In July 2025, the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality, Norma Foley, announced three initiatives to support prevention and early intervention programmes for children and young people in Ireland.¹ They are being funded through the What Works prevention and early intervention initiative. As with previous activities under the What Works initiative, there are synergies with drug prevention activities.

What Works

What Works: Sharing Knowledge, Improving Children’s Futures is an initiative of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA) that was launched in June 2019. It was a rebrand of the Quality and Capacity Building Initiative that the DCYA had been developing since 2016. What Works seeks to embed and enhance knowledge and quality in prevention and early intervention activities in children and young people’s policy, service provision, and practice.

The Safe futures: Identifying promising approaches, opportunities and barriers for interventions designed to prevent youth recruitment and participation in European drug markets projects was launched in June 2025.^1,2 It is a 2-year project that aims to identify effective ways to prevent young people’s involvement in European drug markets.

Project team

The project is a collaboration between the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA) and the Research Evidence into Policy, Programmes and Practice (REPPP) team at the University of Limerick.