THE Arts Council has just told us that grants of around £10,000 to each of three bands who took part in the annual Brian Robinson UVF commemoration parade have been paid out in full.
In February, we reported that the three bands – Freeman Memorial Flute Band, Monkstown YCV Flute Band and Shankill Road Defenders Flute Band – had been awarded a total of £30,000 for new instruments, despite the fact that their participation in the UVF parade drove a coach and four through the Arts Council good relations criteria for bands applying for funding. The money was paid out in tranches and we asked the Arts Council whether funds that had not yet been paid out would be disbursed in the light of the news, particularly given the Arts Council’s admission to us that the bands in question failed to disclose their participation in the highly controversial annual tribute to Robinson. The UVF man shot dead innocent Catholic Paddy McKenna at the Ardoyne shops in September 1989, before himself being shot dead seconds later by an undercover British army unit tracking his movements.
The Arts Council also told us that they carry out due diligence checks on bands applying for funds – checks which should have uncovered the bands’ failure to disclose their participation in the UVF tribute parade. But those checks inexplicably failed to locate easily accessible information available online about the bands’ involvement in the UVF parade last September and so the three bands were included in a list
of bands awarded funding in a blaze of Arts Council publicity in December.
The Arts Council told us in February that the decision to award funding to the three bands was to be reviewed and now, three months later, they’ve informed us that no sanctions are to be imposed on the bands and the £30,000 in funding has been paid in full. The Arts Council said in a statement the bands have “confirmed their commitment to to good relations”.
Do the Arts Council take us for complete fools? How on Earth can bands which took part in the North’s largest and most notorious UVF parade be said to have a commitment to good relations which they are capable of confirming? How can bands which deliberately withheld information which would have made them ineligible for funding be handed the money they claimed in bad faith without a penny being withheld?
This appalling decision tells all bands which participate in public tributes to illegal organisations that the forms they fill in mean nothing. This decision tells them that the Arts Council requirement for them to commit to good relations in order to receive funding is meaningless. Any band thinking twice about taking part in paramilitary tribute parades can now go right ahead, and when the time comes for them to apply to the Arts Council for money they can do what these three bands did: Say nothing.
It’s a shocking and unsustainable state of affairs. More worryingly, it’s a dire, destructive precedent.
