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Ulster's tradition of self help under threat

Communities providing themselves public services where once government did the job is nothing new in republican west Belfast.

But as the coalition wrestles with the problem of how to realise its Big Society vision, Northern Ireland's own traditions of self help, which community workers say did much to cement the peace process, look increasingly under threat.

A series of voluntary sector projects, which flourished in the wake of the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires, are in jeopardy as support from the European Union's peace funds and other external aid bodies winds down.

"We have a sort of Big Society infrastructure but it's been predicated on continued external funding. That's now ending," says Richard Ramsey, economist at Ulster Bank.

Many of the projects provide not just valuable services, but have been instrumental in healing divisions between Protestants and Roman Catholics. "They act as the social glue that keeps this place together," says Bob Stronge of NI Advice, which helps people navigate the welfare system.

Harry Maher, a local community worker who runs an award-winning regeneration project on the so-called peace line on the Stewartstown Road in west Belfast, says: "Communities here have always looked internally to sort out their problems. There has always been a distrust of government, even in loyalist areas."

But Mr Maher believes the devolved Stormont government should step in to replace EU and other funding sources. "There is a view here that government has got many of these services on the cheap," he says.

"Luckily we had a rich American uncle," he says referring to Chuck Feeney, the billionaire founder of Atlantic Philanthropies. "But that support too is winding down."

Stormont ministers have been reluctant to tackle the issue. Westminster suspects it suits the big parties - the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein - to sustain community divisions as a way to bolster the support base in their respective communities. Any financial assistance that is available has tended to be distributed to one community or the other, but not on a cross-community basis.

David Cameron, the prime minister, told the assembly in June this was not a sustainable situation. "We cannot have a future in which everything in Northern Ireland is shared out on sectarian grounds. Northern Ireland needs a genuinely shared future; not a shared-out future," he said.

Mr Maher's project on the Stewartstown road shows what can be achieved when the two communities get together.

Five years ago, the local shops marking the divide between the rival communities were gutted and boarded up, the walls and pavement daubed with paramilitary graffiti. When the elderly went to collect their pensions at the local post office they had to be accompanied by a phalanx of neighbours for protection. The area had been a sectarian powder keg since the start of the Troubles in 1969, when families on both sides had to move in to what became community sectarian ghettoes because of the violence.

Yet today what was once the worst flashpoint in the entire city boasts not just a post office, but a chemist, day care centre and Triona's, a hair salon, after locals got together to create an amenity both communities could use. The scheme won a British Urban Regeneration Association award in 2007.

Mr Maher has further plans to convert the local police station for social housing and to construct a fishing and leisure park.

"I think Lidl set up on the strength of what we've done here," he says pointing to the German-owned supermarket next door, which is linked by a 15ft-high brick wall, the only reminder of the ill-named peace walls that the authorities erected to keep rival communities apart.

Serious rioting earlier this summer on the Short Strand interface in east Belfast was a reminder of what happens when community relations are allowed to fester.

Chris O'Halloran, who runs Belfast Interface Projects, which helps a series of initiatives on the peace line, says: "It takes resources. There's no getting away from that. There is a cost but there is a far bigger cost to society if you abandon such projects."

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