Anne Rabbitte (Fianna Fail)

I thank the Minister of State for being here and I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this. I thank Senator Flynn for her personal contribution and for sharing her lived experience with us. It is important for us all to acknowledge that lived experience.

I was doing research in advance of coming in here and I agree with Senator Gallagher; the Minister of State's opening statement was very welcome. Like many colleagues, I was not aware of the Greentown project. It is based on pillars, facts and evidence. My question is: when can we see more of these rolled out?

When researching for a debate like this, one would check how many youth diversion programmes there are around the country and I would always check how many there are in Galway first. There are three in Galway. When I researched Cork I saw there are nine. As they are both similar-sized counties which are rural with a city; why does Cork have nine and Galway have three?

What I like about the Greentown project is that it is evidence based. It is about breaking that link between the child at the centre of the family or community and that continuous cycle of crime, the dependance on it and the sense that it is the only way out.

One of the biggest parts we have to put into our youth diversion projects is to bring people back into education. If you are educated you can build a way out of that world. Our youth development workers are working hard on the ground but I often hear they are finding it hard to link back into education and back into the secondary schools. In the past, youth project workers were able to go in and work with the secondary schools from where a young person had fallen out or had been given time out. Now it is like expulsion on the first go and there is no route back in. That is very unfortunate and it makes the youth projects really hard and it makes it hard for our social workers. In Ballinasloe we have the junction project.Senator Gareth Scahill and I know well about that project. Martin Dolphin is leading it out down there, a good Portumna man. He is in charge of it. Christy Browne, the Garda member, did so much work in recent years. It is great to see funding in the past five years has gone from €18 million to €36 million. Christy used to be involved with the Courts Service and had to take some of the offerings from the box to give to the youth projects to ensure they could deliver some of their functions. One of the biggest things I picked up from talking to Martin recently was that sometimes they need to go on excursions. They need to be taken out of their environment and given the opportunity to be children, play and enjoy a game of football without feeling the peer pressure they might feel in that environment.

If the Minister of State brings the energy he brought to his speech to funding for more Greentown projects, I would certainly welcome it. I would plead for one in the likes of Galway. I commend the youth workers working in the youth projects and the gardaí who support them and do phenomenal work on it. At the same time, we need to have ETBs and education more on the pitch because we do not all learn the same way. Some people may never have got a diagnosis of dyslexia or ADHD. Everybody might respond a little bit differently. How can we retrain people? We can do it with people with additional needs. We should also be able to do it with young people falling out of the education system and finding themselves in a life of crime.