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In common with other disadvantaged communities, Donegall Pass Community Forum is forced to exist in a ‘hand-to-mouth’ funding environment - exacerbated by governmental indifference (save for the occasional outbreak of patronising ‘lip-service’), ignorance and insensitivity. This parlous state of affairs is made considerably worse by a creaking, arthritic, ponderous and chronically constipated ‘Peace II’ funding structure, characterised by an insanely labyrinthine, overweening bureaucracy - maniacally pedantic and offficiously obsessed with minutiae and trivia.
Among other negative outcomes, this utterly wasteful process consumes workers’ time to a truly scandalous extent - resulting, in many cases, in less than 25% of time being available to deliver the desired results of any given funded programme. Tardy and appallingly inefficient payment of funding tranches forces many organisations into an overdraft situation - hence, yet more waste of public funds.
It is instructive to note that, despite being forced into overdraft by the wasteful inefficiency of this profligate, wheezing, bureaucratic behemoth, organisations are prevented from recovering the associated costs - however, should an organisation be in the fortunate situation of being able to exercise even more financial prudence than normal by placing a temporary surplus in an interest-bearing account - that organisation will be penalised by having such interest deducted from funding.  So, it’s ‘heads, they win and tails, we lose’.  Funny old world, isn’t it?
Much of ‘Peace II’ funding is, of course, ‘delivered’ by government departments who piously pontificate about the necessity of obtaining ‘best value for money’ - particularly when referring to programmes which they have been asked to fund.  These self-same virtuous exemplars of probity become unusually silent and strangely and, perhaps, conveniently amnesiac when their lofty attention is drawn to the hundreds of thousands, nay, probably millions, of Euros wastefully absorbed by a monstrous, rampant, nit-picking, bean-counting bureacracy.
The whole rotten edifice composed of an absurdly multi-layered ‘Peace II’ funding structure allied to the imposition of a lupine and lunatic bureaucracy, together with the public money required to pay for its questionable existence as currently constituted, must, from any reasonable standpoint, represent horrendously poor ‘value for money’.
Some of the more outré aspects of the ‘Peace II’ process (a rich vein of absurdities waiting to be mined by a latter day Lewis Carroll) and some pertinent criticisms are to be found in the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committe Peace II Seventh Report of Session 2002-03 and the review of the progress of Peace II by Brian Harvey, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, on the ‘Reports’ page of this website - please click on ‘Reports’ on the navigation bar.