'Good society' impossible without strong community sector

The Carnegie UK Trust's report calls for civil society involvement in the creation of a Good Society. But how can this be achieved without an independent, vibrant community sector? By Ann Irwin.

As reported in the Irish Times and in these pages, a significant audience of people attended the launch of the Carnegie UK Trust’s Making Good Society, the final report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland in the Royal Hibernian Academy on Thursday April 22nd. They were told that simultaneous crises in finance, politics and the environment are all in different ways symptoms of an out of control individualism and that there is a need to consider the greater good of society and a shift from an ‘age of me’ to an ‘age of we’.

The report refers to civil society organisations in ‘Donegal or Denbighshire, Devon or Dumfriesshire’ as not governed by profit or power but by values and enthusiasms. Some of us, the report states, are inspired by frustration and anger, others by hope, and others still by fun but together, the many parts of civil society contribute enormously to our everyday quality of life.

Crucially and accurately, the report describes civil society as reaching parts of our lives that are beyond the state and business. Others have extended this argument to contend that civil society is a crucial part of a healthy democracy and is, in its expression of participatory democracy, a counter balance to the largely homogenous nature of representative democracy.  The gathering in the Royal Hibernian Academy heard that civil society is being increasingly relied upon to complement the formal processes of representative democracy and to develop more radical solutions to deal with the fundamentals of power.

At the same time, across the city, in the much less salubrious but possibly more welcoming surroundings of the St Andrew’s Resource Centre in Pearse Street, an audience of 160 community workers, community activists and others were expressing their anger and incredulity at the continuation of the dismantling of the most local expression of civil society active in the most disadvantaged communities in Ireland. Those attending were told of the devastation in Ballymun at the fact that the project funded under the Community Development Programme (CDP) was closed as a result of the (very flawed) review carried out by the Department of Community, Rural & Gaeltacht Affairs for spurious and inaccurate reasons.

In fact, it is far more likely, the seminar was told, that the closure of the project in Ballymun and others around the country is as a result of the fact that the projects were successful in their efforts to ensure that the dissenting voice, often critical of policy and government direction, of the most marginalised in Irish society was heard.

The cyclical nature of community development, or rather State appreciation for community development, was identified. The cycles, recognised by all those in the room, includes State appreciation for the ability and capacity of community work to reach the most disadvantaged, the most ‘unreachable’ people and communities, and the capacity of community work to contribute to sound policy development; State’s perception that it can do it all itself; State acknowledgement that it cannot reach the most disadvantaged; State ‘rediscovering’ community development.

Touching on another of the current key issues for the community sector, the design of the new Local and Community Development Programme (LCDP) set to supercede the current CDP, the gathering was also told by a speaker from the Tavistock Institute in the UK that the model on which the new programme designed by the Centre for Effective Services is based is ‘old and tired’ and the world has moved on from these types of models. Yet our Department is continuing to laud the model as one a model based on international best practice despite statements to the contrary by community workers, community activists, academics and others.

The implementation mechanism for the new LCDP that requires that independent, locally based and managed organisations to be assimilated into Partnership structures was also unanimously condemned by participants, many of whom questioned the motivation of the State is seeming to need to control civil society, independent organisations working with the most marginalised.

The Department have consistently described their moves as a way of withdrawing the ‘burden of governance’ from the ‘voluntary boards of management’ (a term used by t

he Department but one that has never been used by the sector).  It is clearly beyond the capacity of those within the Department to understand the fact that there are significant differences between volunteering and the activism for social change carried out on a voluntary basis that characterises the voluntary activity in civil society organisations.

The loss of independence is not a trivial notion, as the now realigned Department of Community, Equality & Gaeltacht Affairs (DCEGA) has attempted to assert. The withdrawal of the right to direct the work crucial to communities by representatives of those communities in their capacity as members of management committees will be significantly detrimental to the work with disadvantaged communities around the country.

For example, consider a Traveller organisation that will, under the new arrangements, have its work dictated and directed by the Partnership Board of Directors comprising representatives of the Local Authority, the Department of Education and other statutory organisations, about which Traveller organisations are often forced to be critical. Are we to really believe that this crucial work will be maintained under the new arrangements? Are we to really believe that the difficult work carried out heretofore by independent community development organisations will not be negatively impacted?

Another principle of all organisations funded under the CDP that requires local people or members of the community with which the organisation works to be prominent at all levels of the organisation, particularly at Management Committee level, will become a dim and distant memory as no accommodation has been made to ensure that the local voice is maintained under the new arrangements.

The process of dismantling is well under way and community organisations were informed last week by the DCEGA that the next tranche of funding would be issued by their local Partnership Company via Pobal. The process of transforming the management committees of these organisations, experienced and expert in directing work, staff and budgets in the implementation of work programmes based on the needs in their communities (all on a voluntary basis), into ‘advisory committees’ that will have an undefined, though clearly powerless role in relation to work in their communities, is about to commence.

The Community Workers’ Co-operative and others have consistently  argued that what is happening at local level is an extension of the moves by the State since 2008 to dismantle or render powerless the national equality and anti-poverty infrastructure, such as the Equality Authority, the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, the Combat Poverty Agency and others. This policy direction has been widely condemned and rightly so. The excuse of financial constraints is, by now, widely dismissed in favour of a more realistic analysis of the motivation as the unpopularity of the voice of dissent, as the Carnegie report so eloquently puts it.

The local level has received, with notable exceptions, less attention but will have long-term impacts on equality and anti-poverty work at local level with those who benefitted least from the years of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, the same people that are being asked to pay disproportionately for the excesses and lack of ethics of those that did benefit, the same people that have least access to power and influence.

The Carnegie report describes liberal democracy as a ‘three-legged stool’ - one leg is government, providing public capital; a second, the market, provides market capital; and a third, civil society, provides social capital. To get things back in balance, the report argues, the third leg ‘needs strengthening’. Taking up this theme, Geoff Mulgan, the Chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland, has stated that the time is now right to put civil society at the centre of Ireland’s recovery, and to re-emphasise what brings us together, what makes us ‘we’ rather than just a collection of ‘me’s’ - an interesting recommendation in the Irish context, where the direction being taken is clearly to the contrary.

In Ireland, it is widely agreed by civil society organisations that a new direction in Irish civil, economic and political life based on principles and values is clearly required. It has been argued by many that community sector is a crucial and central element of civil society and a key part of democracy. It supports and facilitates members of disadvantaged communities and minority group, so poorly represented by our political system, to organise, to identify the issues that they face and to collectively participate in the development of strategies to address these issues.

What must not be dismissed or underestimated is the importance of civil society work through community development at levels – nation, regional and local. The loss of capacity and independence currently being experienced by the community sector is damaging to civil society and to democracy. It will decrease the capacity for the radical changes identified by the Carnegie report, and it will certainly decrease the capacity of change to be representative of the needs of the most disadvantaged.

A recent welcome trend-bucking development is the commitment by the new Minister of State at the DCEGA, Mary White, to commission an external assessment of the work of the Equality Authority, the Equality Tribunal and the Human Rights Commission. Perhaps the senior minister at that department, Pat Carey, should take a leaf from his junior minister’s book and commission an assessment of the detrimental impact of community sector developments before it is too late.