Your guide to cross-border activities in Ireland
The creation of the Irish border in 1920 divided the island of Ireland into two insular and centralised states whose institutions and political culture developed back-to-back. Even then the border proved 'permeable' and inter-governmental and voluntary society contacts (primarily sporting, cultural and religious organisations) continued albeit on a fragmented and occasional basis. A third and smaller area was academic collaboration where the universities collaborated or their individual staff came together on research projects.
In 1972 the imposition of 'Direct Rule' of Northern Ireland from London saw the border further secured during increasingly violent times. However the island of Ireland entered the same international economic and political framework as both the UK and the Republic of Ireland joined the EEC in 1973. In addition cross-border co-operation has moved increasingly to the political and institutional foreground with a series of inter-governmental agreements in 1974, 1985, 1998 and 2006. The short-lived Sunningdale, heavily resisted Anglo-Irish, stop-start Good Friday/ Belfast and the recent St. Andrews Agreements have all given North/South cooperation a heightened importance and established formal commitments to work towards specific objectives in relation to cross-border co-operation.
Significant funding programmes which have originated with the European Union (EU), the International Fund for Ireland (IFI), the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and various other smaller charitable trusts have massively boosted the numbers of organisations (especially community organisations) involved in cross-border co-operation.
Border Ireland records the details of almost 1600 organisations which have taken part in some kind of practical cross-border cooperative activity. This paper provides a short insight into the governmental, community/ voluntary, academic and private organisations that co-operate across the border exploring the level and nature of their involvement.
ORGANISATION TYPES
Figure 1 shows the breakdown of 1565 organisations held on Border Ireland by organisation type. The importance of community and voluntary sector organisations is clear as they account together for 57% of the total. The next biggest share of 23% goes to government organisations which includes all levels from departments through agencies or semi-state bodies to local authorities. The last two types, private sector and academic, together account for the final 20%.
SECTORS
There are 1567 organisations on Border Ireland which can be broken down into various sectors in which they co-operate. Figure 2 below shows that community development comes far out in front with 27% of the total number of organisations. This includes all the various youth, women's and general community groups as well as the numerous local government Task Forces and Local Strategy Partnerships. Culture is the next largest sector with a 15% share. Again, this is no surprise given the numbers of sports clubs, arts groups and music associations who have taken part in the cross-border EU Peace I and II funding measures. Next comes economic development with a 14% share which includes SMEs and the many local and national enterprise agencies which have led the larger programmes. Education might expect to have a larger share of organisations than 13% but many of the hundreds of schools who have taken part in cross-border exchanges are hidden behind the larger Léargas and Co-operation Ireland programmes.
Within the final third are found agriculture with a 7% share of organisations. This sector includes the various cooperative societies, farmers groups and the semi-state agriculture and aquaculture bodies like Teagasc. Health has a share of just over 6% and this also covers the spectrum from the statutory to the community health organisations such as DergFinn Partnership. Tourism has a similar share which is probably a reflection of the numerous activities by a small number of government bodies such as Fáilte Ireland or the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. The environment sector also has a 6% share and combines a very small number of government agencies and a larger group of community-based organisations working in renewable energy or sustainable development. The smallest sectoral shares are enjoyed by transport (1%) and EU Programmes with only one main organisation, the Special EU Programme Body.
The final sector is the general one which includes those organisations which are cross-sectoral in their approach to cross-border work. These exist at a government level such as the North/South Ministerial Council or the two Departments of Finance. There are also the various voluntary organisations such as the general trades unions or those interested in human rights work. Also here are those few policy development organisations which touch on a number of sectors such as Democratic Dialogue or the Centre for Cross Border Studies.
INVOLVEMENT
Figure 3 below shows the levels of involvement in cross-border activities by the different types of organisations. The totals for each type give the number of times an organisation of a particular type has been involved in a cross-border activity. So if an activity had five academic partners then the numbers for academic types of organisations rise by five.
Figure 3. Types of organisations by levels of involvement
The best way of looking at Figure 3 is by taking the different ratios of organisation types to numbers of activities. These ratios are as follows:
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The ratios can be explained in various ways. The lowest for the private sector suggests that that one company or enterprise agency tends to take the lead, even in the case of joint ventures. It is also fair to point out that many of the private sector companies who were involved in early tourism or other infrastructure projects were actually working on their own without any other cross-border contact due to the funded activity itself being a back-to-back one.
The community and voluntary sector organisations, if taken together, have also got quite a low ratio. In this case the prevalence of one-off exchanges and community networking projects initiated by a single group might help to explain the low ratio. It should also be noted that in more recent INTERREG and Peace programmes the number of cross-border partnerships and joint projects has risen sharply. This might suggest that as fewer activities take place the depth of the partnerships become deeper for these types of organisations.
The government organisations have a much higher ratio of involvement in cross-border activities. This would suggest that each government body on Border Ireland might be involved in as many as four activities. Given the high number (356) of this type of organisation then this is impressive and shows how inter-governmental work has extended into the funded activities. Even on the EU INTERREG I funding programme where only one in five activities saw true cross-border cooperation there were 20 projects with joint partners and often more than two. In 15 cases the partners were government agencies, departments or local bodies such as VECs.
The highest ratio, however, is taken by the academic institutions. Indeed the figures equate to each institution being involved in almost 7 co-operative activities. This has been facilitated by some funding measures, such as the North/South Programme for Collaborative Research, which allocated €5.5m from the National Development Plan to 21 projects. There can often be more than two partners on these research projects and the same is true of the second area of joint activity by academic organisations - the research centres which were supported both by the IFI and INTERREG monies. Finally, academic institutions have happily signed on as partners to government or voluntary organisations and have thus raised their ratio that bit further.
CATEGORIES
To try and categorise the organisation who have been involved in cross-border activities at one level or another is a difficult task. In the first place the funding programmes themselves have provided a dynamic which has changed the nature of cooperation over time. So an organisation involved under INTERREG I in 1993 might have a very different cross-border relationship in 2005. However, a rough categorisation might be as follows:
The first of these categories include the very small number of all-island or cross-border bodies such as the six North/South Implementation Bodies. Beyond these there is the tiny number of organisations working to improve cross-border relations. The 'usual suspects' of Co-operation Ireland or IBEC-CBI Joint Business Council feature here as would the Centre for Cross Border Studies. One pattern which recur for these organisations is that most appeared engaged from the early EU funding programmes and have been repeat recipients of funding ever since. In the case of Co-operation Ireland it has received monies from all of the funding programmes bar the likes of LEADER or EQUAL. In turn it has shaped the cross-border agenda of the Peace programmes and INTERREG IIIA through its work in the Cross-Border Consortium. The same can also be said of CAWT, a partnership of North/ South health Boards and Trusts which adjoin the border, and the three cross-border local authority networks.
The first category is certainly the smallest. Only slightly larger are those organisations which devote a strand of their work to cross-border cooperation. One model of this category is the government departments which since 1999 have, to a greater or lesser degree, assigned officials to North/South work. In most case this would not take up all of the official's time and since the October 2002 suspension of the devolved administration in the North the workload has obviously slackened. For recipients of funding, such as local councils, there might be a cross-border worker or projects officer devoted to this strand of work. This, of course, may only be sustained as long as funding lasts and whether the expertise is lost or taken into the organisation more generally is an obvious question. The return of the NI Assembly on 8 May 2007 should see North/ South co-operation involving government officials intensify under the remit of the North/ South Ministerial Council.
In non-government areas it is very different and this brings us to the third category where organisations take on cross-border cooperation as an extra string to their bow. This is done for a number of reasons. One would be the opportunity to expand the expertise within an organisation and the chance to learn something from across the Border. It can also be to continue core work with an extra cross-border element in order to attract funding. Of course these two reasons are not mutually exclusive. A large number of organisations of all types fit into this category. To take an academic institution as an example, Dundalk Institute of Technology has been very successful in accessing cross-border funding measures. It has established new courses and research areas in partnerships with the University of Ulster (the Borderlands initiative), the Upper Bann Institute (Digital Diversity) and Queen's University Belfast (creative media cluster programme). These examples can also be found in the community and voluntary sectors in organisations such as Groundwork NI. It has developed a cross-border strand of work since first getting Peace I funding back in 2000. Its work with communities in the North to tackle physical environmental regeneration as a way towards community development has been extended into the Southern Border Counties. Through Peace II and INTERREG IIIA funding it has expanded this approach to 80 community groups in Louth and Leitrim and the work is being taken forward on the basis of these new cross-border partnerships. Like Dundalk Institute the extent to which this approach has transformed Groundwork NI is a research question that any study of the impact of these funding programmes would need to tackle.
The final category is by far the largest. This includes the many organisations who have taken part in cross-border activities to pursue mutual interests or assist their organisation to find out more about the other state and its systems. Though most of these activities were one-off affairs the value of this work should not be dismissed. On the one hand it might open up organisations to new possibilities and improved ways of operating - this can apply as easily to a business as to a community group. Also this people-to-people activity has to be at the core of any reconciliation process. For both these reasons the small-scale contact, which would never define an organisation as having a cross-border core to its activity, is as essential as any of the other three categories above.
TRENDS
What the activities recorded on Border Ireland make clear is the unsurprising trend that similar types of organisations, with similar specialisms, tend to cluster together. In other words, businesses tend to work with businesses, government bodies with government bodies and academics with academics. It is probable that the Border exaggerates this effect because of the lower levels of knowledge about the systems and organisations in the other jurisdiction. Formal partner facilitation could be a key method of tackling this barrier to cross-border cooperation and expanding mutually beneficial co-operation. Despite the high levels of commitment to cross-border co-operation on the island little effort has been directed to researching cross-border partnerships and understanding how to co-operate effectively and efficiently. As traditional funding programmes diminish and a new era of co-operation beckons this learning is needed now more than ever.
Further reading
Whyte, J. (1983), “The Permeability of the United Kingdom - Irish border: A Preliminary Reconnaissance”, Administration 31(3): 300-315.
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