Since the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, the arts have been promoted as capable of reconciling communities in Northern Ireland. In keeping with cultural policy orthodoxies in Britain and Ireland, practitioners are expected to provide even more information on the contribution of their work to this agenda. However, short-term evaluation processes entrench bureaucratic systems of arts administration that occlude, and even hinder, the complex, long-term legacies of particular applied arts projects. This article instead argues that situating participant experience within the broader material conditions of inequality and scarcity they face offers a better account of the transformative power of such projects.