Several followers of this blog have emailed me to ask why I haven't posted for a while. The truth is I no longer work in the social care or youth sector. In fact, I have left the UK and returned to Ireland where I am originally from. Overall, I loved the six years I lived in England (apart from the months I spent in Manchester near the end, an awful place!) and came to see it as my adopted home

Since the riots have subsided the excuse makers have been busy trying to find justification for the feral mobs that burned working and middle class families out of their homes as well as laying destruction to local businesses and people's workplaces. Wednesday's Guardian gives a few of them a platform in which to try and rationalise mob rule.Last Thursday's edition of Young Voters Question Time

I was on BBC Radio 5 Live with Shelagh Fogarty yesterday talking about the riots in my monotone voice with a clued up lady from Manchester. I wish they had given me an hour after my rant to play some seventies soul and jazz to soothe my mind after talking about social breakdown and the urban underclass. Click on the show for the 10th August it's roughly an hour in to the programme. I am in the

The underclass are rising up. No longer content with simply burglaring and mugging the decent law abiding working classes that have the misfortune to dwell amongst them, they have now decided to torch and terrorise the very communities they come from. What we are witnessing in London and in other cities across Britain at the moment is an attack upon the decent and law abiding citizenry of the

A few months ago a female colleague at the Youth Offending Service, Chrissy, asked me to sit in with her and a young male offender of seventeen. She hoped I could be a positive male role model in getting him to do something constructive with his time rather than burgle his neighbours."Hi I'm Winston. You must be Noel. Nice to meet you."Chrissy then asked him what had he been doing since she last

A few weeks ago I accompanied an assortment of teenage rogues to a youth club where we punished them by means of video games, snooker, take away food and supervising them in a music studio where they had access to records that extoled the virtues of misogyny, gangsterism and drug abuse. However, there was no structure to the activities and even in the DJ studio they were left to their own devices

A few weeks ago at our local Youth Offending Office we hired an ex-offender to read poetry to our assorted crew of delinquents on the Intensive Surveillance and Supervision Programme (ISSP) before we took them out in the afternoon to play basketball. The reasoning behind this initiative was well intentioned. Here was an ex-convict who whilst in prison had learned to read and write and discovered

A few times now I have accompanied some prolific young offenders on the Intensive Supervision and Support Program to one of their daily leisure activities at an indoor rock climbing facility. If leisure is really an antidote to crime then surely instead of calling for more prisons to be built we should be lobbying politicians to construct amusement parks within the slum estates that bedevil

Lately, I have been working with the Offensive Youth Service or as they prefer to call themselves the Youth Offending Service. One of my duties is to escort male teenagers on Intensive Supervision and Support Programmes on their daily outings to gyms, boxing clubs, tennis courts, indoor football centres and to various other recreational activities. The ISSP is the most severe 'punishment' a young

Within the next two weeks my book Generation F will be available in all good bookshops and will also be available as an e-book on Amazon.co.ukIt contains lots of material that I haven't published on the blog. A few friends said they found the snippets I showed them shocking and incredulous. There was a time I would have responded to its contents in a similar manner, but now I expect nothing short