A number of questions concerned what ATD Fourth World does. It was set up to identify and reach the people who have the harshest experience of poverty. Our constant occupation is the people who are missing out, not only on an active and fulfilling life but on projects and programmes which seek to provide support. Who are the people not necessarily getting the benefits and educational supports to which they are entitled, or the backing to find somewhere secure to live and bring up their children?
Our constant occupation is to focus on people whose lives are especially difficult. These are the people who are hardest to reach and engage with. We see that as our principal responsibility and we would not be alone in having concerns for people like that. We try to join forces with people, other organisations, community groups, voluntary groups and sometimes people in statutory agencies who carry that concern for those who are marginalised.
All our work is based on our interaction with people who have the harshest experience of poverty and the most insecurities. We try to respond to the issues they tell us are most important in their lives. Everywhere we work, in Guatemala, Haiti, east New York or some of the slums in Paris, almost the first preoccupation of families is the education of the children. That is seen as the principal key to children having a different future to their parents.
ADT Fourth World provides, in different ways and in different places, educational support, simple street and education programmes that reach the children who have the greatest difficulty at school. We engage in those programmes with children's parents. In Ireland we are not doing that at the moment and our principal programme is what we call the cross-community meetings to which we have referred.
With the cross-community meetings, we prepare with other voluntary organisations, community groups, Traveller groups and people in contact with families in direct provision accommodation to bring together between 30 and 60 people who have a severe and difficult experience of poverty. The idea is not to inform people of their benefits, their rights or what they should or should not be doing but to enable them to come together and feel they belong somewhere. Most of the people my colleagues and I would be involved with would be those who do not feel they belong anywhere. They feel life is not for them and they do not have the opportunities which they expect everybody to have.
We bring people together and the most important aspect, we are told, is that people come into a room where they feel they belong and are respected. They feel nobody is going to ask them questions and to justify why they act in this way or that. It is a coming together.
The other aspect of the cross-community meetings is to enable people to express things that are important in their lives. It is to create times and spaces where the factors people carry in their lives, such as the difficulties, joys, successes, birthdays and achievements, can find an audience. During the year we have a theme, which might be the efforts we are making on behalf of our children or the efforts we are making to get people out of bed and breakfast accommodation into somewhere secure. It might be the relationship between poverty and human rights, where we think our human rights are being violated or are not being defended. These themes will be carried through the year and we share them in discussion form.
I ask Mr. Hogan to refer to those cross-community meetings because he has been an active supporter of them for many years.