TAKE a walk or drive round the centre of Belfast and you’ll find the place transformed. The Waterfront Hall and the Titanic building and the costly hotels and apartments soar skyward. In the downtown Ulster University there are 650,000 bricks, 22,000 square metres of glass and 606 kilometres of data cables that’d stretch between Belfast and Derry six times over. Oh, and they expect the buildings to last 300 years.
Ulster University has swept away the huddle of small and dilapidated buildings in the centre of Belfast and replaced them with buildings that are big and bold and even daring. It’s expected that 15,000 staff and pupils will fill its buildings and lecture theatres.
The great majority of Belfast people are pleased to see the impoverished buildings replaced with the glass and stone of this brave new downtown Belfast.
There are exceptions, of course. The residents of Carrick Hill felt that the university being built would cut them off from direct contact with the city centre. Some people, I’m sure, think back nostalgically to the old makeshift buildings and the memories that went with them. But the people who really don’t like this massive development of the Ulster University are the people of Derry.
You may not remember it but I do: in the early 1960s the New University of Ulster (NUU) was expected to be located in Derry. After all, Derry already had the nucleus with Magee College, which had first opened its doors in 1865. Derry was also the second city of NEI so of course the new university would be developed there.
Uh-uh. In 1965 the people that then controlled the levers of power declared Coleraine to be the location of NUU, and when they did, the people of Derry got mad as hell. A 2,000-strong cavalcade drove to Stormont in protest at this blatant act of sectarianism. It didn’t change a thing, that cavalcade, and at the same time it changed everything. The Civil Rights movement had begun.
Today, as Belfast people admire and marvel at the architecture of Belfast’s downtown UU, people in Derry are incandescent at the continuing neglect of their city. At present just over 5,200 students attend the Magee campus. That’s expected to rise to 6,200, thanks to a funding boost of €44.5 million from the Irish government, part of its Shared Island initiative. That helps, but the university is still nowhere near the 10,000 students that Derry has been agitating for since the 1960s.
Derry unionists were glad to see the €44.5 the Irish government coughed up, but took care not to be too appreciative in case they got a Lundy label.
But here’s the thing: If Micheál Martin were serious about his Shared Island project, he’d give more thought to Derry’s location. A few miles outside Derry takes you into Donegal, and just eighteen miles separates the thriving Donegal town of Letterkenny from Derry City. What better project for a Shared Island initiative than a university that straddles the border, with Derry and Letterkenny the two main campuses?
This would not only show the absurdity of a border than cuts Derry off from its natural hinterland, it would help create the full-blown School of Medicine so often promised to Magee campus. And It would provide the economic surge that the presence of a large number of students generates.
Derry people were convinced sectarianism was central to ignoring them and locating NUU in Coleraine in 1965. They have similar suspicions today. about the glittering renewal of Belfast city centre’s campus and the resources-starved Magee campus.
