Now DUP doesn't want residents asked about Irish language signs

THE leader of the DUP group on Belfast City Council has come out against the surveying of streets in the city on the issue of dual English/Irish street signage.

Councillor Sarah Bunting was speaking as City Hall prepares to send out surveys to residents living in a number of streets across the city. Tuesday night’s meeting of the Council’s People and Communities Committee voted to initiate surveys in streets where they they had been requested.

The senior South Belfast DUP rep is particularly concerned about surveys being carried out in the Upper Newtownards Road area of East Belfast.

Cllr Bunting’s intervention marks an escalation of DUP opposition to Irish in street signs. While the party maintains a strong anti-Irish language signage stance, objecting even to the process of asking residents to give their thoughts on the signs is a marked escalation in opposition to dual-language signs

The Balmoral Councillor said her party voted against sending out the surveys to the Upper Newtownards Road district because she feared it could lead to the stirring of “divisions” in what she described as “settled communities”.

"The applications for Irish language signage to be erected on these streets highlights the numerous absurdities of the current dual language signage policy,” she said.

"That just one person living on a street the length of Upper Newtownards Road can apply for dual language signs along the entire run of the road allows for a huge waste of money, and of staff time.”

“If only 15 per cent of residents in these streets want it but the other 85 per cent don’t, signs are erected anyway.

"It causes division, it makes communities feel they are having decisions forced upon them, and it causes a lack of confidence in Council policies and elected representatives overall.

"The DUP will be voting to not [survey] these streets as we don’t think we should be stirring division in these settled communities – I would urge members of the other parties to rethink their positions on this policy.”

Unionist opposition at the committee meeting to the sending out of the surveys came to nothing and letters will shortly be sent out to residents.

While the Newtownards Road in East Belfast has traditionally been viewed as a unionist-dominated area of the city, the lengthy main thoroughfare is in fact socially and politically diverse. The lower part of the road, closest to the city centre, remains overwhelmingly working class Protestant and loyalist. But the Upper Newtownards Road has always been more mixed – and more affluent – the further out from the city it goes.

In recent years, the city’s rapidly changing demographics have seen the Ballyhackamore and Stormont areas in particular become extremely attractive to upwardly mobile professional families from non-unionist backgrounds.

If street signs featuring the Irish language do go up on the Upper Newtownards Road, it will be another significant indicator of how much the face of Belfast has changed over the course of the past decade.