THE News Letter counted 30, I counted 19. The images aren’t great, and it was nighttime, so it might have been 20. Or 18. But it defo wasn’t 30.
The posters online and the free advertisement on the Nolan Show from TUV Councillor Ron McDowell had suggested that, finally, this might be it. This might be the time when the loyal Protestant people of Our Wee Country finally showed the world exactly what they thought of Irish language signs polluting and scarring the city their ancestors built.
At last the discourse would be fed not by the vein-popping objections of Messrs Righteous and Indignation giving out in the Stormont and Council chambers, but by the big numbers that fed the discourse on the Anglo Irish Agreement, the ditching of the RUC and the UDR, the freeing of prisoners, the Irish Sea border. Clear the concourse in front of Olympia Leisure Centre; send the traffic cops en masse to Boucher and the Westlink. Friday was going to be the night when Belfast City Council would learn once and for all that this, to use the words of Cllr Ron, is an Ulster-Scots city.
Didn’t quite work out like that. Like I say, 19 turned out. Or 20. Or 18. But not 30.
I’ve got a dog in this fight because I live in Belfast. But because I come from the Roden Street area of Belfast – which got namechecked a couple of times at the micro-demo – that dog’s not a yappy wee handbag dog, it’s a big, slabbery mastiff. And not only am I a native of the district in question here, I’m one of the Ulster-Scots who Ron identifies as the builders of this great city. I couldn’t give you chapter and verse on my father’s family’s journey from the Highlands or the Lowlands of Scotland to the rich County Armagh farmland around Markethill and Richhill. It was to there the Plantation Livingstones flocked in the early 17th century to accept the stolen land with an enthusiasm which would make your average Israeli gasp in admiration (and where more Livingstones are still to be found than anywhere else). But I know I ended up being born in the front bedroom of a tiny terraced house round the back of Roden Street barracks.
So I do hope Ron will accept my credentials as an Ulster-Scot with a fine Ulster-Scots name who had the signal misfortune of being raised in a seething morass of native Irish malcontents. And I hope Ron will accept that my place of birth makes me an Olympic-level Olympia Leisure Centre stakeholder.
And having established my bona fides, I feel emboldened to say that the idyllic little corner of Loyal Ulster that is the Roden Street/Village/ Boucher area doesn’t give a monkey’s about the Irish signs at Olympia. Oh, sure, if a titan of unionism like Ron knocks on the doors and asks them if they agree that the cúpla focal on the local leisure centre annoys them more than its Greek name, they’re going to say it does. Because they keep being told that it does – by Ron on the radio, by the DUP in the papers and by the UUP on TV. But when they’re asked to get off the sofa on a fine, mild Friday night to walk round the corner for ten minutes, nobody bothers. When they have the chance to send an unmistakeable message to the rebel insurgents at Belfast City Hall, they stayed in and watched the One Show.
But the sphincter-clenching embarrassment of Friday night’s no-show is not the only – or even the strongest – indicator that unionists and loyalists aren’t willing to go to the mattresses over Mná and Fir on toilet doors and Sráid and Bóthar on street signs. The strongest indicator is that the signs keep going up. And they don’t keep going up because the woke leftards on the Council are sticking it to the Prods, they’re going up because those who want them up are doing a bit of work and those who don’t want them aren’t doing any work.
The myth that the three main unionists parties have done an excellent job of propagating is that 15 per cent of people responding to a survey in a street can get Irish added to the sign. That means in a street of 30 homes, if 4.5 homes (look, I don’t make the maths) fill in the form saying they’re for dual language signage, that’s the war over. The first part of the myth is that 15 per cent of respondents to a survey are required to effect change.
Not true. The 15 per cent figure refers to “occupants” and not survey respondents. The second and most corrosive part of the myth is that when that when that 15 per cent says yes, the sign goes up. Again, simply not true. When the required 15 per cent (of householders) threshold is met, that triggers the application (made incidentally by a resident, an elected rep or a developer) being the subject of a report for submission to the People and Communities Committee.
So after that mess is cleared up, we put the brush and mop away and sit down to think. Why is it that we hear only about opposition to dual signage after the signs have gone up? How come opposition is expressed illegally post-facto by way of whinge, paint and angle-grinder? Well, because the necessary energy and activism does not exist. Every day across the city people well disposed towards the language are working to spread the message: Gaeilgeoirí, learners, politicians, community groups. The applications are arriving at a rate of knots and residents are being given a heads-up about what’s happening. All of this requires organisation, and it requires work. But organisation is not – as multiple unionist commentators have confirmed and lamented over the years – a unionist strength. And the work ethic appears to have disappeared with the ropeworks and the shipyard. What do we see and what do we hear about the input of unionists into the dual language sign reports that precede any decision? What do we see and what do we hear of residents happy with their street signs the way they are?
The answer is nothing. We see nothing. We hear nothing. What we hear and what we see are people like Cllr Ron walking around with Fr Ted sandwich boards reading ‘Down with this sort of thing.’
It reminds me very much of the ‘Where are our inquiries?’ unionist mantra. The relatives of a victim of the British state appear outside Laganside court after winning the latest round of their battle for justice. The angry and self-pitying refrain from unionist reps is to demand the same for victims of the Ra, as if that family, their legal team and their supporters were gifted their day on the courthouse steps in front of the cameras on the whim of some malign and unseen anti-Protestant Deep State actor.
The truth is, of course, that they ended up winning in court because they’ve spent years, decades, in a world of tears and pain, punching through walls put in their way by a state possessed of bottomless resources. I can point you to scores of nationalist and republican politicians – hundreds if we go back far enough – who have worked their socks off helping victims take on the British state. I can’t point you to one unionist politician who has been by the side of a Protestant, unionist or loyalist family in a long, costly and painful fight to get truth and justice from the IRA. In fact, I’d be hard-pushed to find a Protestant, unionist or loyalist family enduring ordeal by court, so deep is the impression gleaned from their leaders that the legal system is “not for us”.
So here we are. Unionism wailing and beating its breast at something that lot have done instead of doing what’s required either to make sure it isn’t done; to make sure it’s done in a fair way; or – perish the thought – to do something new and positive.
