Examination of Witnesses (Questions 586-599)
3 FEBRUARY 2004
MS MARY
MCKEE,
MR SEAMUS
MCALEAVEY
AND MS
FRANCES MCCANDLESS
Q586 Chairman: May I welcome you to the
third session in our inquiry this afternoon and ask you to identify
yourselves for the record, please?
Mr McAleavey: I am Seamus McAleavey,
the Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary
Action.
Ms McCandless: I am Frances McCandless.
I am the Director of Policy at the Northern Ireland Council for
Voluntary Action.
Ms McKee: I am Mary McKee, Director
of Groundwork Northern Ireland.
Chairman: We always let witnesses make
a statement if they want to at the beginning, or are you happy
to go straight to questions? Straight to questions.
Q587 Mr Cummings: Do you believe that
there is a connection between the Northern Ireland sectarianism
issue and the more recent racial incidents in the Province? Are
there any direct parallels with the race problems experienced
in some English cities?
Ms McCandless: I think there are
very, very close connections and in fact evidence is coming to
light in recent days that paramilitaries are themselves involved
in orchestrating some of the recent attacks. We have developed
a culture where we have institutionalised separation and intolerance
and it does not really matter thereafter what it is your are intolerant
of: it could be race, it could be gender, it could be religion.
In this case it is race.
Q588 Mr Cummings: Could it just be sheer
thuggery and exploitation?
Ms McCandless: It is possible,
but there is a very complex web of relationships developing. It
is about power and control in neighbourhoods and communities.
In one instance it is actually about an ongoing court case and
the manipulation of witnesses. It is a very complex situation
at its most detailed level. At its most fundamental level it is
about a society which has allowed those intolerances to become
acceptable.
Q589 Mr Cummings: We have all recognised
for many, many years the differences between Protestants and Catholics
but this seems now to be spilling out to the wider ethnic communities.
How do you account for this?
Ms McKee: How you account for
it perversely is that it is the beginning of the normalisation
of the society, the beginning of the fact that people are realising
it is not just two tribes. We have had 30 years of living in what
some policy makers call benign apartheid, where policy makers
and people on the ground allowed this institutional separation
to happen. Now there is an element of the community which cannot
tolerate difference in any manifestation. We need to join up the
debate in terms of community cohesion, the social cohesion debate
in England, Scotland and Wales, with the community relations debate
in Northern Ireland. There is lots of good practice and we have
so much to learn from you and we have so much to share with you.
For me, it is not just about religion and race, it is about relations.
Mr McAleavey: With regard to race,
the other thing to say is that up until very recent times Northern
Ireland has been a very white place. Even though there is division
between religious and ethnic groups in terms of Protestant and
Catholic, that tends to describe the community backgrounds people
come from rather than their religious persuasion. Northern Ireland,
because of the troubles, was not a welcoming place for people
from elsewhere. There are increasing numbers of people, Chinese,
other Asian backgrounds, black communities coming into Northern
Ireland, some of them to work in the Health Service. In the areas
where they concentrate, which have tended to be in the inner city
of Belfast quite close to the two main hospitals, they find themselves
under attack from working class communities.
Q590 Mr Cummings: The current violence
in Northern Ireland has lasted over 30 years. What are the lessons
for the rest of the United Kingdom in seeking to ensure that those
mistakes are not repeated in England?
Ms McCandless: The lessons are
similar to the ones we just articulated a minute ago: do not institutionalise
intolerance; do not spend to allow people to be separate; spend
the state's budget in a way which encourages integration and sharing.
We have separate schools. I was amazed, when the debate on faith
schools was being held in the media, that there was never any
reference to Northern Ireland. We have a system of faith schools
which has failed entirely to promote any form of social cohesion.
We have almost entirely separate housing. Our workplaces have
become increasingly segregated, so it is almost impossible to
meet in neutral venues and to live any kind of lives which are
integrated in any way. I suppose we have made this structural.
Mr McAleavey: Where large parts
of the community become alienated from the state and alienated
from authority, there is a serious problem. When we look at the
Cantle report and we look at some of the things which have happened
in the North of England we see parallels in that alienation. Then
you do get a breakdown, you do get what happened in the Catholic
working class community in Northern Ireland, which was that self-help
groups started to develop to deal with the issues they felt the
state was not dealing with for them. We found that there was a
greater number of community organisations in Catholic areas, there
was more community development and things like that as they became
alienated from the state's provision.
