Ms Aoife Bairéad:

I have worked with communities in the south inner city for most of my adult life and I am always taken aback by how little the positive resources and strengths of those communities seem to be recognised or even whether people are interested in them. There is an extraordinary lack of curiosity as to why so many people in those communities continue to do well, survive and keep their families as healthy as possible. They are seen as problems, which are then individualised into drugs, poverty, housing or education. The fact that they all culminate in the same area is recognised but there is nothing beyond that. Not only is there a lack of recognition but there is also a lack of respect for how extraordinary the people we work with are. Most of the people who work in drug task force services are from those communities and are dedicated to strengthening those communities. While some of them end up in places like here to represent those communities elsewhere, they are on the ground doing work all day every day to make their communities better. As for how this is not given a curiosity, it should not simply be a curiosity as to how you get into the problematic areas; it should be about how do you get to be you and how do you get to be that strong and capable.

I have always struggled with that top-down approach when national strategies are brought in or even city-led strategies. There never seems to be somebody checking to see whether it will work in the community and asking how to can be made better. Portugal has been cited. My fear is that we would take lock, stock and barrel any approach without going to the communities we work in and asking them to tell us how it will work there, because they are the experts. The idea we do not see communities as experts in themselves is one of the fundamental problems as to why those changes have not been made.