As a native of Los Angeles I can say that gangs have always been (at least in my living memory) a feature of life there. I am delighted in hearing that there are new ways of trying to get past problems that so many have written off as being ‘incurable’, and these solutions seem to be working. While we don’t have the same set of societal issues in Ireland, there are lessons to be learned from this that could be applied here.
Perhaps I’m hard-wired for optimism, but there is something about this that definitely gives me hope.