Mr. Harry Maguire:

To clarify the dates, CRJI received accreditation slightly later than NIA because of political relationships and circumstances in the negotiations on policing affecting the Nationalist or republican community. We gained accreditation a couple of years later in 2007, but it had nothing to do with a lack of will.

Ms Watters has outlined the need to have the community centrally involved in dealing with the issues that affect communities.

We engage with our current partners on protocol work, which is to do with accreditation and government protocol, how we deal with reports of crime to my offices, and how that is engaged with by the police and then the Public Prosecution Service, PPS. At that stage it has the potential to come back into the community based restorative justice schemes as community disposals. There are further developments in that process. We are talking to the police and other partners in the criminal justice system about how we can change that and make it a much more accessible system. We are talking about entering into another pilot scheme with them. We are also looking at how we can bring these approaches into the Prison Service not only for the prisoners but for everyone in the prison service to create better relationships and develop much more productive ways of working with people with a view to breaking the cycle, particularly around young people.

We have healthy relationships with the Department for Social Development, which is one of our major funders, and that is an ongoing process. We engage with a set of housing providers from the Northern Ireland Housing Executive through to the private sector. We have projects with Belfast Trust or social services, as we call them in the North. They are based around young people, vulnerable families and supporting families with issues. We are funded and have partnership projects with Belfast City Council. From a Northern Ireland Alternatives perspective that is around Street by Street and developing that type of youth initiative.

In terms of community restorative justice, CRJ, we deal with Traveller issues of which the council is very supportive. Also in terms of CRJ we have been working with Louth County Council which is looking at marginalised communities, with a particular focus on people who have come to our country who have not been able to engage with the community or the statutory sector.

We work closely with the probation service in the North. That is a project which threw up many questions around the Northern Ireland Prison Service such as whether we are reintegrating offenders back into the community. From a community perspective many of the issues we have to deal with are not the issues that result in people going to prison. They are a different set of circumstances which need resolution. We are both members of the Restorative Justice Forum. We have held an inaugural meeting on an all-island basis to look at the possibility of having an all-island conference to examine the restorative practices taking place throughout this island because they are happening throughout the island.

In terms of the future, we want to work with each other on a cross-community basis. We want to see a coming together in terms of the restorative principles, values and practice. We see that coming together as being part of the wider project.

This opportunity to open up a dialogue and engagement with the committee is welcome In the not-too-distant future I will be doing some training in a school not too far from here in the Liberties. I spoke at a recent event in the South organised by a community development association.

Developing joint projects both on a cross-community basis but also on an all-island basis is something to which we would be open because the issues facing working class communities, although not solely working class communities, across this island, be it in Cork, Limerick, Galway, Derry or Belfast, are the same. One of the standard questions we asked when we set out on this journey and went into the sometimes smoky rooms in Belfast - at that stage people could still smoke indoors - to talk with communities and armed groups which were feeling the brunt of crime, criminality and anti-social behaviour, as members are aware from their own experience, was about the causes and drivers of crime. We got the same answer on the Shankill Road and on the Falls Road. I got the same answer when I asked that question in Cork. The answer was unemployment, poverty, social deprivation and generations of young people who went through an education system and came out the other end not being able to read or write. It was ill-health, a breakdown in family structures and a breakdown of some of the institutions of the State in terms of value systems that drove much of the activity we encountered at the sharp end.

In a Northern sense the next question we had to ask in those smoky rooms was whether it was possible to shoot poverty, and the answer was "No". A much more normal term to use when we are still asking those questions is whether it is possible to put poverty, unemployment or educational under-achievement in prison, and it is not possible. As a society that is what we have tried to do. We need to understand that and examine how we can reverse that and grapple with some of the issues on a strategic level, how we can start to change our society, and how we can change the cultures predominant within this sphere.

One of the aspects that jumped out at me when we started to engage in the education field by delivering these programmes and projects within a school context was that dealing with the school disciplinary system was similar to dealing with the criminal justice system because as a society we look at the rules, the rules that have been broken, who has broken them, and the way we sanction those who have broken the rules. Those are the three aspects of this issue as we see it. From a restorative practice point of view we look at what has happened, who has been harmed by what has happened, and how we can repair that harm. That is a completely different way of looking at the issue and is one which taps into all of these causes and drivers. As a society, that is what we need to engage with. I will hand over to Ms Deborah Watters who will close the presentation.