The Joint committee held two Committee hearings, and some stakeholders provided written submissions alongside their opening statements. During both sessions and throughout the submissions the same themes emerged across almost all contributions. Young people are facing multiple crises in relation to poverty, intergenerational trauma, the cost-of-living crisis, homelessness, and lack of access to mental health support, and it is often youth workers working directly with young people who are left to pick up the pieces. The Committee heard that there is a lack of national direction in youth work and an urgent need for a national framework and re-evaluation of the funding mechanisms as the current models are restricting the work of youth workers. A consistent message was one of young people in crisis, instability in the youth sector, challenges in retaining staff due to poor pay conditions and a workforce that fails to reflect the diversity of the population in Ireland. Youth workers have provided practical answers and solutions to these challenges. This report aims to summarise the discussions at both Committee meetings and the submissions made by all organisations that participated and provide a list of recommendations. It was noted during the sessions that recommendations from reports can sometimes go unimplemented and it is the responsibility of the Committee to ensure this does not happen.

Some of the key recommendations included in the report are:

• The Committee recommends that every young person in Ireland should have access to local, accessible, high-quality youth work services, delivered by paid professionals.
• The Committee recommends that youth work should be subject to an all-of-Government approach, to ensure that the youth sector receives adequate attention and focus, at national level.
• The Committee recommends the implementation of multi-annual budgeting and investment for the youth sector, to allow medium and longer-term programming with greater confidence.
• The Committee recommends that the Department embed and prioritise detached street outreach work in future policies relating to young people and youth work. Additional investment in detached street work should be separate to existing programmes, to aid the roll-out of detached street programmes around the county.
• The Committee recommends less restrictive percentage ratios in respect of how youth workers can spend their time, to ensure that youth workers feel empowered to meet the needs of the young people they are working with, often being led by the creative and responsive nature of youth work.
• The Committee recommends that specific supports are developed to support young people aged 18-24 when engaging with adult services, to ensure a continuum of care.
• The Committee calls for the formalisation of the provision of youth services with young people aged 6 to 10, establishing this in future policy and funding schemes.
• The Committee recommends that the youth work sector should be embedded as a key partner in addressing the social and economic structural inequalities facing young people in Ireland, highlighted within the National Policy Framework for Children and Young People, and the National Youth Strategy.
• The Committee calls on the Department to prioritise the recognition and professionalisation of youth work. Increased funding and pay parity are essential to this, but so too is the provision of continuous professional development.
• The Committee recommends that a specific policy framework should be developed for the youth work sector, to harness and protect its distinctive contribution to working with young people as well as to support youth workers and service providers.

P.13 3. Drug use in young people
Stakeholders spoke of young people being disconnected from their communities, and sometimes families, through drug use and ensuing engagement with the criminal justice system. They described how further marginalised these young people are due to a lack of services designed to engage with them in a way that meets their needs. Undiagnosed mental health issues and neurodivergence, such as ADHD, were named as something youth workers were seeing as a reason that some young people were engaging in drug use, with young people communicating to outreach workers that they take drugs “just to feel normal” or to self-medicate. The Committee heard of a young person aged 11 who is using cannabis daily and has disengaged from school. The stakeholder spoke of how youth services need to be able to engage young people before the age of ten, as often by ten years old there are already significant challenges in meeting a young person’s needs that should have begun to be addressed earlier. The Committee heard how significant resources are invested in a criminal justice response to this behaviour and not enough is invested in youth work which has been shown to have positive outcomes for young people.