After serving a prison sentence for drug dealing, Damien Quinn was determined to make a fresh start; to put the past behind him and prove to his family that he'd changed.
He took every educational opportunity offered to him in prison, and now, armed with certificates in business studies and computing, he pursued every angle he could think of to access employment, further education or volunteering. It was not to be.
Damien found every door was closed to him. He says it was as if his prison sentence followed him into the outside world:
"I naively believed that when the sentence was over my punishment was over. But actually, that is when the punishment, when I got out, that is when the real punishment started, trying to get going again in the community."
Speaking on The Ryan Tubridy Show, Damien says this is a common experience among ex-offenders. After finding his way back to education and employment, Damien wanted to find a way to help people with a similar story, and that's when the social enterprise Spéire Nua (New Horizon) was born.
The organisation provides people who have spent time in prison with the opportunity to prove their commitment to starting again and build a better future for themselves and their community. They also allow this commitment to be independently verified, with a view to improving employment prospects for ex-offenders.
Damien says he was dealing drugs for almost a decade before he was caught. He started using drugs as a young teenager when he was left supporting his entire family at the age of 14.
He had a full-time job in a bedding company, and was earning money; but then over a nine year period, selling drugs became his most significant source of income. When he was finally caught, he lost everything:
"I lost all my friends, I lost my house, I lost my partner. People around the town that liked me as a young fella didn't like me anymore."
Damien was 23 when he was caught in possession of a kilo of cannabis. He had returned to education and was studying for the Junior Cert, having missed out on schooling due to difficult family circumstances. Ironically, Damien says the prospect of prison actually held out some hope for him to put a structure on what was then a chaotic existence:
"I actually pleaded to go. I wanted to go, because I knew there was access to opportunity in prison. There is access to education units, there is access to work programmes, there’s addiction counselling. All that stuff I knew was all there to be used."
On his release, Damien says the funding for the re-entry programme he was signed up for was pulled the day before he was about to start. Undaunted, he put a pin in the map and it landed on Athlone. He headed for the town on the Shannon to start again, avoiding his home place in Tuam:
"I had a plan to stay away from where I was from, get my life together, prove to everybody that mattered, that I had changed and that I wanted to play a meaningful part in their lives."
Constant rejection didn’t dissuade him at first from seeking work and volunteering opportunities, but as time wore on, it began to grind him down:
"Nobody was willing to give me a chance. I couldn’t get a house, couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t get into college."
Damien ended up in a very dark place. He says he felt like he had made no progress, even though he was spending all day every day trying:
"I was back where I was before I got locked up. I really couldn’t understand how I found myself back here. I certainly didn’t want to be here. All that work seemed for nothing."
He turned to using drugs once again and ultimately decided, as he describes it, one crisp, sunny day down a laneway in Athlone, that it was all hopeless:
"I took enough stuff and fell asleep in the middle of the road. I seized up into a ball and two women found me."
Damien says he’s pretty sure those women saved his life that day. Following that, Damien ended up living back near his family in Tuam, which, he says, changed everything:
"It was the beginning of starting again. I was around people that I had let down previously and I didn’t want to put them through that again."
Things started looking up – Damien met Jody, his partner and they now have two young children. He studied with Equal Ireland to a postgraduate level and became the manager of a distribution company.
Damien was was drawn to work in community development, but despite his recent employment history, his criminal past was still a bar to getting the kind of job he felt would make a difference. He decided to go to one more open day on social enterprise and he heard the name of Siobhán Cafferty, Social Enterprise and Development Officer with the Irish Prisons Service and Probation.
Siobhán’s ideas resonated with Damien, he says:
"She wrote a paper called 'New Way Forward’, which was about integrating violent ex-offenders back into the workforce. When I heard that, I said, do you know what; I need to stick with education and I need to meet her."
Siobhán spoke about the Certificate of Employability, which was a way of helping people find careers post-conviction. Damien felt there was a need for a broadly-based certification to help people leaving the prison service access a range of activities, like finding accommodation or volunteering:
"I changed it to Certificates of Commitment to Change, that could be used more universally."
The idea is, Damien explains, that skills attained in prison as well as personal development and willingness to change would be independently assessed and verified, making it into something more concrete and valuable:
"My proposal was that we need to be capturing all of the steps out of a life of crime people take and attach a value to that."
Damien developed the concept as part of a Master’s thesis, and he interviewed a range of stakeholders, including Gardaí, prison governors, and Senators. The response was generally positive. Damien says the process involves several steps, during which the ex-offender’s willingness to change is independently assessed:
"As peer mentors, we build portfolios of evidence of commitment to change and we hand that over for the criminal justice sector to assess. If they are satisfied certain benchmarks are met, they just sign off on it; right up to a date that they can confirm, that there appears to be evidence of change here."
You can find out more about Spéire Nua here and listen back to this and other great interviews on The Ryan Tubridy Show page here.
If you’ve been affected by anything in the interview, you can call Samaritans free, day or night, 365 days a year on 116 123.
