Talking to teens:  If you live in Dublin, are aged between 12 and 18, and your parents are breaking up, you can get in touch with the Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service and expect to get help within eight weeks.

It is a critical service for a growing group of people at a defining juncture in their lives.

At present, if you live outside Dublin you might be able to access Teen Between counselling through your local National Youth Federation Office. Because counselling services are thin on the ground beyond the capital, Teen Between could be the only option.

However, this free service could soon be withdrawn from all centres outside Dublin. Despite commendations from the Department of Social and Family Affairs and the Family Support Agency, the funding stream has been severely curtailed and the regional network of Teen Between volunteers may be withdrawn for the sake of 75,000, according to the chief executive of the MRCS, Elizabeth Everett.

"We joined forces with the National Youth Federation in 1997 to train regional counsellors to provide teen counselling outside Dublin," says Everett. "There was a huge demand for the service from parents, teachers and social workers many calls came from outside of Dublin and we felt that people in the country badly needed their own services."

MRCS counsellors trained 31 voluntary Teen Between counsellors selected by the regional offices of the National Youth Federation. Hundreds of teens across the State have since received counselling .

These teens and their families had nowhere else to turn, says Helen Butler, a volunteer in Galway. "The availability of counselling services for families in Galway has been so valuable, not just for the teens themselves but for the wider family, the other children, the schools and the communities in which these teenagers live."

Despite the fulsome endorsement of the Family Support Agency, set up under the auspices of the Department of Social and Family Affairs to support projects such as Teen Between, the funding levels for the project have repeatedly fallen short of need. The programme is operated by volunteers, and it costs in the region of 60,000 a year to operate a Statewide network. However, consistent underfunding has starved the project and now a once-off outlay of 75,000 is needed to stop it from going under, according to Everett.

"We have appealed to the Department, we have scraped together what funds we can from charities and other agencies, we have sold off anything we own to keep the project going, but we are out of ideas. Without the funding that we were expecting from the Department over the past few years, this project is weeks away from closure. Disappointment is not the word for what we feel."

Louise Holden