FORMER Lord Mayor Tom Hartley has been awarded an honorary degree from Queen's University for his services to the local community.

Others who received honorary doctorates on Monday at the university included actor Jamie Dornan and former SDLP leader Mark Durkan.

Speaking about the ceremony Tom said: “Queen’s put a lot of effort into planning the event and they really looked after their guests, it went very well.

“I was talking with Jamie Dornan before the event and I was sitting beside him on the stage and I said to him ‘This is going to change our lives!’”

“Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill also called in on the way back from the talks at Hillsborough Castle and they were there for the ceremony so it was very nice to see them too."

Tom said his honorary doctorate was awarded for his work in politics and as a councillor and his work protecting and preserving the records of Belfast's cemeteries. 

Tom said: “The three things they spoke about which were important to me was my role in Sinn Féin as the General Secretary and the National Chairperson and my role as a councillor in Belfast City Council for over 20 years.

"For me that was the greatest honour because when people put an ‘X’ beside your name it’s a tremendous honour, and also my role as Mayor from 2008-2009. They also mentioned my history work on Belfast’s cemeteries which I’ve been researching to give a social, political and economic history of the city.

“When I first came across the burial records they were down in the basement and in a really bad state so I arranged for them to be brought up, catalogued properly and located in a dedicated room. The next stage was having them digitised and that included all the records for Belfast City Council which includes other burial grounds as well. 

“I also did two reports, the first in 1997 on the exclusion of Nationalists from the positions of Chairs and Deputy Chairs of council committees. I also looked at the employment figures for Nationalists in Belfast City Council and it was after my work on that the Council adopted the D’Hondt system," he said.

“My attitude at the time and what our attitude in City Hall has always been is that you can’t undo history and it was a building which was such a Unionist bastion that we would add to it. I added to it by proposing the Famine Window for Belfast and also the window commemorating the 1907 dockworkers and labourers strike which was led by Jim Larkin which you can see in the foyer of the building.

Tom added he was incredibly grateful to have been associated with the university.

“I said at a speech in 2008 when the Council hosted a dinner for Queen’s to celebrate the centenary of Queen’s College becoming Queen’s University that Queen’s had always been a great reservoir of knowledge and for me it’s always been an honour to be associated with that great reservoir of knowledge.”