Funding cuts slammed in ‘deprivation’ paper

A NEW research paper compiled by two local community workers has criticised the “abandonment of disadvantaged communities” in South Dublin County.

The paper, titled ‘A Decade of Deprivation – The Abandonment of the Marginalised in South Dublin County’, was launched in Tallaght Library on Thursday, June 30.

The report was devised by Aiden Llyod, a community activist who has worked as a youth worker in Tallaght, and Noreen Byrne, who has been a community worker for the last 30 years, the majority of which she has spent working in Clondalkin.

Mr Llyod and Ms Byrne developed the report for the Rights Platform, and they found that the defunding of many groups and community projects has had a detrimental effect in the county.

“In 2010, the Government abolished the Community Development Programme, which funded community and neighbourhood projects targeting areas of disadvantage and communities of interest across the State,” said Mr Llyod.

“In parallel, national infrastructure such as the Combat Poverty Agency was abolished.

“These community projects provided a place where groups could meet, share their experiences and seek responses to their needs.

“They brought personal development, community education and training to neighbourhoods and communities, opening up employment opportunities for those on low incomes.

“These projects, alongside the many women’s groups that were also defunded, brought to an end to what Patricia Kelleher and Cathleen O’Neill in their landmark research termed ‘The Systematic Destruction of the Community Development, Anti-Poverty and Equality Movement 2002-2015’.

“The consequence of these measures was a massive loss of connectivity, solidarity and empowerment within and across communities and regions as issues of housing, health and poverty became endemic.”

In ‘A Decade of Deprivation’, Mr Lloyd and Ms Byrne have documented the impact of this on communities in South Dublin County.

They detail this in the report by setting out the contribution that local projects made to community solidarity and wellbeing, and the regression that their demise and diminishment has created.

The researchers also pointed to the projects that either ceased or had to operate reduced services as a result of a decrease in Government funding.

These projects include the West Tallaght Resource Centre, which was amalgamated into the South County Partnership in 2009 and has yet to reopen since the onset of the pandemic, and the Equal Access Community Development Project (CDP) which was wound up after funding ceased in early 2010.

The North Clondalkin CDP has been operating at a reduced capacity since funding was cut in 2009, while the Dolcain CDP was amalgamated into the South Dublin County Partnership in 2009, before ultimately closing a decade later.

“Local Development Partnerships have become the key intermediary between the state and those experiencing poverty and social exclusion,” the report states.

“What is disconcerting is that there is no critical presence in the relationship.

“Previously, Partnerships and their constituent contributors/allies – the various local community development groups and projects – were relatively independent of the State and were well able to deliver as they knew fit and to make known the flaws in the National Programme framework.

“Now the State manages the intermediary, and the intermediary in turn is part of the planning and prioritisation process within the Local Community Development Committee.

“When this colonisation by the state of the local development landscape is placed alongside the control exercised through the PPN [Public Participation Network] of the local community sector the essential critical voice that enables the fulfilment of a difficult task, the reversal of social exclusion, is even further problematised.

“Co-option may ease the administrative process, but it doesn’t deliver outcomes for the most disadvantaged.”

The report’s authors also noted the growth of local drug economies as being a particularly destructive example of community disempowerment and abandonment. For further information on ‘A Decade of Depravation’, visit The Rights Platform website HERE.