The British government has given the go-ahead for a £70 million "educational village" on the "peace line" in west Belfast. The Northern Ireland Secretary, Dr Mowlam, said the Springvale project, which will bring together 4,500 further and higher education students on a campus straddling the Springfield Road, was the "biggest investment in a higher education institute in the UK this year". She said the project was a crucial element in the peace-building process in the North; part of the "bedding down" of a balanced settlement.
The campus is a joint initiative by the University of Ulster and the Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education (BIFHE). The University of Ulster had unsuccessfully sought the backing of the last Conservative government for its original proposal for a more traditional university campus on the site.
In the past year it joined BIFHE, which provides foundation, further and higher education courses in six campuses and 134 outreach centres throughout Belfast, to present a revised project for a multi-level "educational village" on the Springvale site. The new campus will provide courses at every level from basic literacy and numeracy to postgraduate research.
In phase one, the 900 students at the university's art and design faculty will move to west Belfast. The other start-up disciplines will be informatics, catering, tourism, social and community studies and university access courses. Dr Mowlam said yesterday she wanted to see "something on the site" by 2000.
There will also be an "outreach centre" to service the 20,000 students on BIFHE's adult and community education programme, and a postgraduate research centre specialising in the first instance in areas like bio-engineering and multimedia.
Dr Mowlam said she had no worries that the required funding would be found. The British government was committing £40 million, and the University of Ulster and BIFHE had pledged to raise £20 million. "There is no lack of willingness to help, particularly after last Friday's agreement. There are people in the US and Europe would like to do what they can." She hoped the new campus could become a "model for other higher education institutions in how to respond to people's real needs, rather than the needs of a very small section of the community." The MP for the area, Sinn Fein president Mr Gerry Adams, said the people of west Belfast would be "very hopeful" of the project's potential, both for the opportunities it would give local young people, and the jobs it would bring to the area. It is expected that about 1,200 jobs will be created by the new campus, a third of them for people from north and west Belfast.
The University of Ulster vice-chancellor, Lord Trevor Smith of Clifton, said the go-ahead for Springvale would make it "the first significant civic investment in west Belfast since partition". The new campus would "create a place of hope and environmental renewal out of a wasteland". The director of BIFHE, Prof Patrick Murphy, said this was "not a victory for unionists or nationalists, but a victory for educationalists, and for education". He said Springvale would provide for the first time in Northern Ireland's history "a structured alternative to university entrance outside the grammar school system for the 70 per cent who fail the 11-plus exam". The PUP leader Mr Billy Hutchinson, who represents part of Protestant west Belfast on Belfast City Council, said he hoped that the new campus would use its research and development facilities to encourage small businesses.