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Community organisation the Greater Shankill Partnership went to Belfast City Council looking for £17,000 to help stage its annual Winter Festival, which includes a series of events around November 11’s Remembrance Day, followed by Diwali and then Christmas, including a major lights switch-on. The partnership said they haven’t been able to secure the money they’d need to pay for the popular festival, and asked if the council could make up the shortfall from discretionary funds so the Shankill Road community would be able to enjoy their annual multi-cultural celebrations. At the behest of Sinn Fein, however, the same amount of money is now to be offered around the rest of the city four times over. The party’s leader in city hall, councillor Ciaran Beattie, felt it would be unfair for only one section of Belfast to get discretionary cash, and wanted funding offered around to community groups in four regions of the capital – its north, south and east as well as the Shankill’s west of the city. During a committee meeting last Friday morning, politicians voted to have officials bring back a report on how they might handle applications for what’s effectively a new cash pot with £17,000 on offer four times over. They also agreed to give the Greater Shankill Partnership the funding they asked for, not least as the group was staring down a fast-approaching deadline for their festive events. They’d made that explicitly clear to the council when they asked for the money, a representative stating: “As you can imagine, booking the various elements would need done pretty quickly and early consideration of the request would be greatly appreciated.” Although it was pointed out that community groups elsewhere in the city would have trouble getting Christmas celebrations set up as workers and equipment need to be sourced, Mr Beattie said: “Lights would have to be ordered months ago, so even to do lights would be difficult. “There are other festivals out there who do a brilliant job; it mightn’t be for lights, it might be for something else, and they can never have enough money to do what they want to do. If we’re going to help one out, I think we need to offer it out to other quarters of the city, rather than have [other areas] coming back and saying ‘what about us’.” Alliance’s leader, councillor Michael Long, agreed that a “wider policy” is required. “I just think an automatic £17,000 to the rest of the city isn’t really something that’s going to be a particularly useful way to do it, but we need to at least bring back a paper on how we provide Christmas lights in non-city-centre areas,” he said. “We could argue the Ormeau Road or other parts of our city could do with this kind of support.” Reports on the issue are to be delivered to the leaders of political parties on the local authority, before funding is discussed again at an upcoming full council meeting.
