Save Our Communities

Jim McVeigh
SIPTU
Community and Voluntary Sector Branch

At present in the north over 27,000 people work in the community and voluntary sector. They are for the most part dedicated people who work long, often unsociable hours for low pay. Tens of thousands more volunteer week in, week out, supporting in many cases the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in our society.

Community organisations provide absolutely frontline services to our people who need it most and already cushion the impact of poor healthcare, low wages and inadequate government funding. Support care for our elderly, childcare for our working parents, support for those suffering from domestic violence, education and training opportunity to help prepare people for employment and lift them out of poverty, vital cross community work, including supporting victims of the political conflict on all sides, taking our youth off the streets and into more constructive activities and past times.

If these vital projects and services are cut in the time ahead, it will be the most disadvantaged, the most vulnerable in our communities that will suffer. It will be your reader's local elderly care projects that will close, it will be your reader's local youth clubs that will close, it will be your reader's childcare projects that will go to the wall. it will be them, their neighbours and our children who will suffer.

Cuts to frontline community services, will not only mean jobs lost to the economy but the reduction of vital services. Service’s that none of us can afford to do without. SIPTU believes that all of our local politicians, including Basil McCrea, all of our executive ministers, should be vigorously opposing any cuts to frontline services.

The poor should not be expected to pay for the greed and irresponsibility of the bankers.