Justice In Ireland Research Articles

The demographics of energy and mobility poverty: Assessing equity and justice in Ireland, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates

Energy and mobility poverty limits people’s choices and opportunities and negatively impinges upon structural economic and social welfare patterns. It also hampers the ability of planners to implement more equitable and just decarbonization pathways. Research has revealed that climate policies have imposed a financial burden on low-income and other vulnerable groups by increasing food and energy prices, leading as well to global inequality. Similarly, researchers have warned that in developing countries, emission mitigation policies could increase poverty rates and even frustrate progress towards universal access to clean energy. This research explores whether low-income social groups experience a 'double energy vulnerability', a situation that simultaneously positions people at heightened risk of transport and energy poverty. We investigate this 'double vulnerability' through original data collection via three nationally representative surveys of Mexico (N = 1,205), the United Arab Emirates (N = 1,141), Ireland and Northern Ireland (N = 1,860). We draw from this original data to elaborate on the sociodemographic attributes, expenditure and behaviour emerging from energy and transport use, focusing on themes such as equity, behaviour and vulnerability. We propose energy and transport poverty indexes that allow us to summarize the key contributing factors to energy and transport poverty in the countries studied and uncover a strong correlation between these two salient forms of poverty. Our results suggest that energy and transport poverty are common issues regardless of the very different national, and even sub-national, contexts. We conclude that energy and transport poverty requires target policy interventions suitable for all segments of society, thus enabling contextually-tailored, just energy transitions.

Moving forward with Restorative Justice in Ireland

Moving forward with Restorative Justice in Ireland

A Reproductive Justice Approach to Abortion Access and Provision in Ireland after the Eighth Amendment

In this paper, I draw on ongoing ethnographic research on abortion care in Ireland. My research follows a reproductive justice framework to inquire whether pregnant people have the means and the accessibility to abortion care, and whether providers have the means to provide abortion care. I argue that my approach provides an innovative way of examining reproductive justice in Ireland through a feminist and intersectional lens. Moving away from the moral framing of abortion which has dominated the public construction of the issue in Ireland to date, the reframing of abortion as a reproductive justice opens up opportunities for a more balanced consideration of abortion provision as policy, practice and lived experience for both service users and service providers.

Doing Criminology and Criminal Justice in Ireland: Perspectives From a Peripheral Nation

This special issue invites authors engaged in cutting-edge research on crime and criminal justice in the Republic of Ireland to demonstrate Ireland’s global significance in these fields. Irish criminology is a burgeoning, diverse and outward-looking discipline, with a rising number of scholars making novel contributions to international debates on the theoretical and empirical study of crime and criminal justice. Its relatively unique position as both a Western European democracy and a post-colonial territory means that Ireland is of equal significance to the Global North and Global South. Moreover, this growth in local scholarship coincides with changes to criminal justice that should be of interest to advocates and analysts around the world. With articles on gendered historical abuses, public attitudes to policing, countering violent extremism, penal decision-making, penal politics, youth justice and organised crime, the issue brings this research to a global audience.

Insurgent Bodies in Cultural Responses to Reproductive Justice in Chile and Ireland

Transnational solidarity and comprehensive critiques of colonial legacies and patriarchal systems united the cultural responses created during the campaigns for reproductive justice in Ireland and Chile in 2018. This article considers the performance piece ‘Abortistas’ by the Yeguada Latinoamericana in Chile and the poem ‘Granuaile’ by Róisín Kelly in Ireland. Taking a decolonial feminist approach, this comparative study explores the interstices of art form and geopolitically distinct territories to examine how the creative practitioners' discursive construction of insurgent bodies aids critique of the lived experiences of women and pregnant people under the restrictive reproductive laws of both countries.

