Where Hope and History Meet

Billy Mitchell

During the past number of years I have been invited by a number of Festival Committees to participate in community discussions in nationalist areas. This is something that I have always been happy to do and I must say that I have always been treated with the utmost courtesy and respect. This year was no different. The community discussion organised by the Short Strand Festival Committee was well attended and the quality of the discussion was, I believe, of a high standard.

The subject for discussion set by the organisers was entitled �Where Hope and History Meet�.� What follows is based on part of my contribution to the discussion.

Hope and History, for me, met in those series of events during the nineteen-nineties that led to the establishment of the new Assembly - the Hume-Adams Talks, the Ceasefire(s), the Multi-Party Talks, the Good Friday Agreement, and the setting up of the new Assembly.� These events generated an atmosphere of hope within and across communities in conflict. The dark clouds were at last beginning to show their silver lining.

I suppose everyone has their own set of hopes for the future. Here are some of mine.

As a working class unionist I cherish a hope that the new political dispensation brought about by these events will free working and workless class unionists from their traditional dependence upon , and subservience to, the Fur Coat Brigade. As an evangelical Protestant I cherish a hope that the new dispensation will help to free religious Protestantism from the shackles of political Protestantism.� No genuine religious faith can afford to be allied to any brand of political philosophy or political alliance. There must be a complete separation of religion and politics.

I entertain hopes too that the historic Protestant principle of �individuality� will be set free from the corrupting influences of liberal� �individualism�. Society is made up of unique individuals living in community and having a strong sense of communal responsibility and duties. Over the years this sense of individuality has been perverted by a� selfish �myself alone�� philosophy of individualism that undermines the spirit of true community.

The spirit of community demands a political activism that is rooted and grounded in secular class politics. The development of such political activism is another of my hopes.

But hope needs to be nurtured. It is not a self-achieving entity. We have a duty and a responsibility to nurture our hopes and help to make them come true. My work as a political activist is focused on nurturing hope in a number of key areas that relate to the community and voluntary sector and to the delivery of public services.

The community sector provided the glue that has held society together during the course of the conflict. As increased privatisation reduces the effectiveness of public services, and globalisation increases the gap between the rich and the poor, the community sector will be called upon to provide an increasingly wider range of public and community services.

Already there are some 25,000 people involved in the community and voluntary sectors, providing a broad range of services which the state has neglected over the years. Yet the sector is the most vulnerable in terms of sustainability. The �cinderella� sector, in terms of both validation and financial support, must be supported and developed. There is a danger that the restoration of an elected Assembly will lead to the marginalisation of the community sector. This has happened in other post-conflict countries and is quite likely to happen here. We must guard against this. To sustain the community sector we must campaign for both validation and mainstream funding.

The quality of our public services � health, education, electricity, water, and other services � is being diminished by privatisation. Tory Blair may call it PFI, or PPP or, strangely, Best Value � the bottom line is, it is privatisation, and privatisation means �profit before people�.� If a service is not profitable it will be run down or discontinued leaving the community sector to pick it up.

Those who need our public services most are those who suffer most from social and economic deprivation. Reducing the effectiveness of public services imposes greater social and economic violence on the marginalised poor. We must fight privatisation like it was the black plague. The new Assembly has been strangely quiet on the subject, and that for me is a worrying sign.

The equality agenda is inextricably linked to the struggle against poverty and disadvantage. It is not, therefore, just about equality between Catholics and Protestants. It is also about ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, gays & lesbians, the elderly, the young, the marginalised poor (discrimination by post code), travellers, women,� single parents and working mothers. Already we are seeing civil servants in some departments using every trick in the book to skimp on the equality agenda. Genuine equality costs money and, in some quarters, money is more important than people.

The focus of the equality debate remains centred on equality of opportunity. That is woefully inadequate. Unless there is equality of outcomes as well as equality of opportunity the whole equality agenda will become a sham. Nothing will have changed for the marginalised poor and disadvantaged in working and workless class areas.

I remain hopeful that the new political dispensation ushered in as a result of the peace process will deliver the hopes of all of our people. But, as I have said, hopes must be nurtured and we are the only ones that can do that. At the end of the day it is up to us to help make our hopes come true.