Andrew Montague
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I hope it does.
Well, I think one of the things that you're talking there is about young children being drawn into criminality, and I think that's a huge problem.
And some of it's the unintended consequences of our drug laws that are so severe for people who are selling drugs so that the people involved in the drug trade have decided that the way around that is to involve young people who won't get those severe sentences.
So they've got a very big incentive to bring young people into the drug trade.
And one of the things we have is there's about 60 people between the age of 10 and 16 who are outside of school, who've been suspended or expelled for one reason or another.
And I think we need to have a programme specifically to deal with that.
And we have that in some other communities.
There's a programme in Finglas, there's a programme in other communities around the country, but we don't have a particular programme for those 60 young people who are outside of school in Ballymun.
We desperately need it.
That was one of the things I called for in the report five years ago, and there's been no progress on that.
We also have a huge shortage of social workers.
So that's been recognised by TUSLA.
They've allocated the positions, but they can't fill those positions because there's not enough social workers in the country.
So we were looking to have some senior positions created so there'd be more of an incentive for people to come and work in the area.
that's something the government could help us with.
So we need to tackle this by breaking that cycle, working with young people, working with parents to make sure that this cycle gets broken down because it's been entrenched since the 80s.
That's 40, 50 years it's been a problem in the area.
It is very hard to break down and we need help to break it down.