AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
Over the Christmas break my partner and I went to visit Derry. I have been tantalised by the city’s dramatic location embraced by the Foyle as I bypassed it, but neither of us had actually been there before and found it a great destination. Does it matter, though, 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, whether I call it Derry or Londonderry?
In some ways hardly, no one refers to the TV series Derry Girls as Londonderry Girls do they? (Incidentally the programme’s creator Lisa McGee has a new series on Netflix’s ‘How To Get To Heaven From Belfast’ which she says shares the same DNI. Locals don’t use L in front of a place known as Doire Cholmchille (St Columba’s oak wood) since 6th century either. But it did matter to the DUP’s Gregory Campbell who objected to President Catherine Connolly’s failure to use the L version.
Walking the walls that withstood the infamous 105 day siege in 1689, passing buildings like the 1690 Free Presbyterian Church on Upper Magazine Street or the Guildhall with the exhibition of the plantation of Ulster, I couldn’t ignore the history of the city (1613-18), funded by the London Guilds and built on the ruins of the settlement sacked in 1608. It seems a place apart, with sandstone buildings and streetscapes with more in common with northern cities in Britain than with those in the South. In my head this was Londonderry.
Something chimed too, with some of what Campbell had to say, following his “You are in my country” remark to President Connolly on her visit to Derry as part of her three-day tour of the North. It wasn’t the country part – after all we are all on the shared island of Ireland, allbeit with two different traditions – but rather about his subsequent remarks about balance. While Campbell had no problem with Connolly’s speech in Belfast he felt her approach in Derry was partisan.
In a programme that included visits to the Free Derry Museum and a meeting with the Derry Apprentice Boys, the President met families from the Bloody Sunday massacre. But, as Campbell put, in doing so this drew attention to “tragedies affecting one community and not the other”. He has a point. I grew up in the North and for me Campbell, while acknowledging his hope to build a brighter future for all of us, put his finger on a sore spot.
Whatever about the aspirations for a United Ireland, southerners can have a partisan view which fails to take into account the atrocities visited on the northern population in the name of republicanism or the enduring damage done to both communities there by the Troubles. The effects are there not only in the deadly toll in 1,800 lives taken by the IRA and around 1,000 by loyalist paramilitaries and tragedies like the Enniskillen Remembrance Day massacre in which 11 (subsequently 12) died and 63 were injured for which no perpetrators have been convicted but also in long-lasting effects on the whole community partly due to the impact of decades of violence.
The North has four times the proportion on disability allowance compared with the South, the PSNI report receiving a call about domestic violence every 17 minutes. There are growing inequalities between North and South and much work to be done in progress towards unity which never get a mention in the rush from some quarters to hold a border poll.
Incomes, productivity, life expectancy and educational attainment all lag behind in the North. Education is still divided 90% along sectarian lines, when a move to non-denominational schools would surely help bring the two communities, Catholic and Protestant, closer together.
The failure to have a balanced approach can be alienating for those in the North who have doubts about future unity. It creates a feeling that they don’t count or count a great deal less and that they might be swallowed up, regardless, in unification. That said though, it’s great to see progress in things like cross-border initiatives, growing interest in the Irish language in the North and cross-border trade.
Progress to end partition needs to be about recognising difference and the difference between aspiration and demand.
