6 Country Reports on Youth Work - Jugendpolitik in Europa

from the street culture that defines the leisure and recreational pursuits of young people in
Ireland. Traditional forms of youth work such as youth clubs or scouting are being severely
challenged by young people’s desire for freedom and autonomy. There is a connecting
thread in the interviews with experts that points the way forward though engagement with the
ideas that young people have about the modern world. Institutions like Dáil na nÓg are seen
as not connecting with young people, because they are adult ideas taken from the adult
world. But there is also a sense that a paradigm shift is beginning to take place in youth work
practice. Youth cafés are emerging as a symbol of youth work’s desire to modernise its
practice. Professionalisation also has a major influence on modernisation. Irish youth work,
nonetheless, remains a quintessentially volunteer service with all the strengths and
limitations that entails.
The future will be exciting and productive if the Irish state is prepared to invest in its youth
population by expanding its youth service. It appears that it is beginning to do so, but there is
a lot more to do before there is an adequate youth service. Overall, young people need to be
heard in all their diversity. They are citizens with full rights, and they represent Ireland’s
future. There can be no more important public policy issue than the future of a nation’s young
people. Civil society, in the shape of a committed voluntary sector, took responsibility for
youth work during the 20 th century. Hopefully, the state will need to be more actively engaged
during the 21 st century.
11.6 Italy
The experts interviewed in Italy were
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� a person in charge of the school statistics from the Department of Education,
� two members of local associations,
� a ECAP employee,
� a youth desk information employee,
� a person in charge of Eurodesk, and
� a person in charge of the local employment centre.
Different issues arose from the semi-structured interviews.
A topic outlined by all interviewees is that data on youth work according to the indicators
provided by the project is not available. However, this lack of data is a general problem; it is
due to incomplete information technology systems as well as to the fact that although a
culture of data collection is rapidly gaining ground, it still does not cover all public and private
sectors. At the moment, a lot seems to be happening in the area of youth work at different
levels: there are many initiatives and many ongoing public and private programmes, but at
this stage there is little available data to give more information about them.