Addiction is often spoken about in terms of crisis. The crisis of the individual, the crisis of the family, the crisis of the health service. Yet between those moments of crisis lies an uncomfortable reality. People leave treatment and wonder what comes next. Families struggle to understand what recovery really means. Communities want to help but often do not know how. It is in those spaces, between existing services rather than instead of them, that David Delaney and Michelle Robertson have built the ARC Project.
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ARC stands for Addiction Recovery Community, but the name only hints at what the organisation has become. Founded less than two years ago, it grew not from a strategic plan or funding initiative but from listening.
“The ARC Project was founded just coming up on two years ago,” says Delaney. “It came in response to a community creativity project in Portlaoise where we attempted to break the stigma around addiction and highlight the benefits of recovery through a creative arts programme. As a result, we were getting a lot of questions around where people should go and what they should do.”
Those conversations revealed something important. While addiction services exist throughout Ireland, they are not distributed equally, and many families find themselves trying to navigate a complicated system with little guidance. Rather than attempting to duplicate existing services, Delaney and Robertson saw an opportunity to connect them.
“We are not replacing any services,” Delaney explains. “We’re identifying gaps in the fantastic services that are already out there. It’s looking at where we can slot in and bridge the gap between services and the communication that goes with addiction.”
That distinction matters. ARC is not another treatment provider. Instead, it acts as the thread that joins treatment, recovery, families and community together, recognising that none of those elements can succeed entirely on their own.
Robertson says the organisation developed because they simply could not ignore what people were asking for.
Listening
“It was responding to what was asked of us. We started something and it was something we couldn’t walk away from. It was the family support side of it. That’s what people were looking for, somewhere to go for families who were in the midst of addiction with their loved ones. It’s literally grown from there.”
That emphasis on families distinguishes ARC from many traditional recovery programmes. Addiction rarely affects just one individual. Parents, partners, children and siblings often find themselves living through the same uncertainty while having very little understanding of what recovery involves.
ARC therefore runs parallel support groups, one for people in recovery and another for family members.
“We do topic weeks and open meetings,” Robertson explains. “We bring people in who are in recovery to speak to the families because families have so many questions. We don’t understand what’s going on and we can only see the chaos in front of us. When somebody comes in to speak, people want to ask the questions. They want to see someone in recovery and see what that looks like. There is hope there.”
Just as importantly, the two groups regularly come together.
“We try to bring the family group and the recovery group together once a month. We just do an open meeting and have a chat. It works really well because it’s that open discussion. Families learn what someone has to go through to get recovery, while people in recovery understand what their families have been experiencing while they’re trying to rebuild their lives.”
Community
The word that continually emerges throughout any conversation with Delaney and Robertson is community. Recovery is not viewed as something that happens inside a treatment centre before ending at discharge. Instead, it becomes something sustained by ordinary relationships, understanding and shared experience.
That philosophy extends into how ARC supports people entering treatment.
“We’re not counsellors and we’re not therapists in this role,” Delaney says. “But we will hold your hand. We’ll be on the end of the phone. We’ll help you get into the service you need and we’ll be there on the other side of it.”
Families, meanwhile, are encouraged to learn alongside their loved ones rather than waiting anxiously for treatment to finish.
“Someone can be in treatment for four weeks or twelve weeks,” Delaney says. “The family doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on. Michelle has done fantastic work helping families understand the treatment process so they know what to expect. When the person comes home there’s already a support scaffold in place.”
Robertson believes education removes much of the fear that families naturally experience.
“We’ve had people come in from treatment centres to explain how the programmes work. Families often think they can’t contact their loved one or don’t know what’s expected. When they understand what’s happening they can breathe a little. Then they know what to expect when their loved one comes home.”
Recovery itself can sometimes surprise families. After months away, many expect the returning family member simply to resume ordinary life, yet maintaining recovery often requires attending meetings and continuing structured support.
“What we try to teach,” Robertson says, “is that we’re together in it. It’s not them and it’s not us. We do recovery together.”
That shared responsibility also challenges one of the enduring misconceptions surrounding addiction, that recovery is simply about stopping substance use.
Nobody, Robertson points out, chooses addiction.
“Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to have a life of addiction.’ They don’t. For someone to get into recovery it’s about understanding why they do it. That’s where their own work comes in.”
She believes modern life creates pressures that can quietly lead people across a line they never intended to cross.
Delaney adds: “Sometimes you just slip into it. Before you know it, you’ve crossed that line.”
It is perhaps this absence of judgement that makes ARC’s approach feel different. Throughout the conversation there is remarkably little focus on blame. Instead, there is an emphasis on understanding, practical help and compassion.
Open Recovery
The project itself continues to evolve. Alongside its community groups, ARC has developed what Delaney describes as the first recovery app of its kind in Ireland, Open Recovery, while its website provides resources for individuals, families and professionals alike. Yet technology remains only one tool among many. The real work still happens through conversations, meetings and relationships.
Listening to Delaney and Robertson, it becomes clear that the organisation’s greatest strength may simply be its willingness to acknowledge what already works while recognising what is missing. They speak warmly of existing addiction services and repeatedly stress that ARC is designed to complement rather than compete with them.
Their ambition is modest in one sense but transformative in another. They are not trying to redesign Ireland’s addiction services overnight. They are trying to ensure fewer people fall through the cracks between them.
For anyone affected by addiction, whether personally or through someone they love, those gaps can feel impossibly wide. ARC exists to narrow them.
As Delaney puts it, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question. Please reach out.”
Sometimes recovery begins not with a treatment programme or a medical intervention, but with someone answering the phone, listening without judgement and helping another person take the first step. That is the community David Delaney and Michelle Robertson are quietly building, one conversation at a time.
Go to https://thearcproject.ie/ to find out more
