Rundale

By Moray Bresnihan

What is this nebulous thing called the community sector? What does it look like? If you can’t see it then you don’t need it. You’re not hungry, homeless, suffer from addiction, have literacy and numeracy problems, special needs, a disability, are a victim of crime, poverty, or have mental health issues. You’re lucky. But know this, life can turn on a dime, and some day you may fall off your high wire act and it will be up to us to catch you. The people who can offer you help and support and new possibilities.

However, the political class never liked our autonomous structures and community led projects. In Ireland, successive governments have been working to manage the sector for over 20 years, and in that time have dismantled thousands of independent community-led projects across the country through policies designed to corporatize the sector and bring it under central government control. This transformation has been extraordinary in its speed and, over the last two decades, policy makers have succeeded in shaping dynamic, locally led, community projects into a singular controlled programme managed by market-driven logics.

The outset of the war

In 2002 the first salvo of the war against the community sector was fired by the newly elected coalition of Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats. Both parties ruthlessly set about developing a neo-liberal agenda that ushered in the development of an integrated managerial model under the aegis of the newly created Department of Community Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. Despite its official declaration of wishing to strengthen community projects, it was more interested in aligning the sector to state objectives by developing a technocratic approach to the management, production, and marketing of safety nets.

Within two years of the department’s establishment, funding for the community sector was cut by 53%. Not happy with closing down half the community-led projects, groups, and organisations, the government withdrew all funding from the anti-poverty networks, cut community development by 17%, closed Regional Support Agencies and rural development companies, and renamed them Local Development Companies. This open assault on local independent community support structures was a clear and unambiguous signal to communities that the government was determined to take control and corporatize the sector. No longer did the government value bottom-up development, the capacity of communities to build their own support structures and create local solutions to unmet need.

Post-crash austerity

When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the government had the perfect opportunity to impose unpopular policies on a society that was overwhelmed by a crisis that was not of its making. In its wake, the Irish state undertook a full-scale policy assault on the community sector. By the end of 2008 the government had disbanded the Combat Poverty Agency, who had spent over 22 years raising public awareness about the extent of poverty in Ireland, cut the budget to the Equality Authority by 43%, and in 2009, established a Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes, chaired by the arch neo-liberal economist Colm McCarthy, to examine where they could make further cutbacks in government spending.

In its ‘Report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes’  the group recommended that the Department of Community, Rural & Gaeltacht Affairs would be closed and all its functions redistributed along with the discontinuation of the Revitalising Areas by Planning Investment and Development scheme (RAPID). Further recommendations included: the phasing out of Ceantair Laga Árd-Riachtanais; funding cuts for the Community Services Programme; the Local Development Social Inclusion Programme; the Community Development Programme, as well as the discontinuation of many drugs task force projects, disability projects, and Gaeltacht schemes.

In a report commissioned by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Brian Harvey detailed the extent to which these recommendations disproportionately targeted the sector. For while overall government spending did fall by 2.8%, national supports for the community sector was cut by 48% and funding for local community development by 35%, resulting in the loss of over 11,150 jobs.

In just seven years, the community sector was decimated; projects faced closure, budgets were severely cut, a substantial number of state agencies concerned with social policy were closed, central government became the sole funding provider, and employment in the sector was reduced by over 31%.

One can only surmise that if government policy reflects political vision then the destruction of the community sector, people and organisations who had worked tirelessly to care for vulnerable Irish people, was an open attack by a state that was as deeply antagonistic towards the principles of community work as it was hellbent on suppressing dissent, curbing the independence of community development projects, and making policy decisions on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. This policy direction can most clearly be seen in the work of the Centre of Effective Services.

The Centre of Effective Services and the gutting of community services

If you’re going to hollow out a community sector dedicated to helping the poorest and most vulnerable in our society then best wring your hands, clutch your pearls, and pay someone else to do it. In 2008, the governing coalition of Fianna Fáil, the Green Party, and the Progressive Democrats, did just that. They went into business with Atlantic Philanthropies, run by Chuck Feeney, Ireland’s favourite American billionaire and duty-free shopper, and, in a joint partnership, set up the Centre of Effective Services which promised “to connect the design and delivery of services with scientific and technical knowledge of ‘what works’”.

Shortly after its establishment, the CES was commissioned to review the Community Development Programme and the Local and Community Development Programme and in 2010 published, ‘Effective Community Development Programmes: A Review’’. The paper, laid out its recommendations for centralised governance of the community sector and the introduction of a monitoring system that would measure the service delivery outputs of each community-based project within the programme. This corporatist approach gave the government all the ‘expert knowledge’ it required to centralise control and end state-sponsored community development.

In 2010, the Community Development Programme, along with the Local Development and Social Inclusion Programme, were brought in under the newly established Local and Community Development Programme (LCDP). The programme, responsible to POBAL, (a state-sponsored organisation with responsibility for administering and managing government and EU funding aimed at supporting social inclusion and addressing social disadvantage in the country) was deployed as a results-driven work-activation programme in line with the neoliberal logic of austerity. It was framed by a managerial structure in which quantitative targets were set and centrally monitored by an IT system named IRIS (Integrated Reporting and Information System) for recording ‘value for money’ outcomes.

With the introduction of this new ‘logic model’, community workers were overburdened by administrative and bureaucratic procedures, as well as increased levels of stress, pressure, and mistrust in their work. Mark Fisher, in his book, ‘Capitalist Realism’, describes this constant measurement of work as “…geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself”. Despite calls for a substantial redesign of the programme, Fine Gael and the Labour Party, pursued their neoliberal agenda and, in 2014, replaced the LCDP with the SICAP, which introduced competitive tendering for the first time and marked the completion of the marketization of the community sector. Funding was no longer based on community need; rather, each tender was evaluated on the merits of its inputs, outputs, key performance indicators and service delivery at the most effective cost. In a report on SICAP, Community Work Ireland concluded that, ‘workers had reported significant loss of their autonomy and their ability to respond to the needs of their communities as they are ‘contracted’ to deliver a set of centrally designed services to a centrally prescribed number and range of targets’.

The state had won; its policy direction had insured that community-led development would be determined by managerial outputs that had little or nothing to do with participation, equality, social justice, collective action, and empowerment.

It took the government only 13 years to convince us that the citizen, as consumer, can best flourish in a world where everything is determined by the invisible hand of the market; that individual self-interest will ensure that everyone gets what they deserve, and those that dissent are both degenerate and morally corrosive. Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern put it best, in 2007, when referring to those who raised questions about government policy, saying: ‘I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide.’ At the time of his remark Ireland was at the height of the Celtic Tiger, with the government busy facilitating rampant consumerism through low taxation, pro-business regulatory policies, and the privatization of public assets; measures that were to destroy the economy and the social fabric of Irish society.

That was then and this is now

Today we live in a country ruled by a political class that has systematically dismantled local participatory democratic structures, brought the community sector under central government control, turned community-led projects into market driven service providers, and introduced a competitive tendering process managed by a single government agency. And, while these policies have succeeded in shifting the focus away from the most vulnerable to those who can be ‘work-activated’ in the bright new future of tomorrow, they have, more importantly, ensured that the next time you fall off your high wire there will be no one there to catch you.

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Moray Bresnihan is an artist working in Cork Community Art Link and Foroige, a national youth organisation. He has worked in the community sector for over 30 years.