In the Liberties, Solas Project is piloting a new peer-to-peer approach to their youth outreach work

The sun was splitting the pavement stone outside the Solas Project’s office on Long’s Place in the Liberties, and inside the door the mood was just as bright.

The wide smiles and vibrant, upbeat chatter among the staff made for a warm and inviting atmosphere on Wednesday afternoon.

There is a pool table in the middle of the room. It’s not in use, but it sends a message that this is a place young people are welcome to drop into anytime and hang out.

That message is at the heart of what the Solas team is all about, they say. They are always there.

“We’re relentless. The outreach work, on the street, what we call ‘detached youth work’, is something that we do every day,” says Shauna Dowling, leader of Solas’ RUA team, who is sitting at her desk in the back office.

It’s a bustling environment. With Dowling are Shauna Kelly and Craig O’Brien, youth justice workers from Solas’ Targeted Response with Youth (TRY) team.

“We’re always in the flats, we’re constantly visible,” Dowling says.

This part of the south inner-city can be a bit bleak for young people. Local community leaders and councillors have long decried the scarcity of positive things for them to do in the area.

Some local residents fear large groups of kids who at times roam the area, and have done things like burning bins, damaging cars, and throwing fireworks at cars. There have been calls for more gardaí.

But Solas Project offers another approach, working with young people to try to keep them from falling afoul of the guards, and – if they do – to keep them from reoffending. Including with a new peer-to-peer mentorship programme.

Stay away from the justice system

It is not in society’s or a child’s interest for them to be sucked into the justice system, says Ian Marder, an associate professor in criminology at Maynooth University.

“Although this is counterintuitive, the bottom line is that the more children who are prosecuted and given criminal records, the worse for society,” Marder says.

So the more kids who are not arrested and jailed, but instead put into youth diversion programmes, “the less they will reoffend, and the less they will become entrenched in what is ultimately a damaging criminal justice system”, Marder says.

In Ireland, “virtually all children are considered for diversion after arrest”, which is good, Marder says.

Solas Project has a suite of different programmes meant to keep kids out of trouble in the first place, and keep them from reoffending if they do get into trouble.

This includes an after-school programme, the Yard Programme, centred on skills development, aiming to increase employment opportunities, and the Compass Prison Programme, which steers young prisoners away from reoffending.

Then there are the TRY and RUA teams.

TRY started as a pilot programme based in St Teresa’s Gardens in 2017. It works with young men aged 18–26 and young women aged 16–26.

“The drug scene was big down there, a lot of addiction going on,” says TRY team member Craig O’Brien.

It started with just one guy, Karl Ducque, who is now the team leader, and grew from there, O’Brien says.

“A lot of our young people will be involved in the drug trade,” he says. “We go out and we target them. We just keep knocking on doors. Keep building relationships.”

Meanwhile, the RUA team targets young people who have already come to the attention of the justice system.

“They’ve found themselves involved in courts,” says Dowling, who leads the team.  “They’ve probably come to the attention of the guards quite a bit and been involved with JLOs [Garda juvenile liaison officers].”

“Credible messengers”

The TRY team aims to get out and be present in the community, offer short-term supports like referrals to education or employment programmes, and offer more intense support for those struggling with addiction, homelessness or unemployment.

And, recently, they’ve also added a peer-to-peer mentorship programme.

The aim is for young people who have successfully interacted with Solas to stand as beacons to others of what can be achieved with self-belief and some hard work, the team says.

This kind of peer-to-peer mentorship programme can be effective, says Marder, the associate professor at Maynooth University.

“Most high-quality studies exploring mentoring in criminal justice suggest that it reduces crime, although the evidence can be mixed,” Marder says.

A “credible messenger” can dissuade people from violence and retaliation, he says. “A classic example of a credible messenger would be someone who understands and has experienced the context in which the young person lives, such as a peer,” he says.

For the Solas team, the peer-mentorship idea evolved naturally.

“Last year, we ran cannabis awareness programs,” says O’Brien. “We bring them in each week for a number of weeks, and we talk about cannabis. What it does to you, the good and the bad. Then we did core programmes.”

“I think just this year we looked at it and saw we had a couple of young people who were engaging well, and we are thinking, what could we do with them?” he says.

So, they decided to make them peer mentors. The team hopes that the new programme will continue to grow from here.

“With more young people involved, then more and more in the area see them do it and then they follow suit,” O’Brien says.

“We have six people doing it this year. Next year it could be 10 or 12, we’ll keep building on it,” he says.

Ciaran Ó Meachair, a Sinn Féin councillor representing the South-West Inner City says he’s seen the impact that Solas Project has had in the area, which he said has been chronically neglected.

“Solas have earned an extremely good reputation in the local community in Dublin 8 off the back of their Trojan work,” Ó Meachair said.

“If we are going to address issues like antisocial behaviour we need a holistic approach, and groups like Solas have to be at the core of this,” he said.

A unique place

A recent tragedy highlighted the place that Solas has within the community, says Dowling, the leader of the RUA team.

A young person from Oliver Bond Street lost their life and many in the area wanted to memorialise their friend.

So they hung hundreds of empty cannabis packets across a railing, forming a huge mosaic. Some local residents were not pleased, and contacted the council, Dowling says.

“That was a real issue where DCC [Dublin City Council] were coming in, they wanted to take them down and come at it from a heavy kind of policing side,” she says.

O’Brien, of the TRY team, says the council approached Solas for help. “They were worried the young people might try and fight them if they came in to take it down,” he says.

So Solas workers approached some of the young people who’d put up the memorial to their friend, O’Brien says.

“We said we’d put a plaque there to represent our friends that passed away, you know,” he says. “So, it’s actually a piece of work still ongoing. It’s going very well at the moment.”

Dowling says she considers this a success. “I think a community response was better than a policing response,” she says.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.