Ms Helen Crickard:

Certainly. I mentioned the sectarian carve up and that is exactly what is happening, whoever is in power. If there is a healthy living centre to be built in a Protestant area, there will be one built in a Catholic area even though they are a stone's throw away from each other. That is the sort of activity that is happening. Recently, a council in Newtownabbey gave £80,000 for bonfires in exchange for people not putting flags up in the area, so the place would be more welcoming for tourists because it is on the tourist track. These are the sort of things that are happening.

There is no accountability and that is what the civic forum could have helped provide and could have helped lead the way. The leadership is really poor, there is zero accountability and it is quite stagnant in terms of what does happen there. They seem to feel they are above the law, in some way. They set it and they run with it.

Our funders would mainly be the Department for Communities but we are also funded through the Department of Finance and the Department of Justice, so nobody is taking full responsibility for all of those small pockets of money. Recently the Department for Communities gave some uplifts to funding to community centres and women's centres during Covid but none of that has been sustained.

There are funding structures, such as the neighbourhood renewal, that were set up over 25 years ago to deal with areas of high deprivation but there is deprivation outside of those areas as well. That structure is not changing because single identity groups hold onto it and nobody wants to lose their funding. It is not very transparent and there is no accountability. If you are in an area, like south Belfast, where there are five or six political parties, we would struggle to get funding outside of what is already given because it is going to the neighbourhood renewal areas. There are a lot of things that are under review as well. We do not have much hope that it is actually going to create the change we need because there is no accountability and transparency in terms of what is happening. It is a bleak picture.