Challenges in the Future of Restorative Youth Justice in Ireland: Minimising Intervention, Maximising Participation

While restorative approaches encompass a small proportion of youth justice practices in Ireland, the new Youth Justice Strategy (2021–2027) aims to include more victims in restorative justice, expand family conferencing and train youth justice professionals in restorative practices. This article discusses the legal, policy and practice contexts of these developments, considering how Ireland has defined, used and researched restorative youth justice to date. It situates the ongoing efforts to meet victims’ and children’s needs, and to change criminal justice cultures, in the international criminological and legal literature on minimum intervention and child participation, analysing the possibilities and challenges facing restorative youth justice in Ireland.

Editors' Introduction: Women's Health and Reproductive Justice in Ireland

Editors' Introduction:Women's Health and Reproductive Justice in Ireland Cara Delay (bio) and Claire Bracken (bio) We began conceiving of this special issue in the heady weeks and months following the May 2018 vote to repeal the republic's antiabortion Eighth Amendment (1983). For just a moment all things seemed possible in terms of Irish women's health-care rights and realities. Even then, however, our training in reproductive justice—a framework created by American Black women encouraging us to move beyond a rights-based or legalistic framework to instead focus on intersectional access to women's bodily autonomy and the real-world contexts of reproduction (Ross, Radical Reproductive Justice; Ross, "What Is Reproductive Justice?"; Sister Song; Silliman et al.)—cautioned us against being overly optimistic. In working and living in the United States, we knew firsthand that legality often is less important to abortion access than a person's race or ethnicity, region, immigration status, and/or socioeconomic status.1 In late 2018, despite the referendum in the republic, the actual abortion legislation that would emerge was unclear. Moreover, Ireland's healthcare system, especially for women, had long been, as Jo Murphy-Lawless's work both here and previously has exposed, particularly dismal (Murphy-Lawless, "The Silencing of Women in Childbirth"; Murphy-Lawless, Reading Birth and Death). When limited legal abortion was introduced in the republic in early 2019, and, later that year, Northern Ireland took steps to decriminalize abortion, it became evident that actually providing abortion services island-wide would be a [End Page 5] complicated endeavor, one that necessitated a careful examination of the entire health-care system (Bloomer et al.). Thus a more general context of women's health in Ireland helps to elucidate and unpack the complexities and impact of the postrepeal moment. This is just one of the reasons that this special issue's substantial charting of the repeal campaign, momentum, and moment is placed alongside work that explores women's health in Ireland more generally, both past and present. Reproductive Justice and the Politics of Women's Health The legacies of the past—the shame conjoined with female sexuality, the "architecture of containment" (Smith), and "shame-industrial complex" (Hogan, Republic of Shame) that placed the "deviant" in institutions, and the reality that the state consistently "has protected its institutions rather than women themselves" (Murphy-Lawless in this issue)—not only troubled Irish women's access to legal abortion but also affected the health care that they received more generally, North and South. As several essays in this issue suggest, the island's history of institutionalization in Magdalen laundries, asylums, and mother-and-baby homes should also be read alongside the realities of inadequate health care for women and their oppressions by and through the medical establishment. Biopower, writes Abby Bender in this issue, "seeps into the other spaces of the nation." More specifically, the essays collated here encourage us to expand the notion of Smith's "architecture of containment" to include hospitals and indeed all health-care systems on the island.2 Murphy-Lawless's essay, for example, explains how the maternity-care system's neoliberal, "consumer-choice" worldviews and policies have resulted in not only deficient care but in some cases tragic and unnecessary maternal deaths. The Irish health-care system's neglect of and negligence toward women is also a key focus of Beth Sundstrom's article in this issue on the cervical-cancer prevention crisis in Ireland. So too is Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias's analysis of Celia de Fréine's poetry collection Blood Debt, an important work that stages a powerful reckoning of the medical establishment with respect to the hepatitis C scandal, which saw 1,600 women contract the virus through infected Anti-D [End Page 6] immunoglobulin in the 1970s and 1990s. Through the voice of a poetic speaker who was infected with hepatitis C, de Fréine's collection hauntingly explores the politics of women's embodiment, health, and trauma. This special issue of Éire-Ireland contains one of de Fréine's poems, "scéal scéil"/"hearsay," from Fiacha Fola (2004) and Blood Debts (2014), which...

