At a recent conference, advocates highlighted another route to justice for victims seeking solace

While her son’s killer was behind bars, an overpowering feeling began to take hold of Janet O’Brien, she says.

She wanted to meet the man face to face.

People in her life tried to talk her out of it, she says, but she knew it was something she had to do.

At that point, she had never heard of restorative justice but that is exactly what she was chasing.

Restorative justice is a voluntary process which may involve a victim and an offender communicating, either in person, or by letters, helped along by an independent facilitator, like a probation officer, or community worker.

Other approaches can also be taken if the victim does not wish to be directly involved. 

For victims, it can be a chance to be heard, or to try to get answers. For offenders, it can be a chance to take responsibility, and make amends. 

Only “a fraction of 1% of the criminal justice caseload” is referred to restorative justice programmes, according to the advocacy organisation Restorative Justice Ireland.

But those numbers are growing, according to a September report from the organisation. In 2024, “we identified an overall total of 1,140 restorative justice referrals in 2024, an increase of 50% from an overall total of 759 referrals in 2023”, the report says.

“Continued growth in service provision and referrals are both important steps towards a system in which every person may decide whether restorative justice is right for them,” it says.

The 2025 programme for government pledges to “Continue to roll out nationally the voluntary restorative justice programme”.

O’Brien says she wants more people to know that the route is there.

Remembering a son

When he was just eight years old, Luke O’Reilly became the man of the house, says O’Brien, his mother.

The relationship between his parents had collapsed, she says. 

After that, Luke was always looking out for his younger brother and sister, and his mammy, she says. “He was very, very family orientated.”

Although a good kid, he could be a “bit of a divil” in school, she says. He was eventually diagnosed with dyslexia and Asperger syndrome.

He also battled on and off with depression, which started around first or second year in school, she says. “We were together an awful lot because of all those things.”

“If you met him, nobody would ever know. He was always trying to cheer people up. I think he was very aware of feeling how he felt, that he wanted everybody else to be smiling,” O’Brien says.

After falling into a cycle of drug and alcohol misuse, Luke entered a 12-week rehab programme in late 2016.

The programme was a huge success, O’Brien says. It seemed to be an important turning point.

Although he had been working in various retail jobs after his Leaving Cert, he had a new sense of ambition and began a third-level accountancy course in September 2017.

His proud mother was over the moon, she says.

On Halloween night 2017, Luke was out socialising with his mother and younger sister, Alison. “I always think that gives a good indication as to the kind of kid he was,” O’Brien says.

However, when they got home, his friends were texting him to join them on their night out. So, he went.

That would be the last time O’Brien would speak to her son.

On his way home that night along Old Blessington Road in Tallaght, Luke was the victim of a one punch attack by a young man he knew.

“He came up behind him, hit him from the side. Luke didn't actually see him coming. Luke went straight down and obviously hit his head the wrong way,” O’Brien says.

Her son suffered a catastrophic brain injury and would never regain consciousness.

Luke died two weeks later in Beaumont Hospital. He was 20 years old.

“That was everything gone, everything taken away from him and from us,” says O’Brien.

His assailant, who was on bail for another violent offence at the time of the attack, would be sentenced to five years – eventually serving 3 years 8 months in prison, O’Brien says.

Restorative justice

Restorative justice gives people who have caused harm an opportunity to understand the impact of their actions, says Rachel Lillis, national lead for the Restorative Justice and Victims Services Unit (RJVSU) at the Probation Service.

Through the process, they may take responsibility and address the harm done to victims, families, and communities, she says. 

The justice system can be perpetrator-focused, with victims often left feeling voiceless in the whole ordeal, Lillis said by phone on 22 October.

Restorative justice is more victim-centred, she says, giving them a better chance to express themselves, discuss their experiences, seek answers, and convey how their ordeal has impacted them.

It can look different for every case, she says.

The process will often start with restorative inquiry, which, Lillis says, are the foundational questions of restorative justice.

Questions, she says, like: What happened? What were you thinking at the time? What have you been thinking since? Who was harmed? How could you repair that harm?

The answer to that last question on how to repair harm can be different for everybody, she says.

O’Brien says she knew exactly what she wanted from the man who killed her son, when they met.

She wanted to show him a photo of Luke when he was in hospital, fighting for his life, she says. She wanted to express just how deeply his actions had impacted her life, her family and community.

Most of all though, she wanted to know that when he was released, there would be no more violence, she says.

She knew Luke’s friends were angry, as was his younger brother. And she knew the young man had a violent history, before the night that he hit Luke.

