"I WILL fight to the last for young people who do not have the opportunity to realise their potential." So says Father Martin Clarke, who recently retired as director of the Catholic Youth Council (CYC) after 13 years of selflessly working to improve the lot of Dublin's disadvantaged youth.

The CYC, which was set ups in 1944, supports and services youth ministry and youth work in Dublin and the surrounding counties. Funded by the National Lottery, it runs regional youth services, youth leadership training courses, youth arts projects, outdoor pursuits programmes and disadvantaged youth projects.

Despite its meagre resources and heavy reliance on voluntary work, the CYC runs six residential facilities for youth groups in Co Wicklow, and one each in Dublin and Westmeath. In addition, it has eight regional offices in the greater Dublin area and runs youth information centres in Bray, Clondalkin and Dun Laoghaire.

"Any young person," says Clarke, "has potential. They need opportunities to develop and discover that potential. The CYC is about providing young people with these opportunities."

He says the "bias" of the CYC is towards "disadvantaged young people".

Young people in disadvantaged areas," he says, "are entitled to experience the opportunities that life offers. Because the inequalities and differences of opportunity in Dublin are so great - and have become worse during my 13 years as director of the CYC - that's why you find so many young people with drug, alcohol and crime problems.

"I believe that if you try to reduce the inequalities in society and provide disadvantaged young people with opportunities, they will become transformed. That is why youth work is so important. It provides young people with opportunities."

He maintains that money needs to be spent "in a big way" to provide opportunities for young people.

"If it's spent on youth services, the money will have a major impact in preventing today's young people from developing into tomorrow's criminals.

"In fact, it makes economic and social sense for the Government to become much more active in subsidising youth services."

CLARKE believes that youth work is perceived as "marginal" and "peripheral" compared with the "thought and effort" that goes into second and third-level education.

"It's worth pointing out," he says, "that young people spend more time out of school than in it. It's debatable, too, which environment provides greater instruction in life.

"As a result, more time and money should be invested in out-of-school activities for young people. If this is done, I think that this could have a major impact on many of the nasty social problems which are afflicting young people in the greater Dublin area.

"The problem is that youth services is not a major vote winner and, as a result, it's difficult to get its lack of funding on the wider public agenda. There's more talk these days about improving, corrective, rather than preventative, measures against en me. The former approach is far more expensive than the latter."

He says the CYC's resources are so small that the organisation is having problems attracting the right quality of professional people into youth work.

"Other closely related areas," he says, "such as social work and the probation service, have far greater resources than we do and, as a result, are attracting many top professionals."

He does accept that it's very difficult to quantify the results of youth work.

"By providing young people with opportunities," he says, "I think we in the CYC are in the business of planting seeds rather then reaping the harvest. But, if the CYC did not exist, it's safe to say that the quality of life for many young people in the greater Dublin area would be drastically diminished."

Clarke has been involved in the area of youth work for 30 years. His 13 years as director of the CYC provided him with "great joy and satisfaction". He is currently on sabbatical and, after a short break in the US early next year, he will return to parish duties somewhere in the Dublin area.