A new EU package for Northern Ireland and the Border counties worth as much as £400 million over five years will be proposed by the European Commission to the Berlin summit, Commission and diplomatic sources have confirmed to The Irish Times.
The Irish and British governments and the leaders of the Northern Ireland Assembly have lobbied hard for the funding, particularly after the loss by the North of its Objective 1 status.
With huge pressure from member-states to squeeze the funding for the new "regions in transition" category, there were fears that the North could lose up to 75 per cent of its funding. There were also concerns that with agreement on the preservation of Objective 1 status for the Republic's Border counties through regionalisation, a substantial cross-Border gap in funding might have opened up.
The package will replace the £400 million NI Peace and Reconciliation Programme, established after the first ceasefire in 1994, which is due to expire at the end of this year. British sources hope it will be on the same scale as the previous fund and will be distributed largely in the same way. If approved by the member-states on the same basis as its predecessor, the cross-Border element of the programme will give a further boost of about £80 million to Border counties in the South.
Under the last structural fund programme Northern Ireland received £1.173 billion in Objective 1 aid over six years and about £300 million from the Peace and Reconciliation Programme.