“Even back at Luke's funeral, in my eulogy, I was always trying to say to everybody – no retaliation, no fighting back,” says O’Brien.

And as time went by, the fear that she would hear of him acting the same way after he was released became too great, she says.

When she got in touch with the prison to ask if she could see him, it was explained to her that she couldn’t just arrive and visit him.

But they put her in touch with the Probation Service, she says. “That led me to what is restorative justice, but I wasn't aware of it.”

Initially, O’Brien says she thought she would dedicate herself to fighting for higher sentences for one-punch attacks. Others in her life thought the sentence for Luke’s killer was disgraceful, she says.

Ultimately, she says, she realised that nothing was going to bring her son home to her.

“Even to lock him away forever, what was that doing? That would be two lives lost,” she says.

After their meeting, she was satisfied that the man who killed her son was really going to try and better himself.

He had worked on anger management in prison, she says. “He finished his carpentry apprenticeship. He actually is one of the ones that did try and use it to turn his life around.”

Her grief will never heal, she says. But restorative justice gave her a comfort knowing that a potential circle of violence had been prevented.  

“I’m glad I got the opportunity to do it. To hope that you did make a difference,” she says.

From the other side

Growing up in London with two Irish parents, Killian Hardy says he was raised to consider himself Irish.

So, at the age of 18 he applied to join the Irish Army, and finally moved to Co. Cork at 19, in late 2020.

He was happy to find that he loved life in Cork and the army, he says. His career in the Defence Forces was moving well, he said by phone on Tuesday.

In January 2023, his younger brother came to visit him from England.

At the end of a night out, three young men were giving his brother some hassle in the chipper over his English accent, Hardy says. 

Things were turning aggressive, he says. Thinking in the moment that he was acting in defence of his brother, Hardy struck each of the three men with one punch, he says.

The three men were knocked unconscious.

Two came back around quite quickly, while one was out for 18 minutes. Killian says he put him in the recovery position, and waited for the authorities.

As he was being arrested, he saw the third man eventually come back around and get up, he says.

The sense of relief at that sight was extraordinary, Hardy says.

His immediate feeling in the aftermath of the altercation however was, he says, “Why is this happening to me?”

That feeling went on for a while, he says.

He couldn’t really come to terms with his own responsibility for having hit the three men, he says

Over the following two years, Hardy would make 20 court appearances, he says.

He says the judge saw the CCTV footage of the incident, and acknowledged his behaviour directly after the assaults – that Hardy didn’t hit them again once they were down, and had put one in the recovery position.

After getting to know him, the Probation Service told the court in its report that he was low risk to reoffend, he says.

At that point, the judge suggested restorative justice.

He hadn’t heard of it and some legal professionals he spoke to at the time weren’t exactly sure what it meant either, he says.

The process

There are different models of approach to restorative justice, says Lillis, at the Probation Service.

It can involve victim empathy programmes, letters of apology, or voluntary work in the community, she says. 

It could also involve bespoke reparations, shuttle mediation – when a victim may wish to communicate through a third party – and victim and offender meetings, she says.

The ideal scenario, she says, is when there can be that meeting between a victim and the offender.

This requires the informed consent of both parties, she says. That’s an important detail – a judge cannot make either side partake in restorative justice, she says, it must be voluntary.

Consent can be withdrawn at any moment, she says.

In the case of O’Brien and her son’s attacker, both parties wanted to be involved.

Someone from the Probation Service, Áine Morris, would call to her roughly once a month for about six months, she says.

They would have long conversations building up to the meeting, she says, preparing exactly what she wanted to say and happen. “It was a lot of work.”

The same was happening for the other party, in prison.

She remembers people telling her that if they were in her shoes they wouldn’t trust themselves to be in the room with their son’s killer. “As if they love their child more than I love mine.”

A lot of her family even couldn’t understand why she was doing it, she says.

Eventually her restorative justice meeting lasted about an hour, she says. She had written a letter that she read to him. He then said his part, she says, followed by a conversation.

In the criminal justice process, O’Brien says she had no voice. There in that meeting, finally, she did.

During his process, Hardy would meet with Simon Keating, the restorative justice coordinator with Le Chéile, a Community Based Organisation in Limerick tasked with overseeing restorative justice.

Restorative justice is not a soft sanction, says Lillis, at the Probation Service.

Hardy says he learned this to be true himself, as he went through the process of cultivating his own sense of empathy, truly reckoning with the harm he had done.

It is not simply putting your hands up and saying “mea culpa”, he says. “It’s a lot of psychological stuff.”

There are steps and questionnaires, he says, asking “weird questions”.

