IN SPITE of recent prosperity, 25 per cent of Irish people still live in poverty, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, president of Focus Point Ireland, said yesterday. She was speaking at a conference on young people at risk.
In one area of Dublin where Focus Point recently carried out research, Sister Stanislaus said, there were 1,000 drug users in a population of 32,000. In another area of the capital, 79 young people were out of home or at risk of homelessness in a four week period more than the total number of children out of home in all of Dublin in 1985.
Sister Stanislaus was speaking at a conference in Dublin organised by OEIL, described as a European network of projects helping young people integrate into society.
The president of OEIL, Mr Charles Antoine Arnaud, told the conference that today's generation of young people is silent and lonely. "When they are written about in the papers, it's usually about drop outs with low levels of skill, hardly ever about what it is like to be young in the 1990s."
Mr Arnaud said we read about young people as violent and troublesome. "They are perpetrators of violence certainly, but they are also victims of violence, and they are growing up in a world where they are constantly exposed to violence in the newspapers, on television, and where they are deprived of education and jobs. That is a form of violence also."
Sister Stanislaus called for the setting up of a single government department with responsibility for the care of children unable to remain in their own homes.