Ms McKee: One of the key issues,
which is a cliché in Northern Ireland, is: do not invest
in the politics of the last atrocity. There is nothing like a
good riot to focus the mind and in Northern Ireland it has been
synonymous with rewarding bad behaviour. The debate needs to be
on the table, but let us not get initiative fatigue.
Q591 Mr Cummings: Do you have any views
of any actions which could perhaps have been taken in the early
stages of the conflict, which could have prevented the culture
of intolerance and distrust from becoming so deeply ingrained
in society?
Ms McCandless: We invested very
little in finding out what works in terms of sharing, in terms
of shared communities, in terms of shared education, shared workplaces.
We invested a great deal in trying to mop up the damage as each
atrocity happened and therefore we come to a situation where we
have enormous quantities of research on why certain areas are
separate and how those communities feel and the lack of trust
they feel for each other. There is very, very little understanding
of what has worked and why it has worked, the areas which have
not separated, the areas which have not reverted to violence,
why that has been the case. We do not understand that yet.
Q592 Mr Clelland: Despite all the work
you and others are doing divisions are still intractable, are
they not? How much impact can the voluntary sector have on these
problems?
Mr McAleavey: There has been significant
impact in that one of the things we have done over the last 30
years has been to provide a shared neutral space. We are not neutral
in that our sector has lots to say on political, social and economic
issues and how they affect communities in Northern Ireland. We
have tried to maintain a space which is open to people from a
Nationalist or a Unionist background. One of the things which
has happened is that people did share ideas. In the early 1990s
our organisation supported work called Community Development in
Protestant Areas where some of the Protestant working class areas
in Belfast began to look at how they were behind the equivalent
Catholic working class areas. Quite a lot of information and experience
was shared. Some of the people who involved themselves in that
actually then involved themselves in what became the Loyalist
ceasefires. I think some development took place there and people
could see that there was reasonable commonality and they tried
to draw on that experience. Quite a lot of sharing goes on now,
even though we still have this political division between whether
people are pro union with Great Britain or pro a United Ireland.
There is still quite a lot of sharing and some of the worst aspects
of the troubles have been moderated. That is not to say there
have not been some really bad cases, like Holy Cross, which have
taken place since the ceasefires, since the peace process has
been developed and they have been incredibly damaging. It does
mean that people in those communities do become reinforced in
their separate lives, do live separate lives in terms of not knowing
each other particularly well at the individual level, yet some
of the community leaders are swapping ideas and exchanging things
all of the time.
Ms McCandless: There have also
been some very, very practical interventions in the voluntary
integrated school movement, which came out of the voluntary sector.
Those parents mortgaged their houses to set up schools where kids
could be integrated together and eventually the state took on
the funding of those; integrated play groups for pre-school children
and some very practical examples where change has been effected.
Ms McKee: My experience is that
you do not wait until those things happen, organisations like
ours have to be actively or proactively involved in creating some
of the debate. I found the discussion about the faith communities,
indeed the Youth Service, to be so interesting because it is one
which has been raging on with us for so long. For me the debate
is not about the Youth Service, but the provision of youth services.
It is best done, believe me, in a community situation. In Northern
Ireland we have the largest amount of money invested in the statutory
youth services in the world; phenomenally expensive. There has
been a lot of research about how that has worked and inevitably
if you create big institutions the debate is around salaries,
pensions. The debate is about needing more resources rather than
concentrating on the ground and working with real young people.
Q593 Mr Clelland: Do you think the public
sector in general and local authorities in particular rely too
heavily on voluntary organisations?
Ms McKee: I have to say I wish
they would rely on us more—and I would say that. I wish
they would rely on us more, in a mature and grown-up way. We are
quite happy in the voluntary sector to have service level agreements,
to be contracted in to deliver services. In terms of our role,
our role is not mainstream or delivering mainstream services.
Our role is about R&D; our role is about taking something
and trying it differently, joining up the Youth Service with mental
health, with the environment, with racism, sectarianism, and creating
something and studying it from the beginning. There is an opportunity,
certainly through the Cantle report as well, to begin to try things
out in a different way.
Ms McCandless: The state and local
government have relied on us heavily to do the difficult and the
unpleasant things in areas where services broke down or where
communities broke down and certainly the market was not going
to go there. It has often been the voluntary and community sectors
which have had to step in.
