Restorative justice
Chris McCartney writes about the work of Quaker Service in Northern Ireland and the restorative justice programme it helped to pioneer
It’s not maybe what you expect to hear in a respectable small town museum, the Quaker Tapestry on display. A woman stands and tells the gathered audience that, after her daughter was killed in a car crash, she wanted to grab the driver responsible round the throat and choke the life out of him.
Diane O’Neill (not her real name) imagined many times what she would do if she was ever face to face with the young man. She described the day she waited in a room at Magilligan Prison, about sixty miles from Belfast, while he was fetched from his wing. ‘It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,’ she said.
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