Investment in Youth Work: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-15 ============================================================ Aubrey McCarthy (IND), University of Dublin I thank the Minister for being here. I also thank my Sinn Féin colleagues for tabling the motion. As Senator Scahill mentioned, earlier we attended the Youth Work Ireland and Roscommon Comhairle na nÓg briefing on the youth response to mental health issues. We met the most amazing people who are going to take on the world. It is fantastic that they have the opportunity to do so. On the other side of things, I recently attended a young offenders' prison. Unfortunately, I met young people who had come undone in life for one reason or another. I do not condone criminality in any way, but I do question whether the facilities those young people had in their environments means we let them down in that regard. I spoke to one individual who was a very well-known criminal in his area. I got talking to him about his life and about what led him to the situation he was in. It turns out he was seven years of age when his father was killed in a car accident. His mother used to drink a lot, and so she used to bring home people in the evening after the pub and then he would maybe get a bit of a battering. What he used to do was to wet the bed at night. The mother would check the bed, and if it was wet, she used to get his face and rub it around inside the toilet bowl. At seven years of age, he used to get into his school uniform, climb out the window when he heard the mother was coming home with whoever and he walked around the local town until school started the next morning. Now, we have a criminal in a detention facility, and this is the seven-year-old kid who never had an opportunity. That is why, with the organisation I am involved in, Tiglin, we have started youth cafes, which I have mentioned previously. For example, there is one in Greystones. It is a drop-in hub with all the supports for young people. We have put in pizza machines and barista machines and made it a welcoming environment. We have initiatives like crafts, a Garda diversion programme with Crosscare and so on. Whether young people are there to meet a new friend or simply to sit in a space, that cafe in Greystones provides a social alternative to the streets to a person who is perhaps marginalised. By providing a safe harbour like that, we are not just giving the young people something to do; we are giving them a sense of ownership over their community. We have also teamed up with It Takes a Village in Greystones. The Minister probably knows it. The lady who runs it, Rachel Harper, is on the board of Tiglin. She has created a framework that means we can work in conjunction with the likes of Tiglin's youth cafes. This means there is a practical guideline, on social media, phones, etc., for parents and young people. We have actively encouraged the young people to be a source of their own destination by getting involved in how social media should influence their lives. This has provided a real antidote to digital isolation and is giving people their own future into their hands. We often wait for a young person to feel isolated or disconnected, and the experience in the detention facility showed me that. Support for facilities like the youth cafes, Tiglin being an example, is proactive, community-based and a common-sense approach. Belvedere Youth Club in Dublin city centre works with over 400 young people weekly. Many of them come from a disadvantaged background of poverty, trauma and social exclusion. Its model focuses on building the same type of trust to include young people and build up a long-term relationship and life skills. The CEO of Belvedere Youth Club, Jenny Courtney, is kicking the ball out of the park when it comes to youth work and what that club is accomplishing. She is saying that many of the youth workers are dealing with complex issues. There are huge gaps in mental health support and family support for young people but they also do not have the funding or recognition to match what they need to do. Clearly, youth services are underfunded, workers are filling gaps left by statutory agencies and support for younger people is limited by wider family and community issues. The current funding models do not reflect the needs on the ground. We need more flexible policy whereby maybe we need to look at youth work for seven- to nine-year-olds rather than focusing on unsuitable childcare facilities. We also need to recognise youth work for what it is. The detention facility I visited would not have half the population in it if we got the youth work correct. Youth work is doing far more than it is funded or recognised for. I have seen that at first hand. Even in the rehabilitation centres I have through Tiglin, a lot of the people you chat or talk to will say their childhood was the basis for their trauma. All they needed was a facility or proper investment in youth care that would have given them an opportunity for a different life. Unless we get that right, young people will continue to fall through the cracks. We need to give young people more places like the Tiglin youth café in Greystones and like the Belvedere youth club in Dublin, more places for them to belong and where we can make a difference in their lives. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-15