Mr McAleavey: I am not in the
least an expert in the Youth Service provision but one of the
things I hear from local communities is that it is fairly detached
from young people in those most difficult areas of Northern Ireland
in Belfast. They would say that there is a greater need for a
flexible and very quick response. For instance, a lot of the difficulties
arise in the interface areas of North Belfast around July, summertime,
for a number of reasons: it is the marching season, in terms of
Orange parades, but also the kids are off school. In North Belfast,
where our offices are based, local community workers coined the
phrase "recreational rioting". The kids take part in
riots because they are the most exciting thing around for them
to do. You have to displace that, as some of the community workers
have said, with high octane activities for kids to be involved
in, if you want to divert their attention.
Q594 Chris Mole: A rather unfortunate
metaphor to use.
Mr McAleavey: Well chosen in this
case. What happens is that nine-year-olds start the riot at the
traffic lights in North Queen Street, that quickly becomes sixteen-year-olds,
becomes adults, quickly moves from stones to bottles to petrol
bombs and sometimes blast bombs and on the odd occasion small
arms fire is exchanged. What they are saying is that you want
to take the heat out of that situation, you have to start sorting
it out at the very lowest levels of those kids. In our submission,
we have talked about how community workers have operated a mobile
phone scheme, where they do communicate with each other to try
to take away all the rumour which goes around about who is attacking
who, which sets fire to a lot of these things.
Q595 Mr Clelland: What do you need to
make your work more effective?
Ms McCandless: The main thing
we need is political consensus. Of course we need funding, we
need all kinds of things. But, Northern Ireland needs political
consensus or we are always going to be mopping up the damage.
We live in a framework, as everyone else does, of the state being
where everyone focuses their energy when it comes to voting, when
it comes to thinking about their long-term future. What we do
on the ground is often despite what is happening at that level,
so it is incredibly difficult. What we need most of all is a consensus
into which our politicians can buy and in which they can show
leadership and we can get on with doing what it is we need to
do, which is repairing the damage, otherwise we are just a sticking
plaster every time.
Ms McKee: I would agree. Our sector
has some of the frustrations. When I mentioned R&D, the downside
of that is that we front-load the risk, we front-load the personal
safety risk, we front-load the reputational risk when things go
wrong, very often we front-load the financial risk. What we need
in Northern Ireland, certainly for our work, is more leadership
and more leadership in the absence of politicians, more leadership
perhaps from civil servants to do things differently, perhaps
to look at partnership in a very, very different way, not just
commission us to do things, but be a partner and think them through.
Does this actually work? If it does not work and there are lessons
which need to be learned, then we must not be left carrying the
can. We are not going to have the Audit Commission chasing us
because we did not spend two pence or £10.
Mr McAleavey: One of the key things
which is probably needed, regardless of the political situation,
is more integration in terms of how government approaches these
things. We point out that quite a lot of the responses do not
sit well within a particular department's budget or an agency
or wherever. The most difficult thing of all is to get a corporate
response from government and we need to find better ways. People
keep talking about joined-up government, but we need to find better
ways of approaching some of these problems which engage people
in partnership rather than keep talking about partnership, but
cracking it is a different thing.
Q596 Mr Betts: Is one of the problems
of the strength of many community organisations that so many of
them are rooted in one particular community or another? We talked
before about the good exchange of ideas between community leaders,
but probably not much happening between ordinary members of the
community being very much involved in the organisations which
help and benefit their community.
Mr McAleavey: Northern Ireland
is a divided society. Your colleague John Reid, when he became
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, said that people quite
often wanted to tell him the full history of the last 800 years
as to how we arrived in the spot we are now in. One thing is for
sure, sectarianism has been a big thing for 400 years in Northern
Ireland and it blows hot and cold at times. People separate out
at different times. Particularly in 1968 and 1969 there was the
biggest movement of people which had taken place in that small
part of the world for hundreds of years and people have divided
out. There are areas which are predominantly Catholic and predominantly
Protestant and it is easy to grow up in those areas and not really
know the other side; certainly if you are below 40. What happens
is that community organisations will come forward and they will
be almost exclusively one side or the other, simply by the area
that they are in. We have talked recently about single identity
groups and that is particularly common in Protestant working class
areas where they feel they have to have a single identity group
to develop their culture and feel that they can then communicate
with the other side. One of our fears is that that does not happen
there. One of the points we picked up from the Cantle report was
that greater need, in terms of programming, to see we do not build
these little islands all of the time, but that there is much more
sharing out and beyond, otherwise we will have communities which
simply compete with each other. However, it is very difficult,
because people live where they live.
Ms McCandless: There are issues
of personal safety in this. It is not just about choice or culture.
