Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Apologies for cutting the Senator short. I wish to commend my colleague, Senator Seery Kearney, on putting forward this motion, and on her hard work and commitment in this area and her empathy for young people. I feel it too. I feel it for my own children who are now aged six and eight. There is a massive about of mother's guilt for when we were both working full-time and they were knocking around the house by themselves. They have grown up in many ways over the past year, but in other ways they have also remained very innocent. It has been a really hard year for them.

Not every kid that hangs around a street corner is a hooligan. I fear that we are heading in that direction at the moment because of a lack of things to do for young people. I was one of those kids that hung around the street corner when I had nothing to do and I do not think I turned into a hooligan. However, we must find a way to safeguard and protect them from antisocial behaviour, both getting into it and being victims of it, and ensuring they enjoy their summer. We must also have policing where necessary, too. I welcome the youth justice strategy that was announced. It has gone down very well locally.

I wrote to the Minister's Department last week. We do need a plan for the summer holidays for our youth. The Minister invested in a capital fund in August 2020 to the tune of €2 million to prepare the likes of Foróige to work online and to support youth services. Foróige did an incredible job and brought everything online and still managed to help vulnerable children. Now we need to see additional funding for this summer. At the moment, the youth clubs are working with groups of 15 young people outside, and they are hanging around in places like car parks. We could invest in universal services and also in premises for this summer. I wonder if places like Blanchardstown Shopping Centre would be a good places for kids to meet when the schools shut.

The year 2021 will see funding of €67 million, which is an increase of 8%, but some areas are still falling behind in universal services. I know the Minister is aware this is the case in areas like Ongar, Tyrrelstown and Carpenterstown. I am helping Foróige to set up a youth club in Luttrellstown at the moment, but that is using funds that are being diverted from elsewhere. Therefore, it would be great to see more universal services.

I particularly want to acknowledge the parents of children who go to special schools and note how much I regret that we could not open the schools sooner for them. I sincerely hope the July provision programme will deliver. Central to that is that schools that have not opened under July provision will open this year. That is something we will have to watch.

One of the areas we absolutely have to deliver on concerns disability services and our child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS. The problem was acute before Covid, but now they are seeing numbers on the ground that they have never experienced before. Psychologist staffing levels are a major issue, and yet there are obvious barriers to getting them on the front line. One of them is the inequitable funding for trainee doctorates. For example, if you study as a clinical psychologist at doctorate level, you will be paid a salary of €33,000 for the placement and will receive 60% of your funding, whereas if you go down the route of counselling and education, you pay €15,000 per year for three years and you do not get paid for the work placement.They put hundreds of hours into their placements. That is also on the back of approximately ten years of studying. We are putting their welfare behind that of everybody else. A healthy system would actually look after everyone. That is just one of the barriers.

There are not enough doctoral places. We must look at the role of assistant psychologists and make sure they are funded. We have to look at the new therapy posts, of which there were 100 in 2020 and 100 in 2021. How many of them are child psychologists? There are others but that is just at the tip of the iceberg for how we can look at the entire system in giving children access to educational psychologists.