The list of sectors struggling and the countless amounts of people being failed by the current political impasse in Northern Ireland has been well documented on this site and many others. I don’t wish to take opportunistic political snipes, but instead discuss an issue that, through experience, has grown very close to my heart. I want to talk about young people and our justice system.

Around a year ago, I became a NIACRO volunteer and was assigned a place on the MOVE Project. A befriending scheme which would pair me with a young person who had been identified as ‘at risk of offending’. Together, we would agree on some goals for personal development and through our weekly activities, we would work together to achieve them.

Paired on the basis of mutual interests, soon enough I was nervously pulling up outside the house of a football-mad kid who would have an impact on me I’m not even sure he’ll ever comprehend. Naturally, this being my first ever pairing, I had no idea what to expect, but what I found was a young person who was happiest with a ball at his feet or a game console controller in his hands; a normal, quiet kid who, had we met in different circumstances I would never have guessed might be on an early intervention scheme run by NIACRO.

Our first couple of activities were characterised by me talking a lot and the young person replying in quiet, short sentences as I tried to piece together his personality, tease out some engagement and identify a goal we would work together towards over the next weeks and months. I would soon find out that the best way to get a young person to come out of their shell is to let them embarrass you in a game of football, at which point you won’t hear the end of it for about six months.

After a few weeks we agreed on the personal goal. This young person lacked confidence in himself and had the potential to be easily led by his more dominant peers. His most likely path to potential offending would be peer pressure or falling in with a bad crowd as he became older. So we agreed that increasing self-confidence would be our goal, and although it wasn’t all plain sailing and we had challenges along the way, this young person never looked back. Here was a great kid with a heart of gold who I am absolutely confident will, with the right guidance, and if he makes the right choices, grow into a fine young man.

The part of our time on the scheme which sticks with me the most was a visit to the Christmas market in Belfast. His mother had given him some money to buy himself something nice and he’d been spending a solid ten minutes browsing stalls, money clasped in his hand. He went into one of the stalls and emerged holding a particularly brightly coloured bath bomb. He bought it for his mother for Christmas.

You may be wondering how all this is relevant to our current political stagnation. The fact is there are thousands of young people across Northern Ireland in situations just like our young friend. NIACRO and other voluntary organisations work tirelessly to address their needs, to integrate them into their communities, to support the family unit, to provide opportunities and facilitate advocacy where it’s needed. They aim to create a society where the young person can feel like they have choices, where they feel like they have a purpose and are valued, all with the aim of creating the conditions whereby offending becomes less and less likely.

With no functioning government, however, they are fighting a lonely battle. NIACRO, for their part have noted research that finds that our current justice system risks doing more harm than good to young people and notes especially how “contact with the criminal justice system even for relatively minor matters, can have serious implications for young people’s future life chances.”

To help reform a system that is failing our young people, NIACRO has developed a series of evidence-based policy priorities which includes supporting families and children affected by imprisonment and stopping the criminalisation of children, instead investing in early intervention such as with the MOVE Project. A full list can be found here.

With little prospect of an Executive at Stormont being formed in the near future, these policies will likely never even be considered by ministers let alone adopted and thousands of young people across Northern Ireland will continue to be failed. This is the price we are currently paying.

Time spent with my young person has come to an end, and the scheme cannot be renewed, depriving him of that vital support. I can only hope that the work of the fantastic people at NIACRO and organisations like it have given him and many others what they need to avoid a harmful justice system. Rest assured, should this impasse continue we run the risk of losing a generation of vulnerable young people.