5 Key Lessons for Rural Peace Building

Charmain Jones has been working at RCN as our Community Relations officer for the past 8 ½ years. In this blog she reflects on five key lessons from her rural peacebuilding work. She is the only core funded regional rural community relations officer in NI, funded by the Community Relations Council.

1. Working in peacebuilding in Northern Ireland for me is a lifetime vocation, not a job, it is something you either have passion for or you don’t. Sometimes you think you are making progress, but I find that external events can directly impact the work at a grass roots level and set it back months if not years. To do effective rural peacebuilding you have to be resilient. For me that means focusing on how I can work to make things better long term.

2. You learn very quickly that you work with very resilient individuals. For those of us of a certain generation, some who have lived through turbulent times, each one of us has travelled a very different individual journey based on our own life’s experiences and with that comes many challenges. The initial challenge for me is to try and slowly build a relationship with that person and help build trust so that more open dialogue can take place between individuals about the past and the future. I have learned that to do effective rural peacebuilding you start with the individual, you listen, you support, you empathise and then you help them on their own journey. That has a ripple effect on families, communities and wider society.

3. I have learned the skill of “narrative hospitality”. This means that I ask people to share their story with respect. I want to learn, I want to listen, I want to understand and in doing that, I aim to model the type of respectful conversation I want to have so that this is reciprocated by members of the group. You must learn to walk in the shoes of the other person and hear stories that make you uncomfortable or that are challenging. A key part of my role is to ensure people who engage in this type of dialogue come to no harm.

4. I have learned that urban and rural have a very different way of engaging in peacebuilding. I have lived beside an interface barrier most of my life and having worked in towns for over 11 years prior to RCN, the issues I worked on were visible and that visibility meant you had to try to address them. Issues of division in rural communities are more hidden and there can be a culture of polite avoidance amongst rural people. Rural engagement is more about breaking down barriers in people’s minds rather than physical walls, and that’s an even harder job. It’s about trying to break the silence that has existed for years as people live cheek by jowl and the legacy of the past still impacts today. This means my work has to be slow, it has to be consultative but also it has to be undertaken with empathy and compassion as I am asking people to step out of their comfort zones and discuss issues on a cross community basis which they may never have done before.

5. There are lessons to be learnt from rural peacebuilding that can support and aid urban regeneration and reconciliation and vice versa. I am glad to say some government departments, funders and other statutory agencies are starting to see that rural peacebuilding needs to be done differently.

I was born in 1976 and lived all my childhood and early adulthood, in what I considered then to be a normal society. It is only looking back, decades later, that I realised how abnormal things really were. Northern Ireland has significantly improved, however under the surface many issues and division remains. For me it is important to remember that we cannot do effective community development without addressing community relations issues. This will continue to be my guiding principal in the future.

The UK Shared Prosperity Fund? No I hadn’t heard of it either (Part 2)

Part 1 of this blog looked at the EU Structural Funds in Northern Ireland and the origin of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.  In part 2 Policy officer Aidan Campbell discusses some of the rural considerations for the development of the UKSPF.

Photo by Robert V. Ruggiero on Unsplash

Although the proposed UKSPF is much wider than the current rural development programme and aims to replace all the various strands of EU Structural Funds we are primarily interested in the rural development strand.  The first question is whether a focus on productivity is the place to start in re-designing a rural development policy or programme for Northern Ireland.  In economic terms:

“Productivity is the key source of economic growth and competitiveness. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker, i.e., producing more goods and services for a given number of hours of work.”[1]

RCN would argue that the focus of any future rural development programme should be on social inclusion and ensuring that communities and citizens who had been left behind in rural areas are supported to become more connected into social and economic development. 

If we were agreed that raising productivity is the right objective to pursue to tackle inequalities we could still get into a heated debate over how to do it.  Will raising productivity be best achieved by investing in infrastructure like roads, telecoms etc. or by investing in rural childcare, or in better funding for all primary school children?  Its probably desirable to invest in all three but we’re told that times are tight and that “hard choices have to be made”. 

Northern Ireland has long been behind the curve in terms of productivity and economists such as Dr. Esmond Birnie have explored the gap as has Paul MacFlynn of the Nevin Economic Research Institute.  A NERI working paper identified some of the reasons why some sectors of the NI economy lag behind their British counterparts.  So the stated objective of the UKSPF of raising productivity will be a tough nut to crack in NI. 

If the headline objective of the UKSPF is to raise productivity in the region as a whole that could be achieved by focusing on productivity gains in certain sectors and geographical areas.  For example, economists have identified particular challenges in raising productivity in the agricultural sector due to the high proportion of small and part time farms here compared to Britain. 

The current Programme for Government Framework Working Draft includes an outcome that states “We prosper through a strong, competitive, regionally balanced economy” although the only indicator to monitor regional balance is the rate of employment per council area.  Employment creation won’t necessarily improve productivity if the jobs are of poor quality or if people who are excluded can’t compete for the jobs being created.  In RCN’s view actions and policy to promote balanced regional development should benefit rural citizens and communities.  Cross border considerations are also relevant in NI and are even more important in light of Brexit.  The rural development programme has played an important role in developing cross border links and contains a co-operation strand to facilitate cross border working.  It is important that UKSPF and any rural fund it contains aligns with the rural development programme in the Republic of Ireland so that cross border co-operation is facilitated.

Ministerial statements on the UKSPF have committed to respecting the devolution settlements and engaging with the devolved administrations to ensure that the fund works for all places across the UK.  This is made more difficult here in the continued absence of a functioning Assembly.  Despite the problems and the bureaucracy of EU structural funds it’s important that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.  We should recognise that LEADER has made some really important investment in rural communities that would not have happened without it.  Earlier versions of LEADER were particularly important in NI in involving rural stakeholders in designing and developing the rural development programme and it played an important role in building peace in NI and developing relationships between local politicians across the political spectrum before the ceasefires in 1994.

In my view the UKSPF must ring-fence a fund for rural development as is currently the case with EU structural funds.  Without a dedicated rural strand it’s unlikely that rural communities, with dispersed populations will be able to compete for UKSPF investment against urban areas and a regionally balanced economy becomes another unfulfilled aspiration.

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[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/productivity.asp

The UK Shared Prosperity Fund? No I hadn’t heard of it either (Part 1)

Policy Officer Aidan Campbell blogs on the EU Structural Funds and their proposed successor post-Brexit the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

Ever heard of the European Union Structural Funds? 

The purpose of the Structural Funds is to promote what the EU calls “cohesion” to reduce economic and social disparities amongst its member states, a key aim of EU regional policy.  This means that the EU invests Structural Funds in regions which have lower rates of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than the EU average to enable them to catch up with those that are more prosperous.  So, for example, structural funds can be spent on building or improving infrastructure such as roads, ports or bridges or it can be spent on re-training adult learners who are long term unemployed.

Between 1989 and 1999 Northern Ireland had what was called Objective 1 status.  Objective 1 status was given by the EU to those regions that had GDP that was lower than 75% of the EU average GDP.  Objective 1 status areas attracted higher levels of EU Structural Fund investment.  Northern Ireland, located on the periphery of Europe, had endured the decline of heavy industry since the 1950s and was embroiled in the Troubles so it retained objective 1 status until 1999.  The region has benefitted from EU Structural Funds of approximately €5,356M[1] between 1989 and 2013.

Structural Funds include the European Regional Development Fund, European Social Fund and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and others click here for more detail on structural funds programmes in NI.  The current structural funds programme between 2014-2020 is worth €3,532.5 million in NI.  These sums are match funded by resources from government departments.  Whether the structural funds ever achieved their aim is debatable but a lot of money was invested.

The UK government has committed to underwrite the full value of the 2014-2020 structural funds programme but after Brexit the UK will no longer benefit from structural funds.  The Structural Funds will be replaced by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF).  This was a commitment made in the Tory party manifesto for the 2017 general election to use money which comes back to the UK as a consequence of leaving the EU to reduce inequality:

“We will use the structural fund money that comes back to the UK following Brexit to create a United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund, specifically designed to reduce inequalities between communities across our four nations.”

At a “pre-consultation” meeting earlier this month rural stakeholder organisations were invited to give their views on what the outcomes of a UKSPF might be and to talk about their experience of accessing EU structural funds.  At the meeting a short presentation was given by the UKSPF team who stated that the key objective of the UKSPF was to:

“tackle inequalities between communities by raising productivity, especially in those parts of the UK whose economies are furthest behind.”

The UKSPF aims to align with the Industrial Strategy in England and will work across the UK whilst respecting the devolution settlements in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

So that’s the background, part 2 of this blog will look at what the initial proposals for a UKSPF are and how that relates to rural development in Northern Ireland.

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[1] This figure is EU contribution only and doesn’t include national public contributions.  Source European Funding in Northern Ireland Dr Jodie Carson and Colin Pidgeon Ni Assembly Research and information Service 2010 available at http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/globalassets/Documents/RaISe/Publications/2010/General/15010.pdf

#Get on Board NI?

Policy Officer Aidan Campbell reflects on his recent public transport experiences in response to Translink’s Get on Board NI campaign which is encouraging more people to use public transport.

Image by Tim Doak

I live in a place called Derrytresk, a rural townland about 3.5 miles outside Coalisland in County Tyrone.  Where I live is also only about 1.5 miles away from the Tamnamore Roundabout Park and Ride so, although my home is rural, it can’t be considered remote.  Like most rural households we rely on our car for the almost all journeys.  A few weeks ago, due to a car breakdown I had to use the bus for a few days.  Working from home isn’t an option as the broadband speed is so poor but that’s another story.  

On the first day the clutch went, I had the kids in the car and managed to drop them to school before limping back home.  The time was now 8.20am.  I looked at the Translink website and saw the next bus serving Cookstown from Tamnamore Park and Ride was departing at 9.40 and would have me in Cookstown at 10.25.  Not ideal.  My next best option was a bus departing from Coalisland at 9.23 arriving in Cookstown for 9.53 which was better.  Next step was getting to the bus stop.  A phone call to a friend confirmed I could drop my bike at her house for the day.  A quick cycle to Coalisland up the Canal towpath and I caught the 9.23 bus and arrived in the office before 10am.    

On the second day I was headed to a conference in central Belfast starting at 10am.  That was an easier journey with a planned drop off at the Park & Ride by my wife on her way to work.  I then caught one of the frequent morning buses to Belfast that serve the Park and Ride.  A quick trip down the M1 had me in Glengall St Bus Station at 9.30am and on time for the conference I was attending.

These two different journeys, one undertaken at the last minute and one planned in advance demonstrate some of the challenges for rural citizens who need to use public transport.  The car breakdown at 8am meant that I had missed the bus from Coalisland that arrives in Cookstown before 9am.  I also had to cycle to Coalisland and find somewhere to store my bike for the return journey that evening.  The pre-planned journey to Belfast using the Park and Ride was convenient and was a better option than driving.  I was able to respond to emails on the bus and had none of the usual hassle or expense of car parking in the city centre. 

The hub and spoke model which connects arterial routes to Belfast has the potential to move more people from cars onto public transport.  My local Park & Ride opened in 2015 and is well used by people using public transport and for car-sharing.  This reduces vehicles on the road easing congestion, reducing emissions and travel times.  The only downside was the £17 return bus fare.  Park & Ride facilities are expensive to develop and need to be of a certain scale on high demand routes to be viable.  Journeys on low demand routes are more problematic and less economically viable to provide.  For many people their journeys are not linear and include drop offs to childcare or schools before work.  In my case, If I had a disability or was unable to cycle I would probably have had no option except to take a taxi.

Translink’s Get on board campaign is primarily focused on encouraging public transport use particularly in Greater Belfast to reduce congestion.  Public transport, as its currently configured, is not a realistic option for most rural journeys.

Pigs Feet, China and Brexit

Aidan Campbell RCN Policy officer reflects on the journey to secure export approval for NI Pork products to China and what this might tell us about future trade deals post Brexit.

Photo by Laura Anderson on Unsplash

Back in November 2017 exports of pork from Northern Ireland to China began.  Dr Robert Huey the Department of Agriculture Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) Chief Veterinary Officer said:

“I am delighted that China’s certification agency, the CNCA has announced its final approval for Northern Ireland plants to export pork to China. I look forward to the commencement of exports.”

The DAERA Press Release tells us that this was the culmination of a five-year process of negotiation and lobbying involving the Department, DEFRA, the NI Bureau in China, the Food Standards Agency and the Industry.  It also involved 3 Ministerial visits to China by Michelle O’Neill and one Ministerial visit to China by Michelle McIlveen.  Two separate teams of inspectors from China visited Northern Ireland processing plants in 2015.  For the first time two processing plants in Northern Ireland can export all cuts of pork to China.  Importantly, this includes pigs trotters which are a low value product here but are highly valued in China.  This means that processors can now get a greater return on each carcase and the industry estimates this could be worth an additional £10M to the NI economy (yes that’s a remarkably round figure for an estimate). 

Now obviously this is a good news story for NI agri-food (although not for the pigs) but what’s it got to do with Brexit?  I’m no expert in international trade or food exports but surely this story tells us something about the future of trade in agricultural products.  Gaining access to new markets in Asia and elsewhere may not be as straightforward as some may hope.  The experience of securing approval for pork exports into China has hopefully given officials and the industry important insights into how to negotiate the bureaucratic hurdles.  China is the biggest market for UK pork outside the EU although the UK sold nearly three times as much pork to the EU compared to China in 2017.  So, if a favourable trade deal between the UK and the EU can’t be agreed serious work will be needed to replace any EU market share lost by UK producers as a result.

Mr Huey reflected on the complexity of this particular negotiation in evidence he gave to the Assembly Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs committee meeting on 30 June 2016, less than a week after the Brexit referendum.  He was responding to comments from South Down MLA Harold McKee about the delay in securing approval from China for imports of “fifth quarter” pork products.  Mr Huey said:

“Someone from the US once said to me that no one has the right to export products into their country and that they would make it as difficult for us as possible.  That is almost the way to think about it.  If you turn it round, how easy do we make it for imports from other third countries?  Not very easy might be the answer.  It is a dog-eat-dog world out there…The average trade deal takes somewhere between two and 10 years.”

Can NI grow its share of the Chinese pork market and how quickly can that be done?  Will Chinese producers raise their production levels and how might that impact future NI imports?  What bearing will Brexit have on trade with China after the UK has left the EU?  Will any of the extra income make its way down to the hard-pressed farmers who are producing the meat?  These are all questions producers and processors must balance as they make investment decisions.  A dog eat dog world seems to sum it up well.

"Most people living in rural communities in Northern Ireland are farmers – right?"

RCN Policy officer Aidan Campbell explores the data on the numbers of people employed directly in agriculture in rural Northern Ireland and what that might mean for future policy.

Most people living in rural communities in Northern Ireland are farmers – right?  It’s a question I was asked recently at a meeting with someone who wasn’t that au fait with rural NI.  Farming and farmers are still very important in rural areas.  They grow the majority of food that consumers eat and shape the rural environment but, as in all developed countries, the proportion of people in rural areas who are directly involved in agriculture has been reducing for decades. 

One way of thinking about this is to look at the data.  NI Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) produces population estimates broken down to Small Area level.  Small Areas are the smallest geography that population statistics are broken down into and there are 4,537 of them in Northern Ireland.  Small Areas are classified by NISRA as urban if 90% or more of the population are living within the boundaries of an urban settlement (population>5,000 people).  They’re classified as rural if 10% or less of the population are living within the boundaries of an urban settlement, and anything in between is classified as 'mixed urban/rural'.

The 2016 Mid-year Population Estimates for Small Areas can be combined with the Small Area level lookup table to create approximated population totals for Urban, Rural and Mixed areas for mid-2016.  This gives approximated population totals as follows:

Urban population	1 112 338
Rural population	666 497
Mixed urban/rural	83 315
Total population NI	1 862 150

Using this method approximately 36% of the population of Northern Ireland lives in rural areas.

The Agricultural Census in Northern Ireland 2017 identifies 48 704 people as the total agricultural labour force (this includes farmers, partners and directors, spouses and other workers employed directly in farming).  48 704 people employed directly in farming represents just over 7% of the approximate rural population of 666 497.  So over 93% of the rural population have no direct connection to agriculture. 

As I said at the beginning of this post agriculture is still important in rural communities.  It’s also important for the NI economy as agriculture supplies produce directly into the agri-food industry which is a large employment sector in NI terms (c. 80 000 people employed) and supports a range of related jobs and businesses.  However, these figures show that it’s important for policy makers to consider how they can develop the wider rural economy. 

The people who are no longer directly employed in agriculture are working in construction, manufacturing, agri-food, the public sector or service sector and are increasingly commuting to regional towns and cities to work.  That’s not even to mention the low paid or unpaid care work undertaken overwhelmingly by women in rural communities which will become more important in years to come as rural populations age. 

Economic and regional development strategies must meet the diverse needs of rural citizens and prioritise connectivity.  It’s crucial to ensure that any rural development policy post-Brexit is not merely an adjunct to a price support policy for farming.  Rural populations are increasingly diverse and the share of people who receive part of their income from agriculture is likely to continue to decrease as small farms are consolidated.

For more details you can contact Aidan on 028 8676 6670 or email aidan@ruralcommunitynetwork.org. You can also visit our website www.ruralcommunitynetwork.org

More Rural Schools Identified where “Sustainability is an issue”

RCN’s Policy Officer Aidan Campbell looks at the recent announcement by the Education Authority of potential school closures and questions the approach to area planning.

Photo by Tim Doak

The Education Authority (EA) released its second Annual Area Planning Action Plan recently.  The accompanying statement quoted the EA Education Director John Collings saying:

“The challenge that faces education in relation to area planning is that we have many schools that are too small to adequately provide pupils with access to a broad and balanced curriculum, …In many areas of Northern Ireland there are too many school places for the size of the population, while in other areas, there are not enough places.”

The action plan identifies 70 separate “work streams “ and states that one third of these relate to “sustainability issues” in 27 named schools across 3 areas.  The action plan identifies issues across all school types and all areas but the majority of schools where sustainability is an issue are in rural communities. 

The words closure or amalgamation don’t appear anywhere in the document representing a change of tone from previous announcements.  The action plan states that schools may be identified as being part of a solution to a sustainability issue in their area. When the Education and Library Boards carried out their initial viability audits of schools in 2012 to prepare for area planning schools were highlighted in red if they failed to meet targets set on the three criteria of enrolments, academic performance and financial viability.  The language has become more nuanced but this approach will still be unsettling for the parents, staff and governors of those schools identified. 

There are significant numbers of rural primary schools with enrolments that are well under the target set of 105 pupils.  For some of those schools closure or amalgamation may be the best option to provide a better quality education for children in that area.  All stakeholders are agreed that a decision to close or amalgamate isn’t solely about enrolments.  Other factors in deciding if a school is sustainable are quality of educational experience, strong leadership, accessibility and strong links with the community.  Any proposals for closure must be consulted on by the Education Authority and that will be a very difficult conversation in any rural community.  However the blow of potential closure may be softened if parents and communities are more involved in planning for what happens next. 

The EA still doesn’t seem to be taking a true “area-based” approach to planning the future schools estate in rural areas.  Using District Council areas as boundaries is largely meaningless for parents as most primary schools draw pupils from a very local catchment area.  Even the largest post-primary schools will draw the majority of their pupils from only part of a District Council area.  Area planning for schools isn’t just a technical exercise, the data is important, but it should be used to inform a meaningful engagement with schools, parents and communities to develop the schools estate we need.

BBCNI news story https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-43718194