If we use the language of social capital, Northern Ireland probably
has a great deal of bonding capital which looks inwards and builds
quite strong and outwardly cohesive -looking communities—sometimes
those are held together more by force or threat than by choice—but
not very much of the bridging capital which would allow or encourage
those communities to reach outside themselves to other communities
or to decision makers or to arms of the state. It sometimes also
depends how organisations are funded and how they are incentivised
as to what becomes possible or not possible for them.
Ms McKee: That is where my organisation
would come in, in terms of one of our value bases, community cohesion
and community relations. So any project—and we have 104
of them at the moment—we would create would automatically
have an inbuilt incentive to come together. That is not to say
we want you to come together to discuss community cohesion, because
you would get a stampede. It is to sit round a table to discuss
child care, play, environment and generally relationships are
built up. It does happen and it does take some time, but it should
not take for ever. You cannot keep investing in people being separate.
You have to incentivise them. If it continues to be separate,
then you stop it and you try it somewhere else and you build good
case studies which actually work.
Q597 Mr Betts: A lot of these organisations
will have to get public funding. Do you think there should be
a requirement, when public funding is handed over, that the groups
being funded invite citizens across communities, or at least that
there is an incentive to work with a similar group in another
community? How careful do you have to be that you do not drive
the organisation away from the public funding to look for other
sources and then you are back to the churches, or religious groups
or elsewhere and to say if that is a condition they will not accept
it and they want to remain inside their own community and they
actually pull away altogether?
Mr McAleavey: That is right. It
is a really, really difficult task to do this. If it were easy
to square, people would have done it. The other thing that happens,
if there is a cross-community requirement, is that people are
very good at getting around that by making an arrangement with
another community, saying we all love each other and we will sort
the funding out and you will get yours and we will get ours. People
are very good at thwarting those sorts of arrangements. We do
have to invest in terms of local communities, but we also then
have to build up their own confidence quickly so that they realise
they need to dialogue with others, they need to be involved with
people outside their own immediate area.
Q598 Chairman: If they fiddle the system
to get cross-community cohesion, to get the money, is that not
at least a start?
Mr McAleavey: You can become very
cynical. We are not involved in funding, but I saw an application
once which said "We are a cross-community group of Catholics,
Protestants and legless paraplegics". They thought they would
hit everything which sounds good. People can get round the system.
Questions would be asked. We have had a community relations council,
or a forerunner of that, in Northern Ireland for donkeys' years
as well. How has it not solved the problem?
Ms McKee: It is not just about
money. It is also about putting projects together to improve the
local area and sometimes when there is a very weak infrastructure
and sometimes the infrastructure is not as kosher as you would
want, then it is about organisations handling the money until
there is the infrastructure within that organisation. In Northern
Ireland, in fairness, we are awash with money: European, American,
every element of money. It is not about money. It is how money
is invested and how it is spent.
Ms McCandless: We also have to
be careful about the superficiality of what we spend on what we
would call crude contact work. It is not enough to fulfil the
terms of your funding obligation that you meet a few Catholics
once on a Friday afternoon and call that cross-community work.
We have had years of an industry of taking kids away together
on holiday to America. They come back and they beat the living
daylights out of each other again the next summer as they did
the summer before they ever went away. It is much, much longer
term work than that. When Holy Cross was going on, there was an
integrated school in North Belfast and some of those children
have been integrated since primary level right up through to secondary
school level and they were out rioting on different sides. If
it is easy to slip back into that after years and years of an
education which is focused on asking you to examine what the differences
and the issues are and how you can live together peacefully, then
if that is not quite enough, if you need all of the structures
around that, parents and society, then a funding requirement which
says you must sit down with the other side for ten minutes once
a week is just not going to cut it. That kind of superficiality
is meaningless.
Q599 Mr Betts: How do you measure the
impact of you bringing communities together?
Ms McKee: That is something I
am asked to do every day by funders. They ask how I can know it
is value for money and how I can know it works. There are two
very basic replies. We know it works if we are working in four
communities, six communities across Belfast. After a certain amount
of time sectarian murals, hate graffiti, will disappear off walls.
Red, white and blue, green white and gold kerbstones will disappear.
Flags will be put up, but they will come down. There are very
quantifiable ways in which you can measure. Qualitatively? You
take attitude surveys. This is measuring the effectiveness of
your work, especially when you use the environment and regeneration.
It is not rocket science. The challenge is sustaining that.
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