Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and I support the motion. It is time that we looked at how we deal with minor offences. I am someone who has briefly practised in the District Court in that area and found that one does not need to send people to prison to educate them about crime. All one needs to do is attend the District Court on any morning where one will see people learning the ropes and how to go further down that road to crime. I have large numbers of young people congregate there making friends with people who are involved in crime. It would be much better to move young people away from that scenario.

A number of years ago I was involved in a project. I was chairman of a board of directors and was asked by a community group to help out in a centre that was attended by 50 young people who had dropped out of the education system. The vast majority of them had been referred to the place by the Garda who had gotten involved at a very early stage because they wanted to make sure that the young people did not go down the road of crime. It was interesting when I worked with the young people to discover their difficulties; the reason they had taken the wrong route was due to a lack of literacy and numeracy skills. The project cost €650,000 on average and we had full-time teachers plus support staff. We also made interesting discoveries when we carried out a survey on a group of young people who had left the centre five years earlier. We commenced the project to see what progress they had made after we helped them onto the first step of the ladder. We found that 70% of the people who had attended the centre five years earlier were in full-time employment which would not have been the case but for early intervention by community gardaí and their work with young people. Their intervention led to these young people discovering a better way of doing things.

Unfortunately we discovered that a large number of the young people had come from families where neither the father nor grandfather had ever worked. Those young people got involved and changed their work culture for themselves. Their success is attributable to the people who worked with them, the gardaí and the local community. The project had originally been established on a voluntary basis by local community people who felt a need to approach the problem from a different angle. Likewise with community courts we must work towards a solution and ensure that people do not go deeper into the criminal world. People working together is part of the solution. A local community can benefit from minor offences being dealt with appropriately and not in the abstract manner that the District Court tends to use to deal with the matter.

I welcome the decision by the Minister to establish a pilot project. Perhaps we might look at establishing a similar project in Cork city.

Senator Norris mentioned that poor areas have not benefited from Government funding over the past number of years but I think that they have.

We introduced a reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio in the primary schools, from 27-28 students to one teacher to 15 students to one, and that had a benefit. Likewise, there are new projects now being put in place in a number of areas around the country where it is about working with parents and children together and ensuring that the parents get the benefit of the education system that the they did not get in their younger years. Those are the policies that can make a significant contribution to reducing the number getting involved in crime. There have been many projects over the past few years and we should not let them go unrecognised.

I welcome this proposal. The Minister is correct to set up the pilot project, but he should not confine it to Dublin. We should also look at setting up one or two projects in other parts of the country as well.