The evidence collected at estate level indicates that the failure to streamline governance has also created problems for community groups. Community activists complained that the need to interact with diverse bodies involved in local planning for area based investment placed a considerable burden on their organisations. For example, a resident of Fettercairn who worked as a community development officer for the estate reported that she devoted the bulk of her work time to participating in committees linked to RAPID, the Local Partnership Company and the CDB. Other interviewees highlighted considerable overlap in the local development planning work carried out under the auspices of these three programmes. At the same time, several community activists raised concerns about the possible amalgamation of these bodies into the local government system on the grounds that local authorities may not have the capacity to manage these programmes effectively. The large number of separate funding schemes in operation, the rigidity of their terms and the different and often onerous reporting arrangements employed by different funders also raised significant challenges for community groups. For instance, a community activist from Finglas South complained: projects are completely flooded with evaluations, checkups, financial audits, personnel audits … it’s time consuming and, in smaller projects the amount of time a team leader who might have been a worker … puts aside one day a week to do the admin..., that person is now lost to the team and there’s a lot of frustration around that, a huge amount of frustration around that ... and people are having difficulty with it. Variations in the reporting requirements for the different area based programmes administered by Pobal were also commonly criticised. These variations relate to the range of government departments from which funding originated and which Pobal had to reflect in its administrative procedures for different schemes. Interviewees also complained that inflexible terms for area based funding schemes decreased the efficiency of projects on the ground. For instance, interviewees working in the drug treatment area highlighted difficulties in accessing funding to address emerging problems such as cocaine use via the Local Drug Task Forces, while local authorities highlighted difficulties in raising funding for the aspects of regeneration projects which did not entail refurbishment / physical works on estates.
4.6
Interventions through social housing
So far we have considered area-based interventions of a general kind. However, a particular interest arises in the case of local authority estates in the role of their landlords – the local 86
