Mr. Harry Maguire:

I will start with how the restorative justice concept arose. As with all conflict situations, be it the conflict in the North or the conflict in our personal lives, we are challenged by those. We are challenged in a way that requires us to form resolutions. As many members will be aware from having lived through it and been part of the vast changes that have been aspects of the process across the island, we had the big political high wire acts in terms of getting the parties around the table, the peace process, mediation and negotiations.

There had to be peace-building in some form on the ground. At that stage there were still very fraught relationships across the political and statutory world. The issue also arose of informal policing initiatives being delivered by armed groups. That was our starting point - how we could change what was happening on the ground and make interventions on the issue of punishment violence. When we started out on that journey, we thought it would be the sole focus of restorative justice practice because we were challenging armed groups and saying what was happening was not good enough and needed to change. We were supported by the leadership of these armed groups in doing that work. We were also saying our communities had an experience of policing which, to say the least, had not been positive. We needed to develop a third way, a new way, a much more dynamic way to make the interventions we needed to make. It was about peace-building on the ground, but it was practical and focused. Both projects started in 1998 and up to 2006 we made upwards of 600 interventions. The figures have been fully evaluated. It was a huge piece of work in the context of the peace process and what it meant. We were challenging mindsets, a key part of being involved in conflict resolution. One of the outcomes was that there was an uptake of our services as we started to do the work which we did not expect or legislate for. We were quickly inundated with a range of community conflicts which were not particular to the North. One could pick a city anywhere in Ireland and I could go through a range of community disputes that would be present. We were inundated with such disputes, ranging from disputes between neighbours to much more serious forms of criminality.

The CRJI group has projects in Belfast, Derry, Newry and Armagh, while Northern Ireland Alternatives has projects across Belfast city - north, east, south and west - and in Bangor, north County Down. We were initially trained, supported and evaluated by Professor Harry Mika who was based in a university in Michigan. He was a professor of criminology and has written extensively on the use of the restorative justice measures in a global sense and equally in the context of the position in the North.

Our key areas of work involved working to deal with neighbourhood disputes, many of which can escalate, become nasty and extend to various forms of criminality if they are not dealt with early. We work with young people in an educative way. We work within the education system. We try to reintegrate young people who have slipped through back into the school system. We try to engage schools, young people and families on how to maintain the relationship and see it through to the end of the school process. We support victims of crime and anti-social behaviour, a group of people who are very often lost in the bigger scheme of things. We deliver training which we have developed ourselves. It is very much focused within the communities in which we work. It is designed to tackle the issues peculiar to these communities. By training people in the techniques and approaches of restorative justice we build a capacity and mindset in terms of how we engage and do things. Community empowerment is at the centre of our approach. The problems that occur and the issues that arise are not being transported from another planet; they are part of the lives of the people concerned and a part of their value system. We encourage them to become part of the process in order to resolve issues.

Ours is a government-accredited organisation. I invite Ms Watters to explain the accreditation process to the committee.