A Sinn Féin councillor has commended a Belfast City Council 'diversionary fund' for keeping 'internment bonfires' away from parts of North and West Belfast in August.
City Hall’s Summer Community Diversionary Festival funding programme 2022 gave grants between £25,000 and £100,000 to community festivals and events in a bid to reduce tensions around July and August bonfires.
The council states the annual fund aims to “engage with issues relating to positive cultural expression in the lead up to and around July 11 and August 8 through the provision of summer community diversionary festival activity”.
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It aims to “divert young people at risk of becoming involved in at-risk behaviour in the lead up to and over the two periods; and develop community capacity to deliver summer community diversionary festival activities at specific locations where there are negative issues associated with bonfires”.
At the recent meeting of the full council, Oldpark Sinn Féin Councillor JJ Magee said: “I want to take the opportunity to thank Belfast City Council staff for the work they have carried out over the last few months regarding the bonfires in North Belfast and wider Belfast.
“There were no August bonfires, particularly in the area of the New Lodge Road, Oldpark. In this work, intervention money has been really well spent. I want to thank the youth workers, the Department for Infrastructure and the Housing Executive who worked hard with the community and ourselves, and who were very responsive to any calls we made, to get rubbish in our areas lifted.”
He added: “This isn’t about one night of bonfires, this is about months of antisocial behaviour. This team worked together and brought a quality of life to residents of the New Lodge particularly, and across North and West Belfast where there are usually bonfires.
“The image of Belfast was a positive image during August. It is money well spent, and saves a massive amount for the statutory agencies on clean-ups.”
The fund faced controversy last year after smaller parties such as Alliance, the SDLP and Greens described it as a “political carve-up” between Sinn Féin and the DUP. The same community groups that won awards in 2019 received funding in a “rollover” for 2021, after the fund was suspended in 2020 due to Covid.
The smaller parties said this raised issues of accountability and transparency over those groups that were allocated funds, and in the council’s open-call processes.
The local government auditor, Collette Kane, wrote to the council to “highlight her concerns” about the bonfire diversionary scheme. The Audit Office said it “strongly discouraged” a reliance on discretionary funding and advised that criteria should be “widely advertised.”
This year applicants for the fund had to attend one of the information sessions which took place in March 2022 before receiving money.
Councillor Magee said after the council meeting: “There were no bonfires in nationalist areas in Belfast. We worked with the statutory agencies, and if any young ones did start collecting wood, we went in and lifted it, and got the youth workers to talk to them, and divert them away. With the full support of the residents, who most importantly don’t want any of this bonfire stuff in their neighbourhoods.”
He added: “This is the progress from work over a lot of years, of talking to young people about what they would like to see happen. That’s how the dance night developed for example, from years of talking, and developing and redesigning the Féile.” The last bonfire at New Lodge was in 2019.
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