In a frantic 24-hour visit to the North last week, the EU Commissioner for Regional Affairs, Ms Monika Wulf-Mathies saw the union's £240 million peace programme at work and heard from those who are using it about their hopes.
This was her the seventh trip to the North. There were old friends at every turn and a strong sense of her personal commitment to a remarkable EU programme for peace and reconciliation that has approved grants to some 7,000 organisations across the North and in the Border counties.
She points to the fact that 14,000 groups have applied for help as a sign of the impact of the EU's £240 million, and is determined to find another £160 million for the final two years of the programme.
The Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust, one of the key NGO partners in the programme, sees it as enormously positive. In its mid-term review, the group reports "an enornmous burst of new energy that can be directly attributed to the availability off new funding" and "a sense of local ownership at community level of the programme that has never before been a feature of EU involvement".
On her whirlwind visit last week, the commissioner met the social partners for breakfast, spoke to a conference on strategic planning for the North, met two ministers, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, MEPs Ian Paisley and John Hume, visited two projects in north Belfast, hosted a press lunch and went to Lisburn to meet an inter-church group.
In Belfast she faced an audience of community and voluntary sector activists for two hours of intensive feedback on the pro gramme. The mood was one of overwhelming enthusiasm for what is seen as "peace-making from the bottom up" based on community empowerment, an indispensable counterpart to the Stormont talks process.
Over an Ulster fry, Ms Inez McCormack of the ICTU told the commissioner that the best legacy the programme could leave would be the ability to sustain the new civic dialogue which is at the core of the programme. It was a theme taken up throughout the day, by business leaders, community activists and even the politicians she met. Ms Wulf-Mathies's own view is that with its extensive local accountability, the process of delivery of cash is as important as the money itself. Once the money runs out, she hopes the process will continue and intends to incorporate the successful Northern experience of local accountability in mainstream structural funding throughout the Union. It improves not only transparency but efficiency, she insists.
That will certainly provoke a battle with the more centralised member states; Ms Wulf-Mathies lost few opportunities to urge grass-roots activists and the social partners to help her with political pressure on governments. The Commission, she said, was determined not only to devolve more responsibility for day-to-day spending away from Brussels but ensure there was a genuine sense of "ownership" by people in European funding. "We are going to do that by making sure no programme is adopted that has not gone through discussion with the local authorities involved," she said. "Wish us luck."
Instead of funnelling EU aid through government departments alone, the special Northern Ireland peace programme established two other forms of delivery mechanisms - while just over 40 per cent of cash would be used in the traditional way for government-sponsored projects, the same amount would go to "intermediate funding bodies", independent bodies like Combat Poverty in the South or the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust. They in turn would assess projects and distribute cash to the myriad individual community and NGO projects - from the £200 to a Donegal teenage drama project, the £480 to Ballinamallard Girls Brigade in Fermanagh, the £18,600 to the joint work by SIPTU and the Belfast Unemployed Centre in training programmes for young people.
The balance of the cash (17 per cent) has gone to cross-community partnerships based on the district council areas involving politicians, the social partners and community interests. In these, DUP councillors have sat down with their Sinn Fein counterparts to plan projects for their local communities. Each mechanism has been monitored at local and province-wide level by bodies that have actively involved thousands of individuals and groups in the decision-making process.
The particular success of the partnership approach has prompted Ms Wulf-Mathies to press for more of the funding to go to them in the second half of the programme. She is determined not to take the cash from the rest of the non-state sector.
"The problem is that for too long the Northern Ireland Office has seen its role as protecting the taxpayers' money from politicians on both sides of the community who could not really be trusted to spend it fairly," one experienced voluntary sector worker argued. "That role was honourable," he said, "but we must now take risks for peace by trusting communities to take responsibility to make decisions for themselves, and it is working."