Hardy remembers being given a scenario with a list of people, including a 40-year-old pastor and a six-year-old asylum seeker, among others. 

There are 15 people looking for a place on a lifeboat, but you have to choose nine to save. Every answer has to be explained.

It’s a gradual process, he says. 

Keating wouldn’t feed him answers, but as things moved along over several months and he got the sense Hardy was understanding more and more, Keating would open up more also.

Eventually, Hardy was back before the judge, who he describes as a just, fair and very intelligent woman.

Hardy had to have a discussion with her about his progress.

“She kind of tested me on it. She was like, ‘Let's see what you did get from this’. I felt kind of on the spot,” he says.

In Hardy’s case, none of the three victims decided to take part in a formal meeting. Which he was disappointed to learn just a week out from the date.

So, they used a “proxy victim” to meet with him.

This can be quite common, Lillis says, and doesn’t mean that the restorative justice process has to stop for the offender if the other party doesn’t want to be involved.

It can be someone who was the victim of the same type of crime, in a different situation, but who can express to the offender the impact such a crime had on them, their families and friends.

Or, in the case of a public order offence, it might be someone working in the emergency services, or a representative from a victim support group. 

Empathy and the mirror

A strong tenet of restorative justice is developing empathy in offenders.

While everyone is different, empathy can be learned and nurtured in people, says Pat Dolan, a professor at the University of Galway.

Last Friday, Dolan was a guest speaker at Limerick’s Thomond Park, where Le Chéile held its conference “Empathy in Action: Restorative Justice and the Human Side of Harm”.

“Sometimes empathy is talked about as a kind of a lefty, soft thing. It's not. It's bloody hard,” Dolan says.

Empathy is not pity and it’s not sympathy, they're totally different things, he says.

Pity relates to how you feel about the other person, which is not actually empathy, he says. “Empathy is capacity to go in the other person's shoes.”

He also points to a definition from Mary Kate Berardi of Penn State University that empathy is the opposite of “othering” others.

It’s important to remember that empathy is natural, innate and can be cultivated, he says.

“The great news is you can learn to be empathic. It's never too late,” Dolan says.

Empathy education is in every school in Ireland now, he says, on the transition year programme and the second-year junior cycle programme. “It's compulsory education in Ireland, which is great.”

Empathy is even observable in the human brain, says Pete Wallis, a senior practitioner of restorative justice at Oxfordshire Youth Offending Service.

In Limerick on Friday, he spoke about “mirror neurons”.

There is a spontaneous, automatic response of the brain when we see someone else who is suffering, Wallis says.

“What the neuroscientists have discovered is that the same parts of the brain light up for the person who's experiencing empathy in that moment as light up for the person who's suffering,” he says.

For Hardy, while maybe these neurons were firing, they were masked by his own ego and even embarrassment. Through his work in restorative justice, he was able to truly unlock his own empathy, he says.

Although he will always regret his actions that night, he says, he learned an incredibly important lesson on how easily things can turn really badly.

“God gave you two legs, use them and just walk away,” he says.

Building momentum

In Limerick on Friday, Niall Collins, Minister of State at the Department of Justice, said it has been positive to see the increase in referrals to restorative justice services.

In 2024, there was an 88% increase in these referrals from 2023, which had been higher than the year before, said Collins, a Fianna Fáil TD.

“These increases demonstrate that we are going in the right direction,” he said. “But although awareness and implementation of restorative justice is growing in Ireland, it has yet to reach its full potential.”

The Probation Services Action Plan 2025–2027 sets a target of growing both the number of court referrals and the use of restorative justice interventions at all stages of engagement with the Probation Service by 10 percent each year.

It also calls for the provision of restorative justice training to Probation Service staff to build capacity and confidence, with 20 percent of operational staff trained on an annual basis.

O’Brien wants more people to know that this is an option, she says. And that it can help people in a similar way that it helped her, she says. 

While the participation numbers are still nowhere near as high as she would like, Lillis, of the Probation Service, says there is an extremely high satisfaction rate for those who take part. 

International evidence is that there is an 80 percent satisfaction rate in good restorative justice, she says. Although that doesn’t delve into what models were used, she says. 

Whereas, the Irish Probation Service is operating at almost 100 percent in terms of victim satisfaction in restorative justice, she says. “No victim has turned around to us and said, ‘That is not what I thought it was going to be.’”

Lillis says she puts this down to the care that goes into designing and preparing each experience. 

“We would always look at, what's the rationale? What does somebody want to achieve in this? Why? Why is this important to you? What do you want to get out of it?” she says.

“And then we do our best to work with parties to ensure that that happens.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.