Putting a price on peace?

The North's voluntary sector believes more funds are needed despite reports of a lucrative 'peace industry', writes Fionola Meredith.

When it was recently reported that peace in Northern Ireland is a £1 billion (€1.45 billion) industry, many people living there reacted with disbelieving snorts of derision. After all, statistical analyses show sectarian divisions there to be more deeply ingrained than ever.

Outside the world of community relations, peace work is often viewed with a combination of scepticism and suspicion in the North. To many, the idea of cross-community action evokes images either of "toffs against terrorism" - middle-class do-gooders organising "hands-across-the-barricades" basket-weaving sessions at interface areas - or of hatchet-faced paramilitaries appropriating for their own dark purposes peace funds designed to promote healing and reconciliation.

Stories have appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the London Times and the Mirror claiming that the "peace industry" has become Northern Ireland's largest employer, with 30,000 workers being paid by 4,500 community organisations, which have benefited from £1 billion in handouts from the European Commission and the British and Irish governments in the last decade.

The source of the stories was a press release publicising a "funding crisis" conference jointly organised by Incore, an international conflict research project within the University of Ulster, and the Cresco Trust, which works with disadvantaged young people in Derry. But Margaret Lee, managing director of the Cresco Trust, is annoyed by what she sees as the misinterpretation of the conference's publicity information.

"We never suggested that there was a 'peace industry'. It would be unfair to use such an emotive term. People are doing phenomenal peace and reconciliation work here, they take all the crap, and to call it a peace industry is offensive to the work they do."

And the report has left people such as Gordon McCullough, head of research at the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA), shaking their heads in frustration. "There is no peace industry; the phrase doesn't actually mean anything. Our research shows that there are 4,500 organisations in total making up the community and voluntary sector, and employing people in fields such as health, environment, children's services and education.

"Many of them have not received money from either of the European Union peace programmes - only 9 per cent of the sector's income comes from Europe. It's not the big deal many make it out to be: the majority of these organisations do not work in the area of peace and reconciliation. There are only 139 organisations whose primary focus is cross-community work."

Behind the misleading shock-value of the figure of 30,000 so-called "peace workers" lies a vast and diverse sector whose employees include play-group supervisors, disability awareness trainers and citizens' rights advisers: providing valuable services, but not engaged in front-line cross-community or cross-Border work.

The idea that cross-community focused organisations are being lavished with armloads of government and European funding provokes a hollow laugh from the men and women who undertake the difficult, messy and precarious job of peace-building on the ground.

Chris O'Halloran of the Belfast Interface Project, which seeks to create effective strategies for interface areas in the city, says: "The public perception is that money is being thrown at us, but nothing much changes. People are still struggling from month to month."

It's a situation Michael Doherty, of the Lenadoon Community Forum in west Belfast, recognises only too well. "We were supposed to have a peace dividend, but the funding predicament is the worst in 20 years. People knew that peace monies would come to an end. So local community groups had to look elsewhere - but mainstream government funding is not forthcoming."

It seems that the future sustainability of the community and voluntary sector and the services it delivers are increasingly uncertain. Money from the extended Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB) Peace II programme will run out in 2006. Following EU budget negotiations at the end of December 2005, a further €200 million has been secured for an SEUPB Peace III programme running from 2007 to 2013. But the amount available is only half of what is available in the current Peace II extension, leading to concerns about how and where the limited funds will be spent.

While they may be much smaller in number and much more cash-strapped than some media reports suggest, what do real "peace workers" do? Does their bridge-building work make a real difference in the communities they work with? After all, anyone with even a passing knowledge of peace and reconciliation strategies knows how easily things can go wrong.

Who hasn't heard of the women's cross-community dialogue events that descend into howling recriminations hurled across the floor? Or the well-meaning arts projects which attempt to encourage disaffected loyalist and republican youths to bond over literature only to fizzle out through lack of interest? Chris O'Halloran thinks much of the most vital cross-community work is almost invisible.

"A lot of work being done is about preventing a bad situation becoming worse. It's a bit like having insurance for your car: it's working for you in the background, but you don't see it."

As well as the careful, tentative manoeuvring that characterise much interface work, there are more visible instances of exemplary cross-community connections.

The Stewartstown Regeneration Project is an inter-community regeneration initiative located on the interface between the Protestant Suffolk and Catholic Lenadoon housing estates in outer west Belfast. Here, inter-community distrust, violence and confrontation has been replaced by a new spirit of co-operation which has seen the creation of a thriving (and jointly-owned) community and commercial resource building, which also houses a creche and playschool facilities.

"We worked closely with our colleagues in Suffolk and it's transformed the interface landscape," says Michael Doherty of the Lenadoon Community Forum. "The two communities were at each other's throats - now we're working together. The only difficulty is that the funding is running out."

Despite the success stories, the perception that the other side of the community are receiving a disproportionately large helping of the funding pie stubbornly endures. In particular, unionist politicians have questioned whether peace funding is distributed on an equitable basis to the two communities.

DUP MEP Jim Allister, who has been vocal in urging unionist communities to apply for Peace II extension funding, has insisted there is no point in Northern Ireland getting more EU funding if the "current imbalance" isn't redressed. And Ulster Unionist MEP Jim Nicholson, while welcoming proposed Peace III funding, has warned it is "time for unionist community groups to start applying for funding" and to "get their fair share of what they're entitled to".

But many community relations experts and practitioners say this alleged inequity simply does not exist. Colin Stutt, an independent economic and public policy consultant, says: "There is this skewed perception that one side is getting more than the other, but all the evidence points to reasonably equal distribution."

The Community Relations Council (CRC) has been attempting to challenge the perception that "the other" community gets everything when it comes to funding and resources. CRC chief executive Duncan Morrow says, "We need to move away from attitudes such as 'How much did our community get and how much did they get?' and start focusing on what is being done with the money. Over £3 million (€4.35 million) was spent on policing the Whiterock parade. In contrast just over £1 million (€1.45 million) was spent by CRC in core-funding community relations work over a year-long period, equivalent to spending £1.16(€1.69) per person per year in Northern Ireland, the price of a single bus fare from a segregated bus stop."

Others have criticised SEUPB for its long-winded bureaucracy, for creating a huge dependency culture in the community and voluntary sector, and for prioritising economic prosperity in the North over peace and reconciliation.

Last year, there was incredulity when it emerged that EU Peace and Reconciliation money had been allocated to Thales Air Defence, a Belfast-based company producing and developing missiles.

But the real fear is that sectarian divisions in the North are so deep-rooted they are impervious to change. Some organisations have advocated a "community development" approach to the problem, attempting to empower local communities to pursue their own needs and agendas. But if the focus on building relationships is lost, cultural apartheid could be reinforced. As Ray Mullan of the Community Relations Council says, "You'll just get more prosperous communities still at loggerheads with each other."