4.5Impact

In some cases these public funds were supplemented by private and philanthropic funding and, as already mentioned, investment by the latter was especially large in Fatima Mansions, it amounted to the equivalent of approximately €4,500 per household in that estate in 2006. ABIs in Moyross received funds from a philanthropic foundation established by the businessmen JP McManus and by the Dell computer company, although we were unable to capture the value of this investment. As mentioned above, in Deanrock and Cranmore the private and philanthropic sectors did not make a significant contribution to funding area based services.

4.5 Impact

As outlined earlier, information on inputs to area-based initiatives at estate level is patchy and difficult to fill in with any degree of completeness. It is scarcely surprising, then, that no rigorous assessment can be made of the impact of these initiatives. Writing in 2003, Haase and McKeown found that ‘little is known about the actual impact of the area-based Partnerships and even less about the comparative value of different approaches to tackling poverty and deprivation’ (Haase and McKeown 2003, p. iii). Their call for a more scientific approach to monitoring has since gone largely unheeded and the information needed for effective monitoring of programmes is still largely absent. The present study has established that the scale of initiatives deployed in each estate is in most cases collectively large enough to have substantial impact. This in itself is significant since it eliminates the possibility that the programmes were too small to make a real difference. However, it was beyond the scope of a point-in-time study such as ours to generate the trend data and control variables that would have been necessary to provide well-grounded impact assessment. Nevertheless, we can offer some broad comment on a range of issues connected with impact. We do this first by presenting statistical indicators that, taken together with national evaluations of the ABIs and local interviews with activists who implement initiatives in the estates, throw some light on the possible effects of these initiatives. In addition, we comment on three characteristics of these programmes which bear heavily on their effectiveness, namely, their targeting, design and governance.

Statistical indicators Indirect evidence on the possible impact of area-based programmes can be derived by examining change in statistical indicators of deprivation at electoral district (ED) level for the ten area-based programmes that adopted the ED as their spatial unit. For each of 77

these programmes it is possible to identify the EDs the programme selected, calculate the share of the national population that was included in the targeted EDs, and track the average change in the Index of Relative Affluence and Deprivation in those EDs between 1996 and 2006 (see pp. 19-21 above for an account of this Index). The results of this exercise are shown in Table 9. The information on targeting, as measured by population share covered by the different programmes, is a revealing aspect of this table and we return to it in the next section. Here we focus on change in the Index of Relative Affluence and Deprivation for the period covered by the table, 1996-2006. During this decade the mean score for Ireland as a whole increased by 5.2, indicating an increase in affluence. Improvement was tilted considerably in favour of the most disadvantaged EDs – the ten per cent of EDs that were the least affluent in 1996 improved by 11.9 points while the ten per cent of EDs that were most affluent marginally lost ground (a decline of 1.3 points).

Looking at the outcomes in the EDs targeted by the ten area-based programmes, average change was positive in all cases and in all except one case (the Local Employment Service) was at least as good as the national average. However, the gain in these areas over and above the national average gain was modest. In no instance was it as great as that recorded by the ten percent of least affluent EDs and in only two instances (CLÁR and RAPID) did it exceed the national average gain by two points or more. At first sight, therefore, it would seem that the impact of the programmes was modest at best in that they did little to add to the general upsurge in prosperity that occurred in Ireland over the ten years 1996-2006. We cannot attach too much significance to this finding since it is possible that the modest average improvement in areas targeted by these programmes conceals larger improvement in particularly deprived sub-areas, perhaps helped by a channelling of resources into the poorest neighbourhoods by the programmes in question. This possibility cannot be tested in light of the poor information on neighbourhood-level distribution of resources by these programmes noted earlier. Rather, a less positive possibility suggests itself – that area targeting of the programmes was poor and did not live up to the logic of strict spatial channelling of resources that ostensibly motivated the whole area-based movement in social policy. It is thus to the question of targeting that we now turn.