“While we are a city of culture there has to be a recognition that we’re not part of the UK.”
Londonderry may have been shortlisted to become the UK’s first City of Culture in 2013, but the Sinn Féin party leader on the council, Maeve McLaughlin, is not happy.
Ms McLaughlin said she believed the bid was “very heavily weighted in terms of cementing our relationship with London”. “While we are a city of culture there has to be a recognition that we’re not part of the UK.
“We are not opposing the bid, but we are putting down a marker at this stage and saying we should be exploring, rather than cementing, this relationship. “There is a huge onus on the team that’s been put together to lead this bid to put in writing how they will address the issue of the tens of thousands of nationalists and republicans in this city and region who do not recognise themselves as part of the UK,” she said.
She’s wrong on both counts…
Topic: Politics
Region: Northern Ireland, UK
Boys the dear, she is wrong, wrong, wrong. Ms McLaughlin is one of these people who talks complete rubbish in a very confident tone. I think the quote amplifies this point perfectly.
Can she really be so stupid to say “we’re not part of the UK”?!
Maybe she actually believes some of the nonsense from SF HQ.
Ms McLaughlin has set aside both the GFA and the twin referendums which effectively cemented it. Can we expect her to be disciplined for what is a clear transgression of SF party policy? Or will she be excused, on the grounds that she has an intellectual problem with factuality?
Anyone who has an affection for Ms McLaughlin’s city is bound to regard her latest statement as nasty, unhelpful, and immature. There is a huge onus on the team that’s been put together to lead this bid to put in writing how they will address the issue of the many hundred of babies in this city and region who do not recognize themselves as either British or Irish.
Get a life.
Maybe Maeve would do well to get out The Life of Brian DVD from Extravision. Here’s a little snippet for her:
Reg: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Attendee: “Brought peace?”
Reg: “Oh, peace – shut up!”
Reg: “There is not one of us who would not gladly suffer death to rid this country of the Romans once and for all.”
Dissenter: “Uh, well, one.”
Reg: “Oh, yeah, yeah, there’s one. But otherwise, we’re solid.”
The woman is deluded. Once again the Shinners fail to take notice of what really matters to the people of Derry. That’ll be jobs and opportunity. As Hume once said Maeve, “You can’t eat a flag”
Never fear, this will do no damage. That would only happen if SF went back of themselves, looked silly and denounced the bid and I don’t see any sign of that. Bid supporters – or agnostics even- should tread softly, if at all. What about an Irish towns of culture competition that Derry could bid for as well?
well done Maeve – if the unionists refuse to accept that they cannot command people to have a UK mentality and accommodate that then pull the plug
This issue had to be spoke about the people writing the bid had nonsemse like inviting oxford and cambridge to row on teh foyle, invite london football temas to play in derry it was stacking up like derry is a little london. About time.
This sounds like S/F trying to play both ends against the middle.
It will not work. If Derry becomes the City of Culture as I hope. It will mean jobs, tourism and, most importantly, revenue for all of Ireland.
S/F need to remember: governments cant just go out and rob a bank or sell cigarettes and petrol on the black economy, they actually need to encourage people, especially tourists, to come here and spend money.
The lady needs to forget the few dissidents and speak for all of the people all of the time.
In any event since Derry, even its disputed name, is deeply embedded in Irish/UK history I see the award as more of a win win achievement.
I wonder if the subtextual motive is basically electoral, as with Dev’s visit to the German Embassy in 1945.
Pippakin – surely she is speaking for all the people not just those who wish to promote an United Kingdom agenda
Whilst she is factually incorrect, she’s clearly representing the views of the vast majority of Derry people.
David Crookes
If there is a wish I sometimes have (apart from winning the lottery) it is that I had been a fly on the wall when Dev marched himself into the German Embassy to ‘commiserate’ with the German people on the death of AH. I would have loved to have seen the look on the ambassadors face! otherwise it is one part of our history best forgotten.
Coll Ciotach
Did I not say that. If Derry gets the award it wil be a win for the whole of Ireland. In case you hadnt noticed we are in dire straits here. It is not the time to be nitpicking between incompetent governments. It is a time to be making the maximum profit and jobs from the opportunity.
Dec1
Read the above and inwardly digest.
Why is she so wrong?
Derry is not just another provincial town. It is different. Geographically, culturally, attitudinally different. It always was. It always will be. The London connection is part, but only a small part of the tradition (and most evident in that grotesque BT blockhouse and the more recent gimcrack constructions).
The 1920-21 mess made it a frontier town (those who recall the late 60s-late 80s may even have used the Dodge City analogy).
All that is a Unique Selling Point. Some of it should be cherished.
Dundee would not hesitate to trumpet its difference and distance from Dalston. Kenmare is not Killiney.
The City of Culture circus is not meant to homogenize, but to celebrate the variety of what we are, and are not. Else why are we all tourists?
Thanks, pippakin (#12), it ranks with the speech that Churchill made in Rome eighteen years before! Here is part of that speech. “I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers. Secondly, anyone could see that he thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understood it, of the Italian people, and that no lesser interest was of the slightest consequence to him. If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. I will, however, say a word on an international aspect of fascism. Externally, your movement has rendered service to the whole world. The great fear which has always beset every democratic leader or a working class leader has been that of being undermined by someone more extreme than he. Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of civilised society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.”
Malcolm the voice of reason.
What a great chance for Derry to confidently showcase herself as a vibrant Irish town with recognised British links.
SF are spot on here!
Pippakin
I’m doubt the people of Dingle or Doolin particularly care which small town wins the UK’s First City of Culture. Persoanlly I could care less though I suppose I’m secretly rootingg for Norwich if only to highlight the utter waste of everyone’s time this thing is. (How many jobs flow to the eventual winner is clearly up for debate). I’m fairly certain I hate unemployment almost as much as you do, myself but all I was stating is that McLaughlin, aside from the constitutional blooper, is simply articulating the Derry electorate’s viewpoint. Isn’t that one of the duties of politicians?
David Crookes
Not that I am a supporter of Churchill, but had not Mussolini joined with the Nazis he might have introduced an acceptable choice of government. It was Mussolini who said ‘in such a huge grannary you can expect a few rats!”
More importantly by 1945 everyone knew where Nazism had led and Germany was one big waste ground.
Dec1
It is not the job of politicians to be inciting division when they should be encouraging cooperation. