March 2021 update – New case studies and service profiles published

We are pleased to announce the publication of some fantastic new case studies of restorative conferencing by Juvenile Liaison Officers as part of the Garda Youth Division Programme. This includes two cases of violence (one, two), as well as a case involving burglary and another of criminal damage and arson.

All case studies include perpetrators who were children at the time of the offence and whose restorative processes involved dialogue with their victims.

You can find additional case studies involving Gardaí at the bottom of the page under the restorative practices heading, including dialogue with Travellers and refugees, a community healing circle and a restorative youth programme to respond to road-related harms.

We are also grateful to Release and the Solas Project for their contributions to our mapping exercise as services using restorative approaches in their work. We are happy to add new service profiles at any time, and we will update the overviews and summary tables periodically to reflect any new additions.

New blogs and research summaries published

We’ve published several new posts in the last month. RJS4C Core Member Kieran O’Dwyer has written about the need for standards in restorative justice, while Joe Power from the Limerick Restorative Practices Project wrote about his use of restorative practices to support practitioners to keep connected during the pandemic. In addition, interns Kate Duffy, Triona Kenny and Grace Hughes wrote a fantastic review of The Meeting after watching it in their master’s module in restorative justice. Grace, Kate and Triona also summarised some Irish academic papers, focusing in turn on training for restorative justice practitioners, community courts and youth diversion.

Next steps for the website

Please continue to get in touch if you would like to contribute to the website. The next piece of work we want to do for the mapping exercise is to capture the work of individual practitioners who, independent of the services covered so far, facilitate RJ/RP in response to criminal offences (irrespective of whether there was a formal criminal justice response). If this is you, please email myself or Kieran and we will be in touch. To maximise anonymity, we aim to publish a single profile for individual practitioners, aggregating this work.

In addition, the next piece of work we want to do for the case studies section is to work with participants in restorative justice to develop case studies from the participant’s perspective. If this is you, or if you might be able to assist with this, please let us know!

Finally, we are always seeking further case studies, additions to the mapping exercise, authors for blogs, support in developing research summaries, and any other information you would like us to include in the website. Please also let us know if you would like your relevant work to feature in our Stakeholder Publications section.

Other information of interest

• The Criminal Justice Alliance in the UK has organised an upcoming event, Making a Restorative Criminal Justice System a Reality. See more here.
• The Department of Justice recently published this scoping report on community safety in Drogheda, which includes recommendations on the development of restorative justice and practices.
• The IPRT recently published this guest blog on sentencing guidelines, which includes a recommendation that restorative justice be built into the principles and purposes of sentencing in Ireland.
• The European Commission has invited EU States to develop restorative justice with young people as part of its new Strategy on the Rights of the Child.
• Finally, check out this fantastic podcast with Danielle Sered, the founder of a restorative justice programme in New York that focuses on serious violent offences.