There have been many questions with a lot of content. I will deal with some of them and, again, Ms Watters can give a view, as she always does so well.
On feedback from communities, we live in communities and feedback sometimes is given on the street corner or while going to the shop. It happens as people come into our offices and because we hold community-based meetings. We structure ourselves in such a way that we have multi-agency meetings which take place in communities and at which we have present all of the relevant statutory stakeholders and residents associations. We also are open and public about our work. From a community justice perspective, when the decision was first taken to engage with the police on an official basis - I acknowledge we had engaged on some particular cases beforehand - one decision we took was that a police officer who came to our office in uniform would be more than welcome. We would not be telling him or her what way and how he or she should dress. In fact, we were quite happy to see police officers come in uniform because that was a statement within our community to that what we were doing was right. It was a statement that we would engage and would do so in a public manner. Again, this was about community consultation and communication.
The rural and urban question always comes up. It is for rural and urban communities to decide in what shape or how such processes are embedded in their own communities. This is about engagement, training and so on. In a sense, the areas in which we work are city-based, but this is because it is where much of the crime and other antisocial behaviour occurs. However, we also work in Newry and south Armagh, as well as in stretches and swathes of north Armagh and into Armagh city and so on. However, we have a project that operates in the rural end of the constituency. I note Mr. Conor Murphy, MP, MLA, is present and he probably has experience of that project which is both urban and rural. While we have been asked by rural communities and other urban communities to develop projects in their communities or to come and help, we lack the resources to do so. I have made presentations in Galway, Sligo, Kerry, Cork, Limerick and Dublin, to name a few venues in a southern context. However, Community Restorative Justice Ireland, CRJI, does not have the resources to put in place the people and processes required. I hope from this type of engagement and dialogue we can start to talk about this.
Mandatory reporting is an issue and will continue to be so for the next few years until we can get to a situation where, in a Northern sense, there is some discretion in and around the issue of policing. I refer to how we actually engage with young people who have broken the law, particularly in some low level offences. The question is whether they need to be included in the system. While there are political questions associated with this in terms of police accountability, from a restorative prospective, I suggest such discretion is needed and that a debate and discussion in this regard are required. We are upfront about how we deal with people. We tell them that if they report crime, that is, if they make us aware of a crime and give us anything we need, we have a mandatory, statutory obligation to report it to the police. This leads me to a question regarding perceptions. While it would have been a perception that we were not part of the system, we have turned a corner in that regard. We are now are very much perceived to be part of the criminal justice family or the statutory world. Uniquely, however, we have also retained our community status and while this always will be a challenge, we have been able to so do. In this context, we are designated as community-based restorative justice groups, of which we are proud. I acknowledge it has been Northern-centric, but that is because the dynamics of the conflict forced people into looking at new ways. We are open to engaging with people across the island in developing such practices and approaches.
Legislators are a major factor, a point raised by Deputy Martin Ferris. We need legislation and need to be able to state, within the society in which we operate, that this is part of the system and can be resourced as part of it. For instance, we sat through a presentation delivered by a guy called Mr. Brian Steele, the point person for the Scottish Executive which has legislated for restorative justice practices to be piloted within a number of schools in Scotland. Those involved seek to develop this approach within the Scottish education system. Although the respective projects are at least five years ahead of the Scottish experience, we will lose this very quickly because we have not been legislated for and this system will not be resourced. However, both projects have been heavily involved in the education sector.
We hear the saying "game changers". We think restorative practices being embedded within the education sector from a very early age would be a game changer for society across the island. It is the way to go and if we can keep that in mind it would be a positive outcome today.
There are always people who want to go back to the past. I am sure if one walks through Dublin today one will see someone with a Teddy-Boy haircut. They might even have a pair of dark glasses in their pocket and will be dressed like a Teddy Boy because they liked the 1950s and have stayed there. That is part of society. Part of leadership in society is to demonstrate that it is better to be in the present, the here and now, and that we are going to make the future even better. That responsibility is on all of us.
Speaking from a republican perspective, I do not see too many young people wanting to go back to the past. I was at a dissident parade quite recently and it featured people aged 30 something upwards. It was largely people in their 50s who are not going to take anybody anywhere.
There is definitely a sign of contentment there and I do not think they are really going to go back to the past. I see young people moving beyond all of this. I am originally from north Belfast so I am quite regularly over in that end of town, which takes me through the interface areas. I can see young boys and girls starting to meet again at the interfaces, having the type of normal conversations that one would want ordinary young people to be engaged in. I have great faith in where our youth will take us if we give them the right context and motivation. I will allow Ms Watters to make her own comments on these questions.
The allocation of funding is an issue, which is why talking to this committee is so useful. The committee can make an impact on where that funding goes. Ms Watters will provide the figures on what it costs to keep a person in prison. Let us change that. We talk about moving from a punitive to a restorative paradigm. In other words, we must change how we look at these things. Let us start to embrace that change, but we need to do it together. We will find that it will free up funding, thus allowing us to reallocate funding. If we start to do what we need to do in the education system, it will create high achievers rather than under-achievers. It will also diminish the burn-out rate for teachers so they will become less stressed and more productive. The world will then be our oyster. They employ these employment practices in the private sector.
When we went into schools first they had codes of conduct and disciplinary procedures. We have encouraged them to develop relationship procedures because if we have strong relationships it is the key to freeing up resources. Rather than spending time fighting each other, we will spend time collaborating with each other. I know that is not a very good word in Ireland sometimes, but collaboration is the key. If we get people working together and building the relationships we need to build, it frees up a lot of the resources we have spoken about. It will allow us to deliver so much.