"Nuns Don't Get Cervical Cancer": A Reproductive-Justice Approach to Understanding the Cervical-Cancer Prevention Crisis in Ireland

"Nuns Don't Get Cervical Cancer":A Reproductive-Justice Approach to Understanding the Cervical-Cancer Prevention Crisis in Ireland Beth Sundstrom (bio) From 2015 to 2018 scandals surrounding the human papilloma-virus (HPV) and cervical-cancer screening in the Republic of Ireland revealed serious deficiencies in the nation's health-care system. A misinformation campaign conducted in 2015 about the HPV vaccine resulted in a sharp decline in Irish vaccination levels, and in 2018 Ireland's CervicalCheck screening program was revealed to be flawed. In the Scally Report (2018), a scoping inquiry into the problems at CervicalCheck, key informants pointed to the significant gendered failings of the Irish health-care system, noting that "there is a history of looking at women's health services as being secondary," "women and women's rights are not taken seriously," and "paternalism is alive and well." The report identified the need for expert and committed attention to women's issues within the health-care system.1 Through an analysis of two scandals, the CervicalCheck screening program and the HPV-vaccination-misinformation campaign, this study investigates the cervical-cancer prevention crisis in Ireland through the lens of reproductive justice. HPV vaccination and cervical screening are health behaviors that illuminate the intersection of oppressions based on race, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, ability, [End Page 292] age, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.2 These categories are best analyzed through an approach that foregrounds concepts of reproductive justice, underscoring intersectional oppressions in women's health care and advocating for truth telling as resistance. Indeed, this article is among the first studies to apply a reproductive-justice approach to the issues surrounding cervical-cancer prevention and HPV vaccination. Both the CervicalCheck screening program and the misinformation campaign about HPV vaccinations were rooted in unethical communication by the state and nongovernmental actors. Unethical communication is ingrained in hegemonic, paternalistic sociopolitical practices that mirror narratives of oppression based on gender, ethnicity, and nationality.3 By contrast, ethical communication is "socially oriented, empathically situated, and responsive to others."4 In the midst of Ireland's cervical-cancer prevention crisis, women and public-health advocates confronted unethical communication through digital intersectional communication by engaging in storytelling and truth telling about health, illness, and the body to confront, challenge, and change Ireland's health-care system. By privileging the voices of activists and experts in this article, I argue that the ways in which women and public-health advocates confronted the cervical-cancer prevention crisis in Ireland may be understood as a triumph of truth telling over the failure of unethical communication. Methods This qualitative study was part of a larger research project investigating reproductive justice in Ireland. This project offers a novel multiple-methods approach incorporating a variety of sources. Through a Fulbright U.S. Scholars Grant, I completed document analysis, interviews with activists, and participant observation in Ireland from [End Page 293] September to December 2018. Developing convergence of multiple sources of evidence provided data triangulation. To strengthen the reliability of the study, I followed Yin's principles to maintain a chain of evidence and organize the data collected for the study into an evidentiary base that included documents, field notes, interview transcriptions, and narrative compilations.5 I received institutional review-board approval for this research. The document-analysis portion of the study includes an investigation of published documentation on cervical-cancer prevention, including archival records and physical artifacts as well as traditional and social media. Archival research was conducted at the Boole Library, University College Cork, in its archival holdings of the records of the Attic Press, which included materials from the Irish women's movement covering the 1970s to the 1990s. I also conducted qualitative in-depth interviews with fifteen Irish activists working on reproductive justice; the quotations from activists in this article come from these interviews. In order to maintain the confidentiality of participants, all quotes from these interviews are included anonymously in this article. I also completed more than twenty hours of informal meetings and participant observation with experts and activists in Ireland. I collected publicly accessible documents (e.g., websites, press releases, reports, tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, etc.) from twenty women's organizations. I...

