Madam, - This week, with much pomp and ceremony, the Minister for Youth Affairs, Síle de Valera, launched the long-awaited National Youth Work Development Plan 2003-2007. The plan attempts to address the significant gaps in providing vital services to young people and in doing so it can only be welcomed.
However, how precisely does the Minister plan to implement the plan, including improving youth work infrastructure and extending youth work programmes, when the financial resources to do so have not been given?
Only €120,000 of the estimated €35 million required is being provided. This leads me to conclude that the launch was nothing more than lip-service to those working in youth services whose job it will be to implement the various elements of the plan.
What is the point in spending seven years coming-up with a strategy to improve youth services, if the funding is not provided to make it happen? This Government has a penchant for much-hyped launches of initiatives but very little follow through.
It is condescending to young people to treat them in this way. The plan is indeed ambitious, wide-ranging, and attentive to many areas affecting the lives of young people, but in the absence of any economic backbone what use are its proposals?
Ms de Valera claims she will fight for increased resources for the plan. Did she never think that securing sufficient money first and then proceeding to implement the plan realistically would have been a better approach?
I can only conclude that the Government is once again trying to kid us by saying it wants to do something to improve public services but abjectly failing to put its money where its mouth is. - Yours, etc.,
REBECCA MOYNIHAN, National Chair, Labour Youth, Ely Place, Dublin 2.