(24th March 2026)
Community Foundation Ireland is a philanthropic hub working for equality for all in thriving communities and we aim to do so with ambition, courage and leadership.
The urgent need to address poverty, deprivation and exclusion to reduce imprisonment highlighted in this important report fully aligns with that equality vision and our commitment to deliver for people, place and planet.
The Foundation is proud to partner of the Irish Penal Reform Trust over many years and welcomes the publication of ‘The Vicious Circle of Social Exclusion and Crime: Ireland’s Disproportionate Punishment of the Poor’.
The Trust has once again provided the solid evidence needed to link the crisis in housing, the cost of living, under-investment in our young people with the record levels of prison overcrowding.
The Trust does so in a visually striking format – with striking personal imagery that tells an incredibly powerful story, leaving an impression of anger, sadness, respect, tenderness and hope.
Your recommendations offer a blue-print and a way forward to build a society which offers opportunity by removing barriers and providing proper supports and infrastructure.
The focus on ending child poverty is one which Government cannot continue to ignore – indeed it echoes an urgent need highlighted through other Community Foundation Ireland partnerships with the Child Poverty Monitor from the Children’s Rights Alliance and the Poverty Income Inequality and Living Standards Reports with the ESRI each September.
We are all joining the dots in civil society – policymakers must join those dots as well.
Each has delivered some progress – yet policymakers have still to deliver the systemic change needed to lift quarter of a million of our children out of the shadow of poverty.
We know that supportive parents, childcare, youth services and community development give children a childhood rather than setting them on a pathway to discrimination and criminality.
Our philanthropists and our donors are assisting in the transformation of lives by delivering such services across the country – but more needs to be done, much more.
We know that justice and policy reform can be slow – but this report challenges all of us. Do we want to remain a society which continues to criminalise children with unaddressed behavioural issues, undiagnosed neurodivergence or trauma.
This report shows the long-term impact of austerity and the better policy choices that can prevent so much pain and hurt. Choices which can make us or break us. They are not just something we hear about on the radio but rather decisions that can have a profound impact on individuals, families and communities.
We see this every day with rising rates of addiction, imprisonment and homelessness. We who have social capital to spare must not allow ourselves to avert our eyes or become numb to deepening inequality. We must spend that social capital, we must be rich in aspirations – not as charity but as solidarity.
The Community Foundation is in the room today as a partner sharing solidarity and richness of aspiration with the Penal Reform Trust.
We support pioneering research like this, made possible by the generosity and vision of philanthropists and we encourage thought-leadership, to drive change and conversations like those we are having today.
On behalf of all at the Foundation I want to congratulate the Penal Reform Trust, lead researcher Clare O’Connor, socially engaged artist Aaron Sunderland and peer researcher Robert Cullen.
You have given us much to reflect on. Thank You.
I look forward to the conversations ahead.
If you want to find out more about supporting the work of Community Foundation Ireland, please do check out our Strategic Giving Page.
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