Anna Liddiard’s Mount Leinster: an ecocritical reading

ABSTRACT Jane Susana Anna Liddiard was an Irish poet of the long eighteenth century whose life and work have received little scholarly attention. Her poetry, descriptive in nature, engages with a variety of subjects, including the landscape, abstract themes, and her affection for Ireland. Mount Leinster; or The Prospect: a poem, descriptive of Irish Scenery, though of disputed authorship, is perhaps Liddiard’s best work. Anonymously published in London, in the year of her death in 1819, the poem opens a panoramic view to the immediate landscape of Mount Leinster, providing a detailed account of drainage, tillage, and potato farming among other rural-agricultural practices, which unfolds into a strong criticism of British rule in Ireland. Written in the fashion of John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill,” Mount Leinster is a georgic-topographical poem that celebrates the Virgilian concept of labor improbus while criticising British imperialism and absentee landlordism for draining the land of its riches and impeding peace and justice in Ireland. This article is an attempt at shedding some light, however dim, on the figure of Anna Liddiard as an Irish poet and on her Mount Leinster as a vehicle of expression where the environment, literature, and social justice concerns meet in a poem.

Introduction: religion and political thought in Irish history

ABSTRACT Historians of nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland have often overlooked the role of ideas, preferring instead to focus on socio-economic, political and demographic factors. This is never more pronounced then when religion is addressed, and where the influence of religious thought and theology is often folded neatly away into issues of sectarian division and institutional power. This article introduces a collection of essays that attempt to rectify this issue, by drawing out some of their corresponding features and locating them in shared thematic debates. It sets out the historiographical background and examines Ireland’s tangential position within the wider field of intellectual history. Looking specifically at the ideologically symbiotic relationship between Catholic and republican political thought, it argues that developing forms of neo-Thomism which sought to establish a rights-based defence of individual personality against the perceived incursions of both the market and the state, aligned closely with popular radical and republican notions of economic value and justice in Ireland.

Editors' Introduction: Toward Transitional Justice in Ireland? Addressing Legacies of Harm

Editors' Introduction:Toward Transitional Justice in Ireland? Addressing Legacies of Harm Katherine O'Donnell (bio), Maeve O'Rourke (bio), and James M. Smith (bio) We were locked in and there was absolutely no way of getting out. We were made to work even if we were very ill, as I was. No excuses were ever accepted. [My son] was wrenched from my breast by one of the nuns while I was feeding him and taken away for adoption…. At no time did I give my consent to my son's adoption. I do not even know whether he was buried in a coffin…. There was never even a kind or sympathetic [word] spoken to me. I have found it incredibly difficult to access information about my childhood, my mother, and my siblings…. I was made to feel that I was a nuisance. Throughout the time I spent researching my birth family, I found the authorities from whom I sought assistance obstructive and unhelpful. Everyone has the right to know their name; the right to know their mother's name.1 [End Page 9] The testimony above comes from the CLANN report, an evidencegathering and advocacy project that facilitated survivor participation in the Republic of Ireland's ongoing Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters. We open this special issue of Éire-Ireland, entitled Toward Transitional Justice in Ireland? Addressing Legacies of Harm, with survivors' voices in order to acknowledge that the volume is concerned with the experience of hundreds of thousands of individuals who were born or grew up in Ireland, and of their families across multiple generations, who have been too frequently ignored. As academics and members of the Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR) advocacy group, for the past decade we have endeavored to place the motto of survivors, "nothing about us, without us," at the center of our research and activism on the subject of Ireland's class, race, disability, and gender-based abuses, so evident in Irish carceral institutions.2 We have attempted always to ensure that our work is led by survivors' experiences, perspectives, and critiques, and we have consciously continued such practice in putting this special issue and the conference that preceded it together. The essays in this collection originated in the conference Towards Transitional Justice: Recognition, Truth-Telling, and Institutional Abuse in Ireland, held at Boston College in early November 2018.3 Over two days scholars, policy-makers, abuse survivors, people affected by adoption, artists, and advocates came together to consider the nature of both the republic's and Northern Ireland's responses to Magdalen laundries, county homes, mother-and-baby homes, child residential institutions, child foster care, and the closed, secret, and coercive adoption system. What was clear at the conference, and what is evident from the contributions to this special issue, is that state-led efforts to address this legacy of abuse have been inadequate, and as a result the harms experienced are not "historical" but continuing. [End Page 10] Over the past twenty years the Irish state has initiated a plethora of inquiries into twentieth-century institutional and gender-based abuses, including the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (resulting in the so-called Ryan report, 2009), the Interdepartmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (resulting in the McAleese report, 2013), the Surgical Symphysiotomy Ex-Gratia Payment Scheme inquiry (resulting in the Harding Clark report, 2016), and the ongoing Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters (set to produce the Murphy report, forthcoming in 2020).4 However, these inquiries have frequently hampered or excluded other avenues of accountability. They have largely operated in private. Survivors and relatives of the deceased, and frequently also the police, have been prohibited from accessing the inquiries' archives. The director of public prosecutions brought charges against only one person in relation to the contents of the Ryan report.5 Neither the Magdalen laundries nor the mother-and-baby homes have been the subject of criminal cases. Survivors' access to the civil courts has been stymied by myriad procedural barriers, a lack of access to relevant evidence, and the unavailability...

