M9 Fallout, Youth Intervention & Budget 2027

Christina Finn, political editor of the Journal.

Thank you for joining us this evening.

Good evening.

There is a sense that the government has been trying to look for something to do to respond to this, but none of what it's come up with so far at least seems to have caught the imagination or seems to be able to be a viable pursuit.

Yeah, I think whoever got in touch there talking about parental responsibility is something that we've heard a lot from other TDs and politicians in the last two weeks.

We've had a number of people within the Dáil calling for just that, more legislation, more fines on parents, when actually we already have legislation on the books, the Children's Act, which does have a number of mechanisms in terms of different punishments, if that's what you want to call it, for parents' parental supervision orders.

There's fines and compensation orders that can be made.

But I was speaking to Jim O'Callaghan last week on our podcast, The Candidate, and he was saying when a child comes before a judge with his family there, Those options are available, of course, but every situation is different.

Sometimes detention is warranted and a lot of times sometimes families are even asking for their child to be put into detention such that they cannot control them anymore.

But then you have to look at the family circumstances, as Pat mentioned, in terms of you know, domestic violence or drug addiction, is there money there even for the fines? Are there other children within that household that would suffer if a large substantial fine was imposed on it and what sort of knock-on impacts would that have? Long story

short, it's tricky to find something that works in every case.

Yeah, I think sometimes it can be easy to come up with one line that lets us fine everyone and put the parents in jail or put the kids in jail.

A lot more times these situations seem to be a lot more complex.

I think what we've seen now from the government in terms of the steps that they want to take next is the youth diversion programmes.

Like Jim O'Callaghan was saying, thousands of teenagers go through the youth diversion programme, which allows them to avoid criminality on their record if they go through and are successful in avoiding crime.

He said there are success stories there.

And obviously we've heard a lot that there's, you know, a thousand teenagers that just don't want to be involved in that and really are going to have no respect for

authority.

In some ways it nearly seemed like a sort of a fatalist argument.

You could understand, yes, if there's children that just don't want to interact with the system or just don't listen to anyone in authority, whether it's the parents of the state, there isn't much you can do.

But it did seem odd that a minister responsible who's trying to project authority and get to the bottom of this would simply be saying...

If 1,000 kids won't listen to us, what are we going to do?

Yeah, and I think when you think about it, 1,000 kids in the entire country, it seems kind of like a relatively small number if you really wanted to get a handle on it.

There was talk from him that he wanted to have a specialist youth diversion programme targeted at those specific children and teenagers.

The point he was kind of making is at the end of it, the threat of jail would be there if they didn't go through the entire programme, that if you don't do X, Y and Z, you're going into detention.