My personal and professional gratitude to everyone, over all the years.
In 1999, Martin Lynch had another of his great ideas. At this time, the creativity was sparking in the Community Arts Forum offices, with Martin leading a creative revolution in the town and inspiring community groups to write and perform dramas about their lives and their ambitions for them. Martin was constantly looking for funding and the European Peace Funds had been announced. A funding initiative that would hopefully cement the fledgling Good Friday Agreement of 1998, into the hearts and minds of civil society and offer everyone a platform for progress. So, having investigated, Martin thought “ Why not take advantage of all this peace funding for consortium groups and build a new network of community arts and community development organisations across Belfast?”
And, so, after wrangling a grouping from all arts and parts of the city, he determinedly brought together leaders from loyalist and republican areas, unionist and nationalist and representatives of minority ethnic groups as well. Thus New Belfast Community Arts Initiative was conceived, somewhat immaculately, and duly signed into existence on 22nd December 1999.
Just two days later, on Christmas Eve 1999, my own father Jim, took his final breaths, aged just 59. He had suffered from the most inhumane of medical conditions, leaving him trapped, fully-conscious, in his totally disabled body, for many years. I had been his carer for 7 years at that point and had dreaded this day. However it was of course a welcome release from torment for a beautiful man who had suffered so terribly for those years at the close of a millennium.
As the new century and millennium kicked off, Belfast was emerging from the pall of conflict and into the political pressure cooker of peace and hard won progress. Or at least that was the hope. And whilst optimism was abundant, there was growing evidence that financial support might be too, as Martin Lynch has since remarked about this time, when the Labour government in Britain ‘turned on the taps” – and funding finally flowed into so many arts and parts of this wee corner of the world.
And as I returned to the world of work and creativity, opportunities started to show themselves. As a musician, I was playing for Tinderbox, Kabosh, Youth Lyric among others, as a stage manager for Belfast Children’s Festival and others and then, of course, well, I got a gig with New Belfast Community Arts Initiative.
Read the rest of CAP’s 25th Anniversary blog post from CAP’s CEO, Conor Shields. at the link below.