Love's Pursuit: An Approach to Transitional Justice in Ireland

Love's Pursuit:An Approach to Transitional Justice in Ireland Katherine Zappone* (bio) Although commonly associated with processes emerging from conflict, transitional justice offers a way of thinking about the relationship between past, present, and future in Ireland today. When seen as an approach rather than a prescription, transitional justice encapsulates commitment to change, recognition of the indivisibility of past and present, and collective responsibility for past wrongs, present opportunities, and future transformation. Thus, while scholarly literature is now emerging on how the modalities of transitional justice might be adjusted and applied in the Irish context—including the other contributions to this special issue—I instead focus on how and why transitional justice offers new ways of thinking about what we conventionally call "the past," and about how love brings us to experience time in a redemptive fashion. Mindful of the grave violations of human rights and dignity and institutional wrongs done to children in Ireland, I come to this understanding not only as an official with ministerial responsibility but also as a feminist, an advocate for social justice, and a believer in the lasting efficacy of love. From these epistemological standpoints, I view transitional justice as an ethical imperative to deal with the injustice that characterized the first half century of the Irish state and continues to have ramifications in everyday lives today.1 [End Page 315] Given its provenance, the use of the term "transitional justice" to describe the task that now faces us is appropriate. It acknowledges the everyday brutality of the gender injustice that so many have experienced in Ireland and captures an aspiration to transform the country into a republic of substantive equality—while acknowledging the need for modalities of doing justice. This is why, in the first major contribution that I made to Dáil Éireann on the confirmed burial of children's remains in the grounds of a former mother-and-baby home in Tuam in March 2017,2 I signaled my commitment to proceeding with a transitional-justice approach to address Ireland's socalled "historical" abuses: We must listen to, record, and honor the truth of people's experiences. We must commit to the best of our ability to recognizing, recording, and making reparations for the truth…. As a feminist, Independent minister, and Irish woman, I feel a moral and ethical compulsion to reach beyond the legal questions of what happened in Tuam and elsewhere. That compulsion is driven by the need to arrive at this truth. It is only from acceptance of the truth that we can move past it, not by drawing a line under it but by highlighting it and recognizing it as part of our history and part of our national story…. Transitional justice puts survivors and victims at the heart of the process. It commits to pursuing justice through truth. It aims to achieve not only individual justice but also a wider societal transition from more repressive times in order to move from one era to another. Taking a transitional-justice approach means that we will find out and record the truth, ensure accountability, make reparation, undertake institutional reform, and achieve reconciliation.3 In this article I outline my vision for transitional justice in Ireland. This is a vision that, although informed by well-developed legal frameworks, is not solely determined by them. Instead I focus here [End Page 316] primarily on what might be imagined outside of legal and legalistic processes (including statutory or other inquiries). I want to offer here an approach that also emanates from an ethical vision grounded in a feminist commitment to love. In doing so, I gesture toward the desirability of pluralizing approaches without denying that adherence to formal legal processes is a critical part of the broader process of transitional justice. These legal processes are extensively considered in other contributions to this collection,4 and of course we must comply with our obligations under both international human-rights law and national law. We must learn from experiences in other jurisdictions, and we must take seriously the structures, expectations, and norms of doing transitional justice that have developed through international and comparative legal practice. However, what is needed first, I...

