Seeing is believing: dual-language street signage policies as restorative community action

This article was originally published in Just News, the Committee on the Administration of Justice’s Newsletter in January 2024. A copy of the newsletter can be accessed here. It was co-written by Dr. Ó Tiarnaigh and Cuisle Nic Liam.

Language visibility, particularly in the context of minoritised languages, has been consistently identified in international research as a key tool in the normalisation process of said language; both among the minority language community themselves, and those with limited exposure to the language.

The case for Irish language visibility here is particularly unique, not only because over 95% of place names here derive directly from Irish, but because countless attempts by political unionism since the foundation of this northern state have sought to proactively delegitimise, deny and marginalise the Irish language, partnered with an inspiring display of community activism at grassroots level, have awoken an entire generation of Gaeilgeoirí who are keen to make sure that the days of see no Irish, hear no Irish, speak no Irish are a thing of the past.

Faulkner’s comments came at a time when Stormont introduced legislation to officially ban Irish language from street signage through an “English-only” law. Section 19 of The Public Health and Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act (Northern Ireland) 1949 included provisions which gave legislative expression to a long-standing ban, in practice, on dual-language street signs under Unionist majority rule.

The repeal of those provisions, first muted in the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, would finally come in 1995, following a British Government commitment from then Secretary of State and Conservative MP Patrick Mayhew in December 1992. By then, a paper published by CAJ in 1993, entitled ‘The Irish Language in Northern Ireland: The UK Government’s approach to the Irish Language in light of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages’, confirms that “Irish language activists [had] erected over 500 Irish street signs in nationalist areas”.

Article 11 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Northern Ireland) Order 1995 was simply a repeal of the 1949 legislation, leaving the fate of the Irish language on street signs up to the future interpretation and persuasion of local Councils themselves, whilst requiring them to “have regard to any views on the matter expressed by the occupiers of premises in that street”.

Speaking during the passage of the 1995 Order in the House of Lords on Thursday 23rd February 1995, Baroness Jean Denton of Wakefield, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the NIO from 1994-7, confirmed the intention of the legislation was to merely lift the ban, stopping short of proscribing the procedures or criteria by which demand would be gauged, saying:

“However, before deciding to erect the second nameplate, a council must have regard to any views expressed by the occupiers of premises in the street concerned… It is considered that councils using their local knowledge can best decide how to have regard to the views of occupiers when considering whether to erect a second nameplate. We believe that to impose requirements as to how a council should undertake that task could prove unduly restrictive and bureaucratic and is best dealt with in relation to specific local circumstances.”

With the legal powers shifted via proxy legislation to local government, it would take 3 years before the first council would step forward to provide policy cover to compliment the 1995 order, with Belfast City Council first adopting a policy for the erection of dual language street signs in 1998. That policy set an incredibly high bar for local residents to access and achieve dual-language signage, requiring a petition signed by ⅓ of residents on the street to trigger an official council canvas via survey.

That survey, to be deemed applicable, would require a ⅔ majority of residents on the street. Any resident who did not respond would be deemed and counted automatically as against the application. The application would then be brought through council committee and full council for approval.

That policy would be challenged in 2014 by a resident of Ballymurphy Drive in West Belfast when 52 residents of the eligible 92 responded in favour of the application, 1 opposed and 39 did not respond. Despite an overwhelming majority of the responses being in favour of the application, the 67% threshold was not met, the application was deemed unsuccessful and, following an unsuccessful Judicial Review, a recommendation to replace the 2/3 requirement with one seeking a simple majority, was rejected, as Mr Justice Horner ruled:

“a public authority […] cannot be obliged to treat itself as bound to act in compliance with international obligation. Even where it does so it is clear from the authorities that the courts will adopt a very light touch review which will not extend to ruling on the meaning or effect of the International Treaty.”

The European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, which was flag-posted as a huge gain under the Good Friday Agreement, became a useful guidance document, but was, according to Horner, domestically unenforceable in court.

Other councils, as normal, followed the top-heavy, draconian precedent set by the Belfast ‘mother council’, with council with Unionist majorities, such as Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council (2018), Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon (2020), Antrim and Newtownabbey (2022) (following Judicial Review action by Conradh na Gaeilge in 2018) and Ards and North Down (2023) adopting street signage policies which were based upon Belfast’s restrictive practices.

It comes as no surprise, therefore that, to date, only a handful of signs have gone up in one of the above council areas (Antrim and Newtownabbey). At the time of writing, the only local authority yet to comply with the 1995 Order and introduce a policy is Mid & East Antrim.

That 1998 Belfast City Council policy remained in place until replaced until 2022, following decades of lobbying from residents and Irish language groups. In that period, 1998-2022, only 265 applications were made. Our experience tells us that this is not due to a lack of demand; between 1998-2022, only 265 applications were made to Belfast City Council for bilingual street signs.

Within 2 weeks of adopting a more progressive, minority-compliant policy in 2022 under which a single resident could trigger the application, the Council received more than 500 applications. At the time of writing, Belfast City Council have received over 1,000 valid applications. Demand was never the problem. Even in instances where ‘supermajority’ demand has been clearly demonstrated and all excessively high thresholds within these draconian policies met, policies contain mechanisms that allow councillors to override successful applications.

A recent case in Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Council (ABC), following the relatively recent adoption of a dual-language street sign procedures based on the 1998 Belfast model, seen councillors exercise their ‘residual discretion’, their veto, to deny an application that had met all criteria up to that stage.

The request from Woodside Hill overcame all obstacles and demonstrated significant demand for dual language street signage. It is understood at least 64 residents voted in favour and only 3 against, and became the very first application in the Council area to ever be deemed successful at that stage.

As the ‘valid’ application then passed through the ABC committee and full council stages for further approval, councillors from a unionist background ultimately used their ‘discretion’ to refuse the request, using the guise of ‘confidentiality’ to hold private council sessions where the sign was discussed and vetoed. To date, residents are unaware of the publication of any rationale used by councillors to deny the application.

The new Belfast City Council dual-language street signage policy, first proposed in 2020, passed in 2021 and brought into effect in 2022, was hard won, following a long-winded campaign and robust legal scrutiny, including many Unionist ‘call-ins’ questioning the legal merit of the proposals.

This update would ultimately reset local governments’ pre-existing relationship with Irish language policies, adopting, for the very first time, a minority compliant set of procedures set out by both the United Nations and the Council of Europe’s main oversight bodies (for example, the Committee of Experts (COMEX)) charged with assessing how state parties are complying with their duties on the European Charter and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Guidance firstly debunked the much misused contention that dual-language signs can somehow be offensive and in contravention of the rights of English speakers:

“The Advisory Committee was disconcerted to hear that some representatives of the authorities consider that promoting the use of the Irish language is discriminating against persons belonging to the majority population.  Such statements are not in line with the principles of the Framework Convention…  It also reiterates that… implementation of minority rights protected under the Framework Convention [is] not be considered as discriminating against other persons.” (Council of Europe Advisory Committee, 3rd Monitoring Report on the UK’s implementation of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCPNM)), 2011).

International guidance was given further strength when read against 2015 guidance issued by the Equality Commission on the same issue, noting “that the use of Irish in signage is, in their opinion, a neutral act and that this is in keeping with political agreements… that the use of minority languages, particularly Irish and Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland for common or official purposes would normally or objectively be considered to be a neutral act that would not be discriminatory.”

As the development of a new policy gained cross-party support, attention quickly focused on setting new criteria around the street survey stage. Barriers such as the initial 1/3rd trigger petition, which had no equivalent practice in any other Belfast City Council policy, were replaced with a trigger of a single resident.

The initial proposal put to councillors from Irish language stakeholders was one of a simple majority of respondents, with non-responses being discounted; a well-established threshold that is already in place in Mid-Ulster and Newry, Mourne and Down. Intervening with further international guidance, Conradh na Gaeilge lobbied councillors to move away from majoritarian quotas when dealing with minority rights.

The rights of those minority communities should never be dependent on winning majority referenda, rather, surveys of residents should seek to establish if there is sufficient support for the minority position. The question, then, was, how to define ‘sufficient minority support’.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues provided guidance on that very issue in Language Rights of Linguistic Minorities: A Practical Guide for Implementation (2017), setting out previous international examples for gauging minority thresholds in street signage in european and international jurisdictions at 5-20%:

“Street and locality names and topographical indicators intended for the public are important as markers of social identity, culture and history. A good, practical approach adopted in most countries is for the authorities to provide transparent legislation or procedures to allow bilingual or even trilingual signs, usually following the proportionality principle where there is a sufficient concentration or demand for such signs in minority languages. While national legislation varies, the low threshold where it is considered practicable and reasonable to provide such signs tends to vary between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of the local population, with the lowest threshold usually associated with the use of a minority language that also has some kind of official status or for traditional, historical reasons. The criteria for the display of signs in minority languages must be given a clear and unambiguous legislative basis for it to be effectively implemented. Bilingual or multilingual signs used by public authorities demonstrate inclusiveness, and that various population groups share a locality in harmony and mutual respect.”

The political negotiation landed on 15% of residents and that was adopted, becoming the very first UN endorsed minority-rights’ compliant street signage policy on the island. Whilst this was certainly a huge step in the right direction for Belfast City Council, we are not naive to the fact that we still have a very long way to go in challenging a long-established culture of limited progress and obstruction to the Irish language.

That very approach has dominated the policy framework of public institutions for centuries, the footprint of which can still be seen by the fact that public and shared spaces still exclude the Irish language, creating de-facto ‘English-only’ zones as ‘neutral’ spaces. On many campaigns, equality legislation designed to protect marginalised groups on grounds of discrimination is often used against us; third level institutions refuse to increase the visibility of the Irish language without legislation compelling them to do so and bilingual signs are vandalised all across the north, with media commentary rarely vilifying the perpetrators in the same way they do the language.

As requests rolled in in their hundreds, Belfast City Council took many months to even begin to deal with the queued applications, and set a maximum monthly quote of 6 applications per month. Activists quickly calculated that the 600th application in the line could expect a survey by the early 2030s. “Rights delayed are rights denied”, contend local, rate-paying, Irish speakers, as they continue to challenge the delays and barriers to dual-language signage in streets and shared facilities and spaces.

This is more than simply “sticking Irish up alongside the English”. This is a restorative linguistic movement, reinstating Irish as the authentic and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, as the original versions of placenames once banished and banned from the public eye.

You can apply for a dual-language street sign in your street here: https://www.dearg.ie/en/uirlisi/sraideanna