Flagship Northern Ireland anti-racist project faces shutdown

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/28/northern-ireland-anti-racist-project-shutdown-lisburn

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An award-winning project praised for stamping out racism on an Ulster loyalist working-class housing estate is under threat of closure after Northern Ireland’s first and deputy first minister withdrew its funding.

With race-hate attacks and incidents now running at two a day in the region, former Ulster Defence Association prisoners as well as Polish and Belarus community workers said they were perplexed that a project held up as a template for combating racism faces shutdown.

Since the first minister, Peter Robinson, and his deputy, Martin McGuinness, promised to launch their still-unpublished anti-racism strategy last June, Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) figures show there have been more than 1,000 xenophobic attacks and insults directed at immigrants across the province.

The overwhelming majority of these incidents take place in loyalist working-class areas. But on Lisburn’s Old Warren estate, a group comprising ex-UDA prisoners, loyalist political activists and eastern European immigrants have ensured that such incidents rarely occur.

“Ten years ago this estate was 100% Protestant,” said Adrian Bird, a former UDA prisoner who served a jail sentence in the Maze maximum security prison during the Troubles. “But if you go out on to our streets in the morning or the afternoon you will loads of kids in Catholic school uniforms from the primary St Aloyisius’s to St Patrick’s secondary. These are children of Polish and other eastern European immigrants, Catholics, who have settled on the Old Warren estate and love living here. A decade ago I would have said that that would have been unthinkable but now no one blinks an eyelid. These are our neighbours who have integrated into the community here due to the Welcome Project.”

Olga Dominik decided to settle on the Old Warren estate 10 years ago, but the 35-year-old Belarusian was initially warned not to go there.

“A housing official told me not to accept a house on the Old Warren because I was not only foreign but would be perceived to be a Catholic. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to live there but once I got there I heard about the project Adrian and others had established to welcome migrants to the area, and I got involved.”

Dominik started out volunteering at the Welcome Project and later became employed as a community worker helping to run English classes for new immigrants, offering everyone in the area including locals advice with welfare benefits and running an initiative encouraging children’s education. Now the job she does helping both migrants and the indigenous population alike is in jeopardy.

“We have built up a great network of support here and managed to keep this area, and Lisburn in general, relatively free from racist attack. I cannot believe that our project could be in danger just because we are a success,” she said.

Philip Dean, the chairman of the Welcome Project – and a loyalist political activist who has travelled on education programmes to other conflicts with former republican enemies, including to Bosnia – said their integration project has resulted in some unthinkable scenarios.

“Our football team, called Old Warren, have a couple of young Polish players including one of our best strikers. We were playing a match recently in front of 300 supporters from the estate and when our Polish striker scored a brilliant goal, he celebrated by blessing himself. The rival team looked on in amazement because not one of our crowd supporting the team batted an eyelid. He was our player from our community and we didn’t care if he blessed himself in the Catholic way – he was and is one of us. That incident alone tells you how well the Welcome Project has worked in this community.”

A spokesman for the Office of First and Deputy First Minister said the project’s funding was “not axed or withdrawn” but its application for further financial support had failed.

“They applied to a competitive funding scheme, the Minority Ethnic Development Fund, and their application was not successful as it did not score highly enough to secure funding.

“They were provided with formal written feedback detailing the sections of the application form where they failed to provide sufficient evidence to reach a score that would have made the application suitable for support. They have appealed the decision. Their application will now be looked at by a separate appeals panel who will review how the selection panel has applied the criteria.”

Around the corner from the project’s headquarters, local youths were restoring a huge bonfire built from a vast stack of wooden pallets after it had been set alight long before 11 July – the night loyalists celebrate King William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Another immigrant living on the estate for almost a decade, Monika Lubasinska, said even the bonfire was a symbol of the project that had integrated young migrant families from all over the world.

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Lubasinkska, who also faces losing her job due to the end of funding for the project, said: “We have Polish kids working in the green to build up the bonfire with the local kids. It is another sign of how we have all helped to normalise relations in this community and yet they want to close our project down. I cannot understand it.”

Bird meanwhile has a theory as to why the leading department in the regional government has rejected their funding application.

“I suspect because we have been a success, that we have managed to thwart racism in this community and throughout Lisburn, the thinking is that there are no more problems, that the issue here on the Old Warren is parked and they can move on to other areas. That is a very dangerous assumption because racism can still raise its ugly head.”