A Collective Restorative Justice Strategy for Ireland, 2019-2023

This article reproduces in abridged form a strategy for developing restorative justice in Ireland that emerged from a symposium held in March 2019 in Maynooth University and through subsequent consultations with participants and other interested parties. The purpose of the strategy is to help embed restorative justice and restorative practices within the Irish criminal justice system, building on existing practices and stimulating new work to fill gaps in policy and practice. The strategy initiative is part of a four-year project involving ten European jurisdictions, coordinated by Maynooth University, Restorative Justice Nederland and the European Forum for Restorative Justice. The key elements of the strategy and implementation steps are set our below; changes to the original document are limited to the omission of three appendices which provided information on the background to the project, a brief overview of the current state of play of the field in Ireland and the report of the March symposium. A full copy of the complete document can be accessed at http://www.probation.ie/EN/PB/WebPages/WP19000022

‘Respectable’ victims and safe solutions: the hidden politics of victimology?

This paper offers a critique of the dominance that victim discourse has come to occupy in debates about criminal justice in Ireland. It argues that such a discourse works with an unacceptably simplistic notion of the term ‘victim’, it can lead to reforms that result in revictimisation rather than victim empowerment and it distorts the experiences of many crime victims for whom victimisation is inconvenient rather than traumatic.

Mass Harm Litigation in Ireland and Multi-Party Actions

In recent years there have been a number of cases of mass harm in Ireland, including contaminated blood products, army deafness, asbestos-related ill health, Pyrite damage, the Volkswagen emissions scandal and the recent tracker mortgage rate abuse by banks. It is natural that victims of such mass harm might seek a legal remedy through the courts. Ireland, however, is a common law jurisdiction that does not yet have an effective mechanism for multi-party litigation of mass harm. This is despite recommendations in 2005 by the Irish Law Reform Commission (LRC) , Ireland’s principal public body for the investigation of law reform, for the introduction of a new litigation procedure in the form of a multi-party action (MPA). Instead, occasionally the courts use a confusing array of alternative methods in cases where an MPA mechanism would have had an obvious role. This paper explores the phenomenon of mass harm and the role multi-party actions as a potential route to redress for such harm. It gives an overview of the current Irish mechanisms for dealing with mass harm and is illustrated by a number of cases exemplifying the problems associated with mass harm litigation. The implications that these difficulties entail for access to justice in Ireland are evaluated and the practical aspects of this procedural lacuna are illustrated. These are explored in light of the LRC Report on multi party litigations and its recommendations. Finally, there is an examination of what may potentially lie ahead for multi-party litigation having regard to ongoing developments in other jurisdictions and European Union initiatives, together with the implications of the Aarhus Convention and related aspects of human rights. The paper concludes that optimum way of achieving collective redress requires a modern holisitic approach. This requires an integrated model comprising a combination of tools from a range of solutions including regulation, ADR, courts, ombudsmen, among others. It would appear that MPA litigation is necessary as a remedy of last resort to deal with mass harm where other techniques fail to deliver collective redress and where there is therefore no alternative to the courts.

Crime control, the security state and constitutional justice in Ireland

It is clear that Ireland has witnessed evidence of a ‘tooling up’ of the state in the fight against crime over the last two decades. Crime control analyses—often relying upon the use of stark juxtaposition—are very useful in describing this trend. They can, however, also conceal the complexities that exist underneath the illusory comfort of binary labels such as ‘crime control’, ‘security state’, ‘actuarial justice’ or ‘Rule by Law’ governance. In employing examples of recent case-law relating to terrorism and sexual offending, this article will argue that crime control analyses fail to properly account for particular legal liberal properties such as rights as trumps, deontological reasoning, fidelity to precedent, the coordinated and hierarchical features of law, and the last ‘authoritative voice’ possessed by the judiciary in dispute resolution. These properties continue to possess institutional and epistemic authority in Ireland, and need to be written in to any ‘history of the present’ of the Irish criminal justice system.

Slow and steady progress: developing restorative justice in the Republic of Ireland

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the development of restorative justice in Ireland since the publication of the Final Report of the National Commission on Restorative Justice in 2009. It argues that although the development of restorative justice in Ireland has progressed slowly, it has also progressed steadily. There are still obstacles in the path of developing a restorative justice framework on a national level for both adult and young offenders, however, all signs indicate that these obstacles can and will be overcome in the future. Design/methodology/approach – The research for this paper was primarily a review of the very limited literature on restorative justice in Ireland. Findings – The development of restorative justice in Ireland has undergone slow and steady progress over the last decade. While a great deal of work is still needed before restorative justice can be rolled out nationally, the progress that has been made suggests that there is a real future for restorative justice in Ireland. Research limitations/implications – Statistics on restorative justice in Ireland are very limited and referral numbers are still lower than what they should be. Practical implications – Any research on restorative justice in Ireland will highlight the fact that more research and analysis is needed, especially in terms of measuring recidivism of offenders who take part in restorative practices. Originality/value – This paper adds to the growing literature on restorative justice in Ireland.

Diverging or Emerging from Law? The Practice of Youth Justice in Ireland

The Children Act 2001 is the statutory framework for youth justice in Ireland. Fully in force since 2007, aspects of the Act appear to be unimplemented while in other areas practice has diverged from the Act’s provisions. Three areas are used to show where youth justice practice has diverged from the legislation: the operation of the Children Court; the use of community sanctions and the use of family conferences and restorative justice. This article studies the disconnect between the law and practice in these three areas, offers some explanation as to why it has occurred and proposes some solutions for how it might be addressed.

Young People’s Offending Careers and Criminal Justice Contact: A Case for Social Justice

This article draws on an analysis of young people’s offending careers. The research was initiated against a backdrop of changing discourse around youth justice in Ireland with a shift towards prevention of offending and diversion from the criminal justice system. Locating crime and criminal justice contact within a biographical context indicated that participants’ offending, and lives generally, was bound up in marginalized transitions to adulthood, and embedded within social and economic environments characterized by high deprivation. The findings support a further shift in focus towards addressing social injustice as a necessary prerequisite to tackle the origins of youth offending.

Creating Utopia through Real Struggle: A Case Study of the Rialto Community Housing Campaign

The article examines the potential of a symbiotic strategy to transform capitalism in a more socialist direction through a case study of a community campaign to address substandard housing conditions resulting from neoliberal property-based regeneration policies and austerity. The case study contrasts the empowerment of disadvantaged groups with dominant partnership approaches to achieving social justice in Ireland. It concludes that while such human rights approaches offer the potential to achieve improvements in people's living conditions, their prospect for symbiotic transformation is limited, unless they link to wider social and political forces challenging structural inequalities, including class and gender.