A chara,
The month of March saw a record-breaking, over twenty-nine thousand rentals of Belfast Bikes in our city.
While many people are no doubt availing of the improving weather and taking the opportunity to safely get outside, with all the positive mental health benefits that comes with that, I also believe the last year has shown us that Belfast citizens are up for reimagining how we travel, how we live, work and play within our city.
Belfast Bikes can play a role in how we emerge from lockdown and take advantage of being active and outdoors, connecting with each other and our city in a safe and environmentally friendly way.
I commend the leadership of Belfast City Council, both members and officials, in driving this project over the last number of years and I hope we can continue to see it expand throughout the city and reach communities who would surely take advantage of having the asset they help pay for much closer to their own homes – helping them access the city core and play their part in re-stimulating the Belfast economy.
While I believe in the further potential of Belfast Bikes, it is predicated on the Department for Infrastructure properly and urgently investing in the nuts and bolts of cycling in the city; the Belfast Bikes scheme on its own will not be the solution to the challenges that lie ahead, they are of course much bigger than that.
If we want a city centre that is accessible, open, safer, cleaner, more environmentally just and equal, then some fundamentals need to change and change very soon.
We need more permanent, protected bike lanes.
We need to look at how our city is laid out, who (or what) is given precedence; we need to look at real physical improvements and recalibration, not the tokenistic and unenforced moves announced by the Department for Infrastructure in recent months to ‘pedestrianise’ a minuscule number of streets in a section of the city centre – while announced to much fanfare, these streets remain much the same as before and surely our aspirations for the city are much bigger and much bolder than this?
We should be ambitious. We should look to the city of Cork and their decision to properly pedestrianise over seventeen streets in the centre of their city.
We need to look at giving Belfast back to people, by ensuring that if we do minimise the dominance of the private car in the city core, they don’t then further tighten their stranglehold on the inner-city communities that surround the heart of Belfast – these areas must not be forgotten in any future plan to improve travel and transport infrastructure in the centre of the city.
We need infrastructural planning and vision for a Belfast, like a world, forever changed as a result of what we’ve been through this last year.
While acknowledging the broad and at times difficult issues at play; while accepting that there is no ‘silver bullet’, I firmly believe that the high use of Belfast Bikes shows us that the people here want something different for our city.
If leadership and delivery can replace press-releases and social media posts from the Department for Infrastructure, I have no doubt that there are many partners ready to assist in this work and even more people out there all too willing to relish the benefits that such changes to the city can help bring.
So let March not just be a record-breaking month for the use of Belfast Bikes, let it act as a catalyst for the long overdue and required change that people so clearly want to see in and for our city.
Is mise le meas,
An Seanadóir Niall Ó Donnghaile, Béal Feirste
• The legacy of partition has been division and pain
FOR over eight hundred years Irishmen and women of both main religions were subjected to the most incredible hardships the British Government could inflict on them.
An Gort Mór is the greatest example of how the English valued the people of the thirty-two counties, including the ancestors of what would become a six-county sectarian state.
Partition was the British Governments way of inflicting even more pain on the Irish people. They didn’t just partition the country, they partitioned the people.
While the people of the twenty-six counties started to rebuild a future together without British interference, the people of the six counties were driven further apart by the British Government’s exploitation of religion, in favour of the Protestant population of the six counties. In today’s political correctness that would be a hate crime.
One hundred years of partition has brought nothing but death, destruction, poverty, housing crisis, educational failures and even more division. All brought about by the British Government.
Now we have a return to serious riots across the North from Unionists opposed to the Protocol brought in as a result of Brexit. Those riots soon turned to attacks on Nationalists homes on the peace line at Lanark Way. Nationalists didn’t introduce the protocol, the British Government did.
Prince Philip’s death on April 9 brought some calm to the riots. Sinn Féin showed their respects to his death with a speech by Michelle O’Neill in Stormont. Boris Johnston was in the six counties weeks ago for a photo shoot but he has refused to meet all concerned parties over the street violence in the North.
British interference in Ireland has brought nothing but suffering for all our people. Wolfe Tone saw it in 1798 and it’s about time his Unionist descendants recognised it.
A True Republican
• Lenadoon youth work is second to none
A chara, I was very disappointed to read the anonymous letter trolling Glen Parent Youth in last week's paper. Glen Parent Youth do fantastic work in the Lenadoon area, much of which has been covered by Andytown News journalists in recent months. The faceless letter writer does our local youth workers a great dis-service with his/her baseless criticisms containing outright lies.
As a Lenadoon resident, I regularly see Glen Parent youth workers on the streets at the weekend. I have witnessed them engaging with our young people from the top of the estate near St Oliver Plunkett Church right down to the bottom of the estate near Horn Drive.
Everyone I have spoken to this week has been disgusted to see our underfunded local youth workers attacked in this way. I'm sure however that Glen Parent Youth's excellent reputation will not be affected by anonymous letters containing untruths.
Le meas, Glen Phillips, Léana an Dúin
• Slavery: It’s not just a black issue
REGARDING your series on slavery, any discussions about slavery one cannot ignore the 17th and 18th century British slave trade using Irish slaves (not indentured servants).
Slavery was not only a black issue. Further, what does one call the British attitude and treatment of Catholics in the island of Ireland since the 12th century and, in particular, the racial bigotry of Protestant/Unionist governments in the north of Ireland against Catholics since, at least, 1912 and up to recently.
James Gallagher
• Mickey was one of life’s gentlemen
REGARDING your article about the murder of big Mickey Gilbride, in 1992, I just want to say Mickey was one of life's gentlemen who was murdered by cowards. R.I E.P. Mickey.
Billy Gray
