Last week up to 1,000 community workers and employers marched on the Dáil to protest about funding cuts in the community sector. MICHAEL McHALEreports on the march's background
FOR THE past month Susan Collins has been training her staff in how to say ‘no’. She works in Addiction Response, a help centre for drug addicts in Crumlin, Co Dublin, and because the centre has a lack of resources, many of the people coming to the organisation for help have had to be turned away.
Four weeks ago, the staff of Addiction Response were told by the Government that they were going to have an 8.5 per cent cut in their funding from July, back-dated to January.
“Because of these cuts, we are now forced to turn away drug addicts who come to us seeking help. Instead of giving people the opportunity to address their problems, the Government is leaving them to a life of addiction and chaos,” says Collins.
The cuts to the centre are part of a wide range of funding reductions which have been made in the community sector since the Government’s supplementary Budget in April. Last Wednesday saw almost 1,000 community workers march on the Department of Finance to show their dissatisfaction with the cuts, which include a 17 per cent drop in funding for projects under the National Drugs Strategy.
Speaking in Dublin’s Liberty Hall before the march, members of the Siptu and Impact trade unions, which represent close to 20,000 community workers, said the measures may result in the closure of many community organisations.
One victim of the cuts has been the Return to Education project. It has had its funding ended and is now looking at closing numerous adult training courses in subjects ranging from literacy to computing.
The project was set up eight years ago as an initiative between the Community Employment (CE) scheme and the Vocational Education Committees (VECs).
“The Return to Education project has broken that cycle of disadvantage in the community,” says Mary Bevan, an adult literacy tutor working in locations around Dublin.
Already she has seen adult training centres close as a result of the disappearance of Return to Education.
Under the Community Employment programme, participants work a total of 19 hours a week in the community sector, including six hours of training courses developed to give them skills that will help them get full-time work.
According to Bevan, the Government now anticipates that those in the CE programme will go to their local VEC to receive training, but with the VEC facing its own round of Budget cuts, places are limited.
Many of those involved in community adult training marched against the cutbacks last week.
“We are keeping our fingers crossed that the Government didn’t understand the implications of this,” says Bevan. “I was expecting cuts . . . but we weren’t expecting the Return to Education project to be gone.”
At the same time, many tutors like Bevan have lost their jobs. “It’s such a new thing for us,” she says.
According to David Connolly, Siptu’s Community Branch President, last week’s march was just the beginning in the campaign to reverse the Budget cuts in the community sector.
“We want to get the message to the Government to realise the implications of this,” he says. “Because are scattered over the country it’s not clear to the Government what they have done.”
Already it seems that the protest has had an effect. After initially being told that the CE programme would have the training grant per participant reduced from €500 to €300 a year, and a cut in the maintenance grant from €20 to €15 a week, the community sector last week got an e-mail from Fás, which handles the running of the programme, saying that “it has been decided not to make any changes to either materials or training grants on CE projects until the budgetary implications are further assessed”.
Community childcare centres, which look after the children of disadvantaged families, including those whose parents have had drugs problems, have also seen a reversal of fortunes, but on a narrower scale. After being told in April that those centres which had applied for capital grants would be unsuccessful, 30 childcare centres around the country were last week told that they would in fact receive their grants from the Government (costing the State €10.6 million). However, this still leaves community childcare services that have seen their Government funding halted, with their futures in doubt.
Other financial losses in the community sector include a €9 million drop in funding for the National Women’s Strategy, a €4 million cut in youth projects as well as a 12.5 per cent cut in the suicide prevention budget.
According to Susan Collins of Addiction Response Crumlin, the budgetary measures are part of a long-term denial by the Government of the necessity for such services in society.
“We developed these projects because the Government wouldn’t listen to us then and they won’t listen to us now,” she says.
At last week’s protest Impact representative Una O’Connor said that “every cut in community sector funding means dashed hopes for unemployed young people, less help for victims of rape, fewer refuges for victims of domestic violence, more dangerous nights on the street for our homeless, more disadvantaged women passing up rare job opportunities because they can’t get affordable childcare, and more young people condemned to a short lifetime of drug addiction.”
But despite the problems facing the community sector, many of those involved have vowed to continue to provide these services.
As Collins says, “If you trample on someone long enough they do react.”