Belfast Council to spend up to £170,000 on over 300 Irish language street signs

A Belfast City Council committee has given the go-ahead to the installation of more than 300 Irish language street signs at a cost of up to £170,000

A decision to erect the signs across the city’s Gaeltacht Quarter en masse was made at the latest meeting of the Strategic Policy and Resources Committee at City Hall, but involved some bitter exchanges between the SDLP and the DUP.

Last October the same committee agreed in principle to erect a large number of Irish dual language streets signs in the area in one go to save the council money rather than dealing with applications individually, and asked for an updated report with details on the undertaking.

Councillors also agreed to an objection threshold of 15 percent. This means it will take objections from at least 15 percent of any street in the Gaeltacht to trigger the requirement for a normal application and engagement of the current full process for a specific street. The proposals passed the full council without support from any of the unionist parties.

Councillors at the S,P&R committee meeting this month received the officer report detailing the 301 streets involved, including ten of which have no occupiers. They were recommended to agree to sign all 301 streets, and agree to a full survey for Clovelly Street - the only street where the level of objections to the proposed approach met the 15 percent threshold.

Councillors were also recommended to agree a maximum budget of up to £170,000. Elected representatives voted in favour of the recommendations by 15 votes to five. All the unionist councillors in the chamber voted against the recommendations.

Last October the estimated cost of signage for the streets currently identified within the Gaeltacht Quarter was in the region of £135,000, with an extra £9,652 to be spent on mail and advertising.

Sinn Féin’s Ciaran Beattie said then that the cost of going through each Gaeltacht application individually would be £359,370, meaning the en bloc approach would save the council £209,718.

At the latest meeting, DUP Councillor Ian McLaughlin told the chamber: “I am not comfortable with this agreed boundary for this agreed bloc. I certainly had no role to play in that, I would never have agreed to it, and I don’t understand who did, or when they did.

“We have been asked to create a demarcation zone between people who wish to avail of Irish language signage, and those who don’t. If we don’t we will damage irreparably in my opinion community relations where they are already strained.

“There are people, with the greatest respect, who want the Irish language, and quite rightly so. But in my constituency, which has quite a few interface barriers still in place, they do not.”

He added: “There are a lot of people whose single interaction with the Irish language was very poor. It was usually when the murderer or terrorist that murdered their loved one used to scream and squeal the famous words ‘tiocfaidh ár lá’ - whatever it was - as they left the scene of their horrendous crime.

“I don’t care if it upsets anybody or not. We have people today who are traumatised when you mention the words ‘Irish language’ - so nothing that you propose eases the fears of those people who do not want any interaction whatsoever with the Irish language.

“I understood from the outset that the boundary for the Gaeltacht Quarter, when it came to interface communities, would be the white line in the centre of the road, so that there was a neutral zone between this particular Irish language sign area, and that where people didn’t want anything to do with it.

“I propose we have some kind of a zone like that. It might only be a couple of metres on a road, but it means a lot to people who live in these interface areas. We will do immense damage with this process if we don’t try to alleviate the fears of people who live here.”

He said: “For example, Lanark Way in my community. The proposal is for one half of Lanark Way to have signage and the other half not to. The residents on Lanark Way who live closest to Shankill Road haven’t been asked their opinion on this. I don’t know whether the business community on the Springfield Road has.

“No matter what way I frame this, people are going to say it’s anti-Irish language. On the contrary, I am more interested in the impact it is going to have on community relations.”

SDLP Councillor Carl Whyte replied: “Last Friday morning I was on the radio with another councillor who told me about the Irish language being inflicted on people, being propagated. Really significant and poisonous language has been used to describe a language.

“And today I have had to listen to this. There are other victims in this room, who wouldn’t dare to suggest any objection or reluctance to the English language because acts carried out against them or their families were carried out while an English phrase was spoken or used by that organisation.

“To move from a debate about street signs to casting up incidents that may or may not have happened, frankly is beneath contempt. You cannot say you are trying to work for community relations and the benefit of the Irish language through the erection of Irish language signs, and by the same token, use an argument (like that).”

He said: “It is an insult to people who speak and love and use this language. To those who brought it back to life in this city who come from a unionist background. This (argument) is being used as a way to divide and to delay.

“It is a deliberate tactic to stoke up anger and fear and resentment. We are seeing that the continued outworkings of this is the vandalisation of these signs, which police are now recording as hate crimes. That has to stop. Language has to be tempered.”

Sinn Féin’s Ciaran Beattie said: “The Irish language is for us all, it doesn’t belong to any one community, or any political party. We have a duty to protect minority languages under the UN Charter as representatives across the city.

“The Gaeltacht Quarter boundary was designed by Deloitte in 2012, and was ratified through this council after heavy consultation. It has been the existing policy of the council, and has never been disputed until now.”

A council report states: “Significant work was undertaken to identify and review the streets within the boundary agreed for the Gaeltacht Quarter project which did not already have dual language street signs in place, and also to identify the individual addresses within each of these streets, for consultation.

“Particular attention was taken along the agreed boundary, where streets continued through the boundary and on either side of the peace line wall and gates, to ensure letters were only delivered to properties within the boundary

“This resulted in 8,887 addresses being identified for the purposes of the consultation with residents. Letters were issued to all residents through a mail drop using an external company ‘Postal Sort’. The purpose of this letter was to advise residents about the proposal to erect dual language street signage and also to give residents the opportunity to object to the proposal for their street.”

It adds: “In total, 21 objections were received from residents of 16 individual streets using the reply form provided. From the analysis of these objections, there was one street (Clovelly Street) where the level of objection to the proposal met the agreed 15 percent threshold as agreed by members.

“Of the 15 letters issued to residents in this street there were three objectors to the proposal which is a 20 percent objection rate. One resident provided a comment, ‘as this is a mixed area I think this would cause tension for us and our neighbours’. The remaining 18 objections were spread across 15 streets with no objection rate over six percent for any of these streets.”

The council has said the process of signing the Gaeltacht under the bloc procedure will involve the erection of the nameplates in established clusters of approximately 30 streets at a time.

In 2022 councillors agreed a new policy on dual language street signs would finally be implemented - 18 months after the policy was originally given the go-ahead in the chamber. Sinn Féin, Alliance, the SDLP, the Green Party, and the People Before Profit Party all support the new street sign policy, while the three unionist parties, the DUP, UUP and PUP, are against it.

The new policy means at least one resident of any Belfast street, or a councillor, is all that is required to trigger a consultation on a second nameplate, with 15 percent in favour being sufficient to erect the sign. Non-responses will no longer be counted as “against” votes, and there will be an equality assessment for each application.

Before that, the policy required 33.3 percent of the eligible electorate in any Belfast street to sign a petition to begin the process, and 66.6 percent to agree to the new dual language sign on the street. In the six months since the policy changed, a backlog built up of over 600 applications for Irish street signs.