James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Probation Service will soon publish a three-year restorative justice action plan aimed at promoting greater awareness and supporting increased use right across the system. This plan will detail how the Probation Service will further drive the integration of restorative justice into all its services. Restorative justice is really important. We did some very good work back in the 1990s in this area, but it probably has not been expanded in the way we would have hoped since then. That is one of the reasons the Minister and I got the Department to prepare and publish the policy paper I mentioned. There is huge capacity for restorative justice, building on an awful lot of the good work that has been done in other areas of the country in restorative justice. An example is the Cornmarket Project in my county of Wexford, but there is also the restorative justice services in Dublin, Meath, Wicklow and Kildare. There is Restorative Justice in the Community in Tipperary, Laois, Offaly and Westmeath, Le Chéile in Limerick, Cork and Clare and Tuam Community Training Centre covering Galway, Mayo and Roscommon. As I said, many of these were set up in the 1990s and there is a lot of good practice in them. We want to start taking some of the those best practices and seeing them expanded.

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