WHILE recent events on the streets have cast a shadow on some young people, the positive work of our youth services in diverting young people away from the trouble has gone largely unreported.

Youth workers from St Peter’s Immaculata Youth Centre were just some of the many teams on the ground as the violence broke out across the city last week.  Discussing the work that they do, Stephen Hughes from the centre said: “We run the Hidden Communities project which is a project for young people who are not engaged with local services. 

“They are often street-based, whether they be disenfranchised from youth clubs or not aware of the opportunities available to them or they may feel unsafe. 

“We try to engage them through working with our schools, working on the street or through group work. It is very intentional and focused work with specific groups of young people.”

He added: “We have our street work programme which involves working with a number of youth clubs across West Belfast. Our street work here in Divis is connected strategically and practically in youth work application to all the other services across West and North Belfast. 

“We try to be helpful in keeping young people safe and support them to make better lifestyle choices. Those youth workers follow the young people as they move around Belfast and it is coordinated by Holy Trinity Youth Centre.”

One of the testaments of our youth services has been their ability to work together in a coordinated manner.

Stephen said: “Some really good success stories over the last couple of weeks – and in particular surrounding the violence at the interface – were all the youth teams came together. 

“We had Holy Trinity Youth, Corpus Christi, Black Mountain Street Beat, Townsend Street, Hammer Youth, Forthspring, Grosvenor and St Teresa’s  all working strategically to protect and prevent our young people from getting involved in the violence.

“Granted, some did get involved but there was far more young people prevented from getting involved and taken out of the environment than participated in it and that was a huge success. 

“One of the big pieces that I identified was the work between Corpus Christi and Black Mountain Action Group at the fort on the Springfield Road. The work they did was a great success story in preventing young people from getting involved in the violence. 

“Our staff were out on the ground and were helping get our young people out of the area, phoning parents and challenging young people who wanted to get involved in the violence.”

However, it wasn’t just the youth sector that were instrumental in helping the community which Stephen was keen to point out.

“We also had great assistance from Lisa Lynn, our Community Safety Officer here in the lower Falls” he said.

“She was absolutely sterling and has done so much youth work in the last number of weeks in tackling anti-community activity in the area.  “She has been a huge help in connecting all the youth groups and developing interventions to keep our kids safer.”

Detailing the work that their team carried out on the ground he added: “We were able to get help and support to a number of individuals who were struggling during this period. 

“We had kids taken to hospital who had been hurt in the violence but we also got help and support for kids who were struggling. 

“These weren’t just kids who were struggling with the violence, but they were kids who were struggling with Covid and the lockdown. We have seen a number of our young people being exploited during the pandemic and during the violence.”

Continuing, he said: “We are seeing an increase in child sex exploitation, drug and alcohol abuse. These are all self-soothing behaviours. 

“We are also seeing an increase in self-harm and negative mental health issues. We are trying constantly to support our young people with these issues across West Belfast in a coordinated manner.”

Discussing the issues that his team are seeing, Stephen told us: “The main issues we are seeing are kids being bored because of the lockdown. All the services were closed down. Although thankfully we didn’t and continued to work through the lockdown doing one-to-ones, small group work and online activates. 

“These kids just need somewhere to go and something to do. They need to re-engage with the services and they need help to rebuild the relationships that they had and to relearn those social and life skills.”

In March we reported on the bespoke intervention work being carried out by the Glenparent Youth and Community Group in Lenadoon following the decision by the Education Authority (EA) to stand down services due to the pandemic. Discussing the impact that this decision had on their work, Stephen said: “The Education Authority had stood down their youth services, but we just couldn’t. We worked continually through the lockdown because our young people were so vulnerable and we didn’t want our young people being left isolated or in crisis situations. To be fair to EA they recognised that and were very supportive to ourselves and the youth services across the North. 

“There is always a shortage of resources and this has been exacerbated by recent events. We are always needing additional support to deliver our services.”

In recent days, St Peter’s Immaculata staff were the victims of misinformation on social media which suggested they were participating in the violence, when in fact they had been on the ground to dissuade youths from engaging. Stephen has expressed his concern at the impact this will have on the team’s good relations work. 

“We are worried about what impact the recent violence will have on our good relations work and it might take a while to fix that,” he said.

“There are many friendships out there within our community that are a legacy of the good relations work that we do. We have a T:BUC programme with the Shankill alongside the Ambassadors for Peace programme and our Global Service Learning programme. We also have SHIVIS, our Shankill and Divis joint programme.

“We are also worried that our partner organisations from the Shankill and other unionist areas may get some backlash for working with us on the back of false allegations which appeared on social media regarding our staff. We don’t want this to have a negative impact on them.

“From speaking to other service providers out there, there is a real fear of the impact this will have on cross-community projects that we deliver and if anything, we need to see more of that work taking place. We need more investment in cross-community work to break down those barriers.” 

Conor Largey is a youth worker with St Peter’s Immaculata.  “We have kids from the Shankill who have come through our doors on the T:BUC programme who have become staff members here,” he said. “That is a testament to the good work that we do.

“Those kids come in from the Shankill and work in the lower Falls without fear or threat and we don’t want that to be affected because of this sectarian tension.

“Our young people lost contact with the relationships that they had built across the divide when Covid-19 struck. That has had a massive impact on that side of our work.”

St Peter’s Immaculata Youth Centre also provide a number of global opportunities for their young people. 

“We have been inundated with messages from Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and South America,” added Stephen. 

“These are all groups that we work with on a global scale be that through bringing our kids out to those countries or online work and they were seeing the work we were doing on the ground and telling us not to give up hope. But the pandemic has killed some of our international projects and those kids have lost some great opportunities as a result and we are looking forward to getting that work restarted again.”