Ms Dearbhla Holohan:

Our expert by experience model is based on using the expertise young people have, particularly young people who have been through our services and through similar experiences. It is not us as youth workers or managers imposing our idea of what peace-building should be or what the programme should look like.

It is very much coming from the young people's point of view. Those expert-by-experience young people are very close in age to the participants. We have found that trying to provide that sort of vehicle for them to facilitate work with other young people is much more meaningful in terms of the programme content and what they get out of it because they feel it is their programme and there is a real sense of ownership. They can also articulate their feelings about what is going on in the wider world and relate it much more clearly to those expert-by-experience volunteers. It is also something that is aspirational for young people because they want to get through the programme so they can then play that role for other young people. They are not the young people who would usually be asked to be the school prefect or to get into those sorts of roles. They are not used to getting asked to hold these sorts of positions of responsibility. It can be particularly hard to get young males to step forward because it takes a lot for them to stand up and say they have some expertise they can offer their peers.

It is so important to look for those opportunities, especially ones that are not just about us continuing to churn out the same peacebuilding programmes again and again. They may have been great when I was a young person going to them, but the world has changed so much now. Senator Currie's question was about social media, which has changed where young people get their views from so much. It is not all about what they hear at home around the dinner table. It is also what they hear from many unregulated sources. Some of that work can be around talking to young people, not always through structured debate, but through conversations over a cup of tea about what is going on for them now, or that thing they read on Facebook the previous night, and picking apart what it actually means. How do they know it is true? That is how a lot of myths are perpetuated around sectarianism and racism and so on.

In general, we need to look for more and more forums where young people can feel they have a place in their communities. A major part of the programme is around community volunteering. We do not say to young people we have arranged for them all to go to pick litter on Wednesday night, for example. They come to us, say they have had a look in the area and have seen some areas that might need brightening up, or they think they could raise some money for a particular project. They come up with the idea of what they want to do to generate a community project and, as far as possible, go about leading that with support from youth workers. It is all about youth workers as facilitators of the process as opposed to imposing what we think.