Belfast visit highlights contribution to peace

Date: 09/10/1997

AFTER the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the last thing the two German MEPs - one from the West and the other from the former East Germany - expected to see in the Union was a community divided into two by bricks and mortar.

But that, in the shape of peace walls, was precisely what confronted the two MEPs, Socialist Detlev Samland and Christian Democrat Stanislaw Tillich, during their 24-hour visit to Belfast last month to see for themselves how the EU's financial contribution towards the peace process in Northern Ireland was being spent.

The trip made a deep and lasting impression on both and will undoubtedly be a key factor influencing the European Parliament's decision later this month to continue EU funding towards the special support programme for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

“I knew the Berlin Wall and I was so depressed when I saw the walls in Belfast. I never realised that you could have an island in a city. Now that the political process is moving in Northern Ireland, it would be a nonsense to stop the funds,” says Samland.

The visit was a clear example of how various MEPs try to see for themselves how EU funding is used on the ground before voting in the autumn in the isolation of the Strasbourg hemi-cycle on the Union's annual budget.

It was arranged by Paul Murphy, the UK minister of state at the Northern Ireland Office, to demonstrate the impact of the 300 million ecu which the Union has devoted to the programme over the past three years.

With the European Parliament's approval now needed before a further payment of 100 million ecu can be made next year, the MEPs' support is seen as crucial. It has become all the more so since doubts about the future of the programme emerged during the summer, when some Euro MPs feared that the contributions for Northern Ireland might be made at the expense of other Union-financed projects. That concern that has now been allayed.

The fact-finding trip was an eye-opener in more ways than one, as the MEPs visited two community centres: one in a predominantly Protestant, loyalist area, the other in a largely Republican, Catholic part of the city. They found that the money was not being spent in the way that they had earlier imagined.

“We thought it was being used to bring different groups together in kindergartens and community centres, but we learnt that that was impossible at the present moment. Instead, groups on each side of the wall had to be developed separately,” says Samland.

“It was the people who live in those communities themselves who told us it would be impossible to change from one day to the next and speak to people across the wall,” says one official involved in the programme.

“It was necessary to build confidence in each community first and then they could talk to each other. It is also enormously important for the people involved to see that it is European Union money which is being used. It shows that it cares.”

Both MEPs left the province wondering whether the system for channelling the funds quickly to the people who actually need it could be duplicated elsewhere, either in Social Fund programmes or in schemes to bridge old enmities in the former Yugoslavia.

“If you consider the situation from 600 kilometres away, you can wonder whether the EU money is necessary. But when you see it for yourself on the spot, there is no doubt that it is,” concludes Tillich.