I thank the Chair for giving me the opportunity to raise this matter. I raise it following a number of parliamentary questions I tabled on the threat posed to this project by the termination of funds.
For the past four years women from some of the most marginalised communities in Cork have gained employment under the new opportunities for women programme, a European funded project. During that time those involved developed and delivered education and training programmes for marginalised women throughout the city. Some of the programmes are with accreditation bodies for further development and should be made available in future to hundreds of women. Those involved designed and published a training manual as a tool for community women to work with each other in order to create personal, social and physical awareness and to bring about change. They secured funding to set up the first ever female owned resource centre at a city centre location.
All this and much more was done by a team which taught the women concerned to work co-operatively and to develop skills to train as managers to ensure that they, in turn, could return to their communities to encourage their peers to participate in and take up leadership roles on issues of concern.
All this work will end at the end of this month and ten women in Cork alone and approximately 60 nationally will become unemployed once again and virtually invisible, so to speak. Given that this is happening in the midst of financial abundance when the social economy is being developed and gaining strength from month to month, when women are being actively sought and encouraged to join the workforce or, under the budget, being forced to join it, and when more new initiatives are being launched to give a voice directly to the socially excluded, it is neither moral nor acceptable. I ask the Government to address this problem as a matter of urgency and to put in place mechanisms to provide the necessary Exchequer funds to allow this work continue.
The project is poised to offer, through its resource centre, the experience and learning from the first four years of the project to a vastly wider group of women in Cork. What has been learned has been shared with other like minded women's groups at national and international level through their involvement in transnational partnerships. Through the development of courses on community education and development, a two year national certificate, and a four year bachelor degree in community education and development in conjunction with a Cork CIT, community women in Cork will be able to acquire accredited qualifications specially geared to their particular needs and interests. This course will enable women to be employed and adequately paid to undertake work in their communities that they are already carrying out on a voluntary basis. None of this may, however, come to pass if the NOW funding, which is due to end in December, is not replaced by another appropriate and adequate funding mechanism for locally based community education and training.
Is this a new dawn or a false promise for these women? If such funding is terminated, it will mean that four years of hard work and great learning will have been completely wasted. Twenty women – I am only talking about the position in Cork – at different stages of developing skills and knowledge will be lost to their communities and probably replaced by professionals who have had the opportunity of college education. This is not development in practice. The NOW projects could well become false promises for many disadvantaged women in Cork and elsewhere throughout Europe. I ask the Minister to ensure funding is made available to allow these excellent initiatives to continue.
