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Capitol gains for two Irish charities

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Project Children and Cooperation Ireland have been included by the House of Representatives in the foreign assistance budget for the 2005 fiscal year. The groups stand to split $500,000 between them should the House-approved funding be given the nod by the Senate next month.
The money is contained in a special $12 million Conflict Resolution Account that is itself part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill approved recently in a House vote by 365-41.
The names of the two Irish groups were suggested for the list of organizations to be aided by the account by Rep. Joe Crowley and steered through subsequent committee deliberations by Rep. Nita Lowey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee’s Foreign Operations Subcommittee.
Crowley, a member of the House international Relations Committee and a co-chair of the Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs, said that the money would enable Project Children and Cooperation Ireland to sustain and develop a series of reconciliation initiatives that would reach young people of diverse social and economic backgrounds in Northern Ireland.
A spokesman for Crowley said that the Conflict Resolution Account was open to all groups around the world working for peace, but that Project Children and Cooperation Ireland were among a handful of organizations whose names have been submitted in advance for priority treatment.
The spokesman said he did not expect the $12 million allocation to be “knocked out” when the respective House and Senate appropriations bills are reconciled at joint conference stage a few weeks from now.
The money, he said, would be ultimately allocated by USAID, the federal government’s overseas aid agency.
Project Children founder and chairman, Denis Mulcahy, said that the group brought 260 Catholic and Protestant children to the U.S. this year for holidays with American families. In addition, the group brought in 70 college-age interns to work in New York and Washington, D.C.
The money obtained from Congress would be used for Project Children’s work in general, but was especially useful for subsidizing those interns working in political offices in Washington because they were not being paid, Mulcahy said.
“The intern program has been going very well,” Mulcahy, a retired NYPD bomb squad member and native of Cork, said.
Brian McGinley, executive director of Cooperation Ireland in the U.S., said that his group and Project Children had filed a joint submission to Congress.
“It makes sense for two quality groups to hold hands as they walk up Capitol Hill,” McGinley said.
McGinley said he was hopeful that the $500,000 for the two organizations would pass through the Senate’s proceedings without a problem and be divided evenly between Cooperation Ireland and Project Children.
He said that Cooperation Ireland’s profile in Washington had recently received a big boost as a result of it securing the services of two new board members, former Rep. Ben Gilman and Jean Kennedy Smith, a former U.S. ambassador to Ireland.

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