I TOOK my first trip out of the new Grand Central this week. It is beautifully designed, clean, fresh and modern. And so easy to hop on the new hourly trains to Dublin. What a difference this connection will make, and it will clearly become an integrated part of our infrastructure very quickly.

Although, I am still not sure why the conductors have to print a ticket at the barriers after the traveller presents the QR code emailed to them when they bought it online, and then the traveller scans said printed ticket at the automatic barriers. It is a bit of a faff, but that is small potatoes, and sure beats the previous even more incongruous Lanyon Place system where you queued up with your emailed ticket at a ticket kiosk for a new printed ticket, to queue up for the train conductor to punch. So, all in all definite progress.

However, it is not perfect. How is there a big shiny beautiful station and nowhere to drop people off? Jumping out of your taxi/lift at the traffic lights at the Grosvenor Road, is neither safe nor desirable. The beautifully designed steps face onto the road without a layby. Hopefully that is one of the parts that is still under construction, but right now that is a big gap, and a dangerous one.

It is well recorded that not including An Gaeilge in the signage of the transport hub is not just a gap, it is offensive. It is offensive that we are in 2024, seven years after Martin McGuinness collapsed the Executive due to bad practice and hubris and contempt for Irishness, that we have to still assert our right to our identity in our own country.

I long for the day when my identity is taken for granted and none of anyone’s business and I am not forced to either compromise or protest to be Irish in my own country. The contemptible signs going up over Scoil na Seolta in East Belfast are hate signs. The people engaged in erecting them and defending them hate Irishness, and hate the idea of sharing their pitches and streets with anything Irish. It is insecure and pathetic yes, but it is hate all the same. And it is time they were arrested for it.

There is a notional intolerance for intolerance, but unless those engaged in it are held to account nothing will change. No one has the right to object to Irish identity through threat and intimidation. Erecting signs that diminish the equal legitimacy of Irish citizenship, the Irish language, Irish national sports, Irish culture and the expression of Irishness is to express hate towards half the population of this shared space. The tolerance for these signs and the snake tongued “community stakeholders” who give a reasoning for why a GAA pitch will be regularly targeted is a signal that this intolerance is somehow legitimate.

Crowing over the failure to deliver Casement and pretending that the reason it isn’t built is because of the GAA, is further evidence of intolerance of Irishness.

And the failure to include Irishness in signage in world class new developments like the Grand Central Station tells the world that this hate fuelled treatment of the language and Irishness is somehow OK. And suddenly the shiny and new become very tainted.