Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for updating us on the ongoing work in his Department in relation to community and rural support schemes. As always, I will give out about the lack of development where that word appears after the word "community". I would again like to articulate the concerns I articulated at the meeting of the Joint Committee on Rural and Community Development last year, that the community development part of the Minister's brief has become lost in the rural focus. I strongly believe the community development brief belongs in a different Department given the wide range of issues under this brief. Community development has become somewhat lost. The Minister may disagree but that is how it looks to me and that is what I am hearing from the community development sector. As he knows, it is a sector in which I worked for the majority of my adult life and it is a real shame because there is such a need for community development at the moment.

When thinking about the Minister of State's visit to the Seanad today, I asked myself why we need community development. As I see it, community development is about profound transformative change and is a sign of a robust strong democracy. It works much more towards a deep participative democracy and not the highly centralised one that we have today. It asks questions as to what it means to live a good life, to be happy or to flourish. Asking such questions brings one to understand that not everyone has the same opportunities to follow his or her dreams. The deck is stacked against this and it is due to the endemic nature of inequality in Irish society.

We know the landscape of inequality well and the causes of it. We also have excellent frameworks for understanding the problems and what needs to change, and I refer the Minister of State to the equality framework in Equality: From Theory to Action by John Baker et al. The landscape metaphor is real, in that inequality is literally built into the fabric of our towns and cities. The poor live together and the rich live together and never the twain shall meet. The difference is that the poor have no choice. Powerful groups monopolise privilege and power in various ways. They have control over resources and to a large extent over our political and educational institutions. Powerful groups also control media institutions and the core messages that they convey.

One message that poorer people are consistently given is that they are responsible for their own failure. Community development is one part of a broader egalitarian movement to change things in Ireland. I am a product of that. I met people on projects who told me there was another way and they were right. The community development sector has been the subject of a relentless onslaught in recent years, and it continues today in new forms. If one is interested in the detail of what has happened it has been chronicled in the work of Brian Harvey and others. He estimated that more than a third of all funding to the community sector was removed during the austerity period. The dismantling of the national community development programme and its replacement with the much more narrowly focused social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP, was hugely significant and has profoundly negative consequences. Eight consecutive austerity budgets gutted the community sector at every level and in every part. Neither the structures nor the money have been restored nor is there any sign that they will. It is a sector which has no formal pension system. A strong argument can be made that austerity suited those in political power to settle other scores and to destroy any possible forms or sources of dissent and even competition. No part of the community sector was spared. All this was done to pay bank debt and today it is as if it never happened at all.

They must have put something in the water. The project closures, the programme cuts and the shorter time have become the new normal, but despite appearances austerity did not end and it continues in the community sector right up to the present day. It has just donned a different garb. The community sector is now prey to new regimes of discipline and control and a reorientation of power to the centre. State agencies, like the HSE and the city councils, are redrawing the landscape in colours that suit them. The unwritten command is that if they fund the sector, they can tell it what to do. We can see this in the review of drugs task forces currently being carried out by the HSE where the HSE is disregarding the new national drug and alcohol strategy and writing its own set of rules. These new regimes are being brought in under the seemingly irrefutable logic of good governance. This manifests itself in ever-increasing demands for quantitative evidence of inputs, outputs and throughputs, performance indicators and logic models. The focus of these is usually on the automised, isolated individual who, it seems, has emerged from a nowhere place of no relations of care, and will cure all of their own ills through acts of sheer individual will. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of the economic and social context within which lives are lived and how these need to change has become a de factopolicy of State agencies.The focus becomes ever narrower, instrumental and depoliticised. Community development becomes wrapped up in employment and training structures. Projects have become part of a commissioning process whereby those with the lowest bids win the contracts. We must ask ourselves whether we think it is good to have, properly fund and support an egalitarian community development sector. Does the Minister of State think it is good and valuable? Much needs to be done, not least by showing some bottle with regard to State agencies doing what they like regardless of what the Minister of State and other Ministers think. The clearest sign the Minister of State could send is restoring funding to the sector and re-establishing the national community development programme with the haste that it deserves. The reforms needed to make this a reality are possible and we can work together towards them.

Would the Minister of State be willing to meet representatives from the community sector, listen to their concerns and engage on where we go from here? I would be happy to organise this. As matters stand, people involved in the majority of these community development projects feel that they have no relationship with the Minister of State or his Department due to the rural aspect of the brief. I would like the opportunity to rectify some of those relationships.