New report offers recommendations to advance Community Wealth Building in Northern Ireland

The end of last month saw another significant step forward internationally in the global advance of Community Wealth Building.  Recommendations to Advance Community Wealth Building in Northern Ireland, a report from the Independent Minister’s Advisory Panel on Community Wealth Building to the Minister for Communities, was published in Belfast and released at a well-attended event featuring government officials, community groups, and nonprofit leaders. The report was wholeheartedly welcomed as it was accepted by Deirdre Hargey, Minister for Communities in the Northern Ireland Executive, and sets out an ambitious agenda for economic transformation through a whole-of-government approach.  A flag has been planted by which community activists and civil servants alike can orient themselves in attempts to deliver on the promise of Community Wealth Building for Northern Ireland’s struggling economy and communities.

The Independent Minister’s Advisory Panel was made up of Harry Connolly, Executive Director of Fáilte Feirste Thiar; David Hunter, former Chief Executive of Access Employment Limited and a Director with Social Enterprise NI; Brendan Murtagh, Professor of Urban Planning at Queen’s University Belfast; my colleague, Sarah McKinley (who served as panel chair) and myself, both representing TDC. The Secretariat supporting the panel’s work consisted of Trademark Belfast and the Development Trusts NI (DTNI). We set out 26 key recommendations across the five pillars of Community Wealth Building, together with a suggested governance framework by which to embed action across all levels of government in Northern Ireland. 

The panel commended Minister Hargey for her leadership in establishing the panel and calling for the recommendations, noting the growing importance of this agenda at a time of growing and deepening economic and political crisis. Community Wealth Building is not an optional extra, a nice agenda to add to the already long list of things for government to do. Rather, it is a key means of collectively addressing this growing crisis with real solutions on the ground capable of rewiring the fundamentals of the economy, of who owns and controls wealth, in a way that could be truly game-changing and transformative for communities and people’s everyday lives.  

In such a context, in which available resources are scarce but the need is growing exponentially, every public pound is going to have to do double or triple duty, and the calculus must change to one in which we better mobilize the role of the public sector in Northern Ireland as a stabilizer and anchor and catalyst for economic change, ensuring that public money stays and recirculates in local economies rather than being immediately extracted away. My full remarks on behalf of the panel at the launch event in Belfast contextualizing the report and explaining the recommendations can be found here.

Few places have a more urgent need—or stronger case—for Community Wealth Building than does Ireland, where communities have been ravaged by neoliberalism and austerity.  For decades the Republic of Ireland has been the extractive economy par excellence, an economy based on low wages, precarious employment, financialized property speculation, and heavy reliance on foreign direct investment, coupled with a generous system of state subsidies and tax breaks for transnational capital. The North has adopted large parts of this model wholesale. 

The result has been an “agglomeration economy” that has concentrated power and capital in Dublin and Belfast, cities increasingly oriented to the needs of finance capital and those with the ability to pay. This has come at the expense of state-led investment, indigenous enterprises, balanced regional development, and the needs of those who work and live there. 

This new report holds out the prospect of a very different developmental path for Ireland, North and South—one capable of truly delivering for its people and communities. 

Given its size, the strength of its public sector, the robustness of its community infrastructure and social enterprise sector, and the scale of its need, Northern Ireland is well positioned to become not only a regional leader in CWB but even a global beacon. Getting there will require strong political leadership and community mobilization to make sure that current opportunities do not become yet another false start for Community Wealth Building, but instead an idea whose time has finally now come.