I LOVE Belfast’s Black Mountain. And I love how it is now a living billboard to send out international messages of solidarity to people experiencing repression, to give voice to campaigns who feel censored and ignored, to assert the legitimacy of an Irish experience in a Belfast which remains in the British jurisdiction but free in its minds and actions.
 
The use of the mountain prompts all of Belfast to think about the matters of the day, even if it feels uncomfortable. And being an environmentally aware bunch, the stimulating letters come down nearly as quickly as they went up, allowing the grass to grow green and the birds to feed on the insects buzzing about, as though nothing had ever taken place.

100 years on the Black Mountain might have been proclaiming our victory against the darkness, linking messages of pride from Cregagh, Sliabh Donard, the Sugar Loaf, Carrauntoohill, Croke Patrick and Errigal.

However, notwithstanding the zero environmental impact, the letters remain in our minds and our conversations. The messages are not nuanced, they just are what they are. They prompt conversation, energy, debate and awareness. You don’t have to agree, but you are prompted to ask “What does it say?”, “What is that about?”, “What do you think about that?”
 
This week the mountain proclaimed that “Partition has failed”. It was seen across the city on the anniversary of the founding of the northern statelet. A statement from a people that in this centenary year, what is to come will not look like what has been. While some are happy to maintain the status quo in constitutional terms, for very many partition has failed them politically, culturally, socially and economically.
 
This anniversary prompts questions of what might have been. What if the country had remained united in 1921 when Britain withdrew? What if our people had not been divided on a sectarian headcount? What if the Irish proclamation had been the core of a new constitution and Irish men, women and children had been equal under the law? What if Catholic and Protestant hegemonies had not festered into squalid sectarian and religious zealotry nightmares on two sides of a border?

VIBRANT TALENT OF ALL OUR PEOPLE

What if instead of two economies there was one island economy to which all of the vibrant talent of all our people had been invested and our education system had produced a workforce that would stay on this island instead of being educated to emigrate? What if we had harnessed the energy of the Celtic revival into an Irish expression of culture that was reflective of our complex histories and traditions where all were cherished and developed, and we all became confidently bi-lingual?

100 years on the Black Mountain might have been proclaiming our victory against the darkness, linking messages of pride from Cregagh, Sliabh Donard, the Sugar Loaf, Carrauntoohill, Croke Patrick and Errigal.
 
Of course, that is all what might have been had partition not been imposed on a sectarian headcount and enforced with murder.
 
But in this anniversary week we know this. The potential of our country might still be achieved. Constitutional change is possible.

We know what has failed, but that is a past we cannot change, we can now write the future. With the tragic memory of the past 100 years as our motivation we can now work with all of our communities to write what self-determination, free from London’s malign influence, might look like and vote for it. Imagine what the Black Mountain will tell us on that day.