Mairead Healy

Mairead’s Future Voices seeks to open up new opportunities for Ireland's most marginalized young people and combat the entrenched culture of elitism that dominates the legal and political systems of Ireland. Her work with Future Voices is grounding young people in human rights through a holistic programme, equipping them with a network of contacts and support, the skills to defend their own rights and the confidence to see their role in defending them in a global context.

Mairead Healy is transforming the structures of elitism in the higher echelons of power in Ireland and injecting fresh perspectives into Ireland's legal and political system by building pipelines for the most marginalized to enter and participate within it. Aware that the privileged class dominates the leadership of most fields in Ireland—from law to politics to media and beyond--she is trying to create truly representative democratic structures by seeding a new generation of human rights leaders from backgrounds unrepresented within the halls of power and changing the mindsets of those in charge.

Through Future Voices, she is targeting young people in the worst schools in Dublin, leading them through a two-step programme that builds awareness of human rights, empowering them to understand their own frequently violated rights, to articulate their opinions on the controversial issues around their rights, and the skills, confidence, and access to fight for them. Future Voices, in its second year, offers a multi-level long-term programme that allows young people to explore issues, achieve educational goals, and become advocates for their beliefs and themselves. Mairead’s programme tackles the serious issues that affect young people and helps them understand them in a broader context, while becoming exposed to careers and leaders within the legal field, the citizen sector, politics, and beyond.

Rather than tearing down traditional elitist structures, Future Voices establishes a new network of contacts and references that drive career success within the field for people without traditional access. As she builds confidence and connections among the younger people, Mairead provides a series of supports to help them navigate the path to higher education and build their capacity to challenge injustice throughout their lives—as leaders in the legal field or wherever they choose to make a mark.

The great majority of political leaders in Ireland and a significant percentage of leaders in media and other fields have a higher degree, and many have a background in law. However, the legal profession and politics are dominated by the privileged. There is little representation of the marginalized and excluded in the halls of power and policymaking, which translates to laws and core democratic structures that are not truly representative. Those who “break through” frequently tend to hide their backgrounds and thus limit the number of role models for youth from similar upbringings and areas.

Both the legal and political systems in Ireland are insular, with Ireland’s small size making this particularly evident and common. They are based on connections, both personal and parental, and on access to networks, contacts, and wealth that young people from the roughest, poorest areas of Dublin do not have. To become a barrister, a top-level lawyer, students must shoulder €15,000 in tuition and work for free as an apprentice for two full years. Ireland offers no government loans to supplement these costs. Official channels offer a single full-ride scholarship a year and each barrister has one apprentice slot per year--these traditionally goes to the known quantity of a family member or friend.

There is a crowded market of youth empowerment programmes in Ireland, but they are often academic and short-term in nature. Tokenistic access programs in law firms bring young people in for a week with no channels or intention for further employment. Many focus on short-term hard skills without building a holistic consciousness about broader implications or instilling deeper changemaking skills. Top firms and organizations in Ireland are missing out on a vast pool of talent.

Young people from marginalized backgrounds have personal experience with first world human rights violations—from being frisked by police to being systematically excluded. This, coupled with a lack of voice and disempowerment, leaves them without means or confidence to speak up or even know what they deserve. Those who are most affected by violations of human rights in Ireland often have the least knowledge about their human rights, and the fewest skills to fight for them.

Mairead has built Future Voices on the principles of “engage, empower, and enable”—building skills, confidence, and networks. She is engaging young people on the issues of the day, empowering them to stand in their own opinions, and equipping them with a new network of contacts and connections among the leaders of Ireland.

Future Voices targets students during their Transition Year or third and forth year (roughly 15-17), before the “Leaving Cert” exams that determine long-term career path in Ireland. Mairead specifically focuses her effort on the bottom- rated schools in Dublin, the “kids with the wrong accents.” In Ireland’s lowest performing schools, known as Designated Deprived Schools or DDS, between 5% -10% of students go to college. She began her pilot at the worst rated school in central Dublin, ironically located next to Trinity College, Ireland’s most elite educational institution. Future Voices has two main parts: a rigorous six-month “Flagship Programme” and a follow-up long-term guidance programme, “Step Up to the Mark.”

Future Voice’s Flagship Programme focuses on social justice and human rights law. The programme sources its students from an interview process within the school that explores participants’ backgrounds and interest. A key criterion of Mairead’s program is that participating students must not have anyone in their lives—from friends to family and beyond--who has attended college at all. She is looking for the kids with “a spark,” the “misfits” who hide in books.

Young people meet each Saturday to participate in “walking debates” where they discuss the most controversial issues of the day, ranging from abortion to the Catholic Church to cyber bullying. “A lot of law is boring,” says Mairead. “The controversial issues get them interested, particularly the ones that directly affect their lives; their own community’s inequality before the law.” The young people are guided through a process that helps them think about and determine their opinions on the issues, and learn to articulate and debate them. The program is underpinned by a deep focus on human rights, how they relate to these key issues, and how they relate to the students themselves. Students conduct guided legal research on issues and interview prominent leaders as they grow in confidence, working together to explore how the issues affect their own lives and how they’d shape them differently—whether it’s creating their own Convention on Disability Rights or designing new police protections.

The programme features top level guest speakers, from Ministers to Supreme Court Justices, citizen sector leaders such as the CEO of Amnesty International, to media luminaries and members of the Senate. These leaders eat lunch with the students and speak about their work with a particular focus on their background and spend time discussing student opinion and proposed approaches on their key issues. Many speakers share parts of their lives, particularly difficult elements of their upbringing, that aren’t usually public. Future Voices also arranges placements in legal and other environments for genuine work experience and contact building. Future Voices students have been placed in top NGOs, the Seanad (Senate), been appointed as the key advisor to the Children’s Ombudsman for Ireland, and many other roles.

Mairead specifically employs top barristers as interviewers and mentors in the programme, which is based in the elite Law Society building. She emphasizes a long-term commitment rather than a one-off or limited pro-bono engagement from mentors, interviewers, and the top-level speakers who come to interact with the young people. “We are building their network for life,” she explains. Mentors agree to serve as contacts and references and help facilitate young people on their path and into the sector long after their time at Future Voices has passed. “I am asking for a life-time commitment from people—they are the new long-term career network for these young people. They need to be able to call them in ten years.” The programme is designed to discourage favoritism, recognizing that most of the participants are all too familiar with being left behind. At the end of the programme, Mairead engages the students in designing the following year’s curriculum.

The second level of Future Voices is the “Step Up to the Mark” programme, which builds upon the Flagship Programme. Having already built a strong network, “Step Up” enriches skills such as networking and career planning. It creates a clear path towards higher education, helping students determine their goals and guide them through school selection and applications, while enriching and reinforcing the network. The program is structured at an earlier stage in the high school trajectory so that kids have time and support to change their focus and improve performance. From the first fifty kids who have gone through the Flagship program, all of them but two have been accepted to college, and Future Voices has worked with the remaining ones to go to community college for their first two years.

Mairead has demonstrated an impressive ability to pull in top leaders in support of Future Voices. Based in the Law Society, the grande dame of the legal structure in Ireland, Future Voices enjoys the support of Ruairi Quinn, the Minister of Education, and other political luminaries and top barristers. She has secured commitments from Accenture and other firms to support the work of Future Voices on a limited budget. She has made a strategic decision to reach out to regulatory bodies such as the Bar Council and political committees to help shift mindsets from the top.

Entering its second year, the programme is still very early stage; with the original fifty students entering the first Step Up programme this winter and a new batch of fifty joining the Flagship. Mairead has plans to take the programme nationally within three years, and expand programmes to target younger children and pull in teachers and families. A native of Northern Ireland, she sees tremendous potential and need for the program in the North, where elitism is arguably more entrenched. She is working with law firms and other organizations to see these young people as a long-term investment and wants to build a new national network of scholarships to facilitate entry into more “expensive” fields. Mairead’s goal is to build a new layer of network support for young people. Her goal with Future Voices is to change the political landscape, creating a ripple effect that will be imbedded into legal profession, policy making, and beyond, and building a tribe of young people who can advocate for their own rights in a system that has ignored them.

Mairead’s work with Future Voices is driven by her own personal story of survival. Growing up in Derry, Northern Ireland in the middle of the Troubles, she saw firsthand the discontent and violence the war wrought on her community, and the violations of human rights that people become accustomed to in their daily lives. Raised by an alcoholic mother and a deeply abusive father, Mairead and her siblings struggled tremendously throughout their childhoods. Despite the difficulty, Mairead found wells of resilience, becoming a star student fiercely committed to achievement, seeing academics as a haven. Even with her accolades and successes, scores and medals, she saw how hard it was to break into insular sectors without the leg up of contacts and references. While at an interview for a job in the House of Commons, she saw young man secure a job though he had scored a 3rd to her 1st and had no extracurriculars: “His father knew the MP.” She managed to secure herself a job at the European Commission by cold-calling for four months.

Mairead’s life was overturned when her brother Eamon committed suicide. Equally as intelligent, he did not have the self-belief that drove her rise. She saw him lose confidence and be unable to stand up for himself and his right and fall through the cracks, leaving school with no qualifications. After the death of their mother, he committed suicide. Mairead describes spending four months in a daily ritual of walking up and down the Foyle River, looking for her brother’s body. During this process—which she describes as “the first time I actually had a chance to think”-- she considered the contributing factors to her brother’s death, and realized how much society had failed him, and how few resources he had to fight for himself. Charity volunteers supported her daily search. This was her first time being ‘helped’ by others. She found the experience profoundly moving. She became convicted by the idea of building new ways to give young people the strength and opportunities to fight for themselves. This idea became Future Voices.

Mairead has a long history of entrepreneurship, and is known for her doggedness: “I just keep asking until they say yes.” She has had a consistent focus on defending the underdog and fighting for social justice. As an undergraduate, she designed and set up the first law clinic at her university and designed fundraisers for clean water initiatives. She designed and implemented a human rights monitoring programme for a controversial Traveller’s eviction. Mairead has been heavily involved with Traveller’s rights, writing the first ever UN Shadow Report on their rights within the UK context and seeing all of her recommendations adopted. “It was a political issue and I saw it needed to be about human rights.” She noticed that there were no Traveller representatives on any ethnicity task forces and boards and spent months cold-calling until she had secured slots. She has written a groundbreaking report on human rights abuses within the Bethany Homes, a remnant of the dark government legacy of church mother-and-baby homes, which engaged with corporations on medical testing. Her work will throw a spotlight on these injustices and will hopefully lead directly to restitution for victims.

Mairead designed and led an “equality budgeting” process to assess the Irish Government’s annual budget, from a human rights context. She explored whether the national budget disproportionally affected minorities or the underprivileged. She organized the first ever united response to the budget, surveying fifty top NGOs on how appropriations affected their populations, and coordinating them in a joint response calling for a human rights approach to the budget. This level of NGO collaboration was unprecedented in Ireland. She has coordinated a pre-emptive effort as a follow-up, to add in this input before the budget is finalized and better direct streams of funding on a national level.