Peace Walls Programme

Wake up Stormont! The Peace Walls programme needs the back up of a major programme of borrow- to-invest in housing

Brian Walker on October 13, 2016, 11:18 am

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Turning away from Brexit to the home front, congrats to the Guardian for promoting a theme developed there by Professor Paddy Gray, an academic on the Built Environment, an austere title for a school of research which hosts a great deal of imaginative and practical work on developing society. Gray argues that the slow and careful task of bring down peace walls requires a change in favour of greater incentives for voluntary mixed development. In some places, this is a …

Northern Ireland’s modest and timid ambitions for peace

Mick Fealty on January 31, 2013, 9:30 am

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Malachi O’Doherty points of a long term pessimism that often seems to want to long tail conflict rather than tackle the heart of it. He points to the problem of Belfast’s walled interfaces, in the context of past fatalism: What was routine back then was the conviction that Northern Ireland’s problems could not be solved. Read almost any of the books about the Troubles published right up to the early 1990s and the ending is the same, a dispirited resignation …

Contested Space Programme: “What’s strange is that we haven’t heard anything about this until now…”

Pete Baker on February 6, 2012, 3:48 pm

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On 22 January, after the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) announced their £2million Peace Walls Programme, I asked about the absence of OFMdFM’s £4million Contested Space Programme – announced in March last year. On 27 January the Northern Ireland Executive Junior Minister, Sinn Féin’s Martina Anderson, launched the Early Years Faces and Spaces – Children’s Shared Spaces project – “funded jointly by OFMDFM and Atlantic Philanthropies Contested Spaces programme.” The Junior Minister’s statement is somewhat short on detail, but the ‘notes …

“local communities need help – particularly funding and local political leadership”

Pete Baker on January 22, 2012, 3:25 pm

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In June last year The Detail’s John Breslin was asking questions of the International Fund for Ireland (IFI), and the “significant amount of money under its control, or on the way, that has not yet been either allocated, or is in the hands of, particular projects.” On Thursday last week the IFI announced a Peace Walls Programme with an initial allocation of £2million, and invited “expressions of interest from community organisations for financial assistance”. According to the IFI press release Dr Denis Rooney CBE, Chairman …