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The Irish on probation in the North-West of England

The Irish in Britain have been described as an invisible ethnic minority (Murphy, 1994) and there has been concern for some time in and around the Probation Service that they may be disadvantaged by anti-Irish prejudice in their contacts with the criminal justice system (Fletcher et al., 1997). This concern was shared by managers and practitioners in two probation areas in the North-West of England, and research was commissioned in 2003 to study the needs and experiences of offenders of Irish origin under supervision by probation officers in Britain. Three of the researchers were also involved in the large study of Black and Asian probationers funded by the Home Office (Calverley et al., 2004), and a number of the same data collection methods were used in the study of Irish offenders in order to enable comparisons both with Black and Asian offenders and with broadly comparable samples of white British offenders (Frude et al., 1994; Mair and May, 1997). The category ‘Irish’ is problematic: for example, people may not choose to identify themselves as Irish; many people in Britain who have one Irish parent might or might not be seen by themselves or others as Irish; Northern Irish Protestants might define themselves as British to emphasize their difference from Catholic Irish, but still be seen as Irish by mainland British people. Not surprisingly, we found that it was not always easy to identify through Probation Service databases those people under supervision who would define themselves as Irish and be prepared to talk to us about it. We were eventually able to interview 48 people (38 on probation, 10 on post-custody licence) and were also able to administer CRIME-PICS II (Frude et al., 1994) as a measure of crime-prone attitudes and beliefs and self-reported problems. In addition, pre-sentence reports on 30 of the interviewees were compared with 30 randomly selected reports on non-Irish defendants, using an established PSR assessment guide (Raynor et al., 1995). Readers interested in a fuller account of the research and its findings will find them in a paper in the Irish Probation Journal (Lewis et al., forthcoming), and a full report has been prepared for the two probation areas (Lewis et al., 2004). This short report is intended to draw attention to key findings only, and to some of their practical implications. Key findings and their implications: