiry to examine what went wrong in this country with the collapse of the banking system and the damage done to the economy as a result, we cannot close St. Patrick's Institution without having a full inquiry into what went on inside it. I am very worried that in the past it dealt with people who went through the criminal process and were rendered and treated as less than human beings. No closure of the institution will be complete in the eyes of those who experienced it without a full inquiry into what happened in it. There is enough evidence to indicate there was gross disrespect for their human dignity and human rights.

The Minister has mentioned that there have been extensive improvements from the amount of data available. It is very much welcome that we have improved data which show the experiences of young people. The report of the Oireachtas Library and Research Service published today indicates that the published youth detention data in Ireland are lacking and that as such it was very difficult for it to produce a report on the basis of the data available. It is worrying that we do not have good quality data available. Having said that, the headline figures for the detention of young people indicate that we are moving in the right direction, about which there is no doubt. The number of defendants subject to detention orders made by the Children Court in 2012 was 187 and in 2011, 263. We are aware that boys are more often committed to prison than girls. The number of boys aged between 16 and 17 years committed to prison in 2011 was 231 and in 2012, 144. The data are included in the statistical annex to Ireland's consolidated third and fourth reports to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the annual report of the Irish Prison Service for 2012. We are moving in the right direction, but the headline figure of 144 boys being committed to prison in 2012 is shocking. I note the Minister's statement in this regard and we all respect the thrust of policy - avoiding detention at all costs.

In the past I have argued for broader consideration of the causes of crime. We are all familiar with the issues which give rise to crime which cannot be seen in a vacuum. Young people who offend often come from the worst economic black spots in Dublin city, for example, as mentioned by the previous Governor of Mountjoy Prison.

It is no accident that the people presenting in the judicial system and who are remanded in prison are there because to a large extent they suffer from economic deprivation and poverty. There is no getting away from that. In that respect, again perhaps I will take the opportunity when the Minister is before us to compliment the work of Youth Work Ireland and Foróige in particular in terms of the community-based projects that are being delivered in the poorest communities in this country. If there is any room for manoeuvre as Ireland moves into a positive economic trajectory, I urge her to put more money into the kind of programmes that are delivered to young people on the ground in this country. They are not glamorous. A lot of them are not particularly expensive but they are critical in terms of empowering young people and giving them a real sense of what they can give to their local communities and to society.

It is important also to remind ourselves from an academic point of view that avoiding detention is not just some sort of luxury that is either available to us or not. The academic thinking on all of this is very straightforward. Young people who are detained are singled out from the rest of society. Their criminal status is accentuated. There is accompanying social rebuke, which has unanticipated consequences in terms of undermining other conforming influences in their lives and pushing them into criminal careers. A significant amount of research exists. Studies have been done by McAra and McVie, for example, which confirm that more and more intensive forms of contact with the criminal justice system inevitably damage young people and damage their chances of leaving the criminal system. It is important too to bear in mind that there is a vast amount of research that proves that we cannot treat this as a luxury. Detention within the criminal system for a young person does lead them, practically inevitably, to a life of crime.

I make a plea for funding for groups such as Foróige. The work they do on the ground and what they achieve in terms of their engagement with young people is something on which we cannot put a price. There are statistics on the cost-benefit of engaging with young people from €7 to €1 depending on the age of the child. Sometimes it is easy to draw conclusions based on the money spent on young children as opposed to older children but we are not taking into account the cost to society of criminality, the ultimate cost of detention and some of the other issues down the track in terms of mental health, ongoing homelessness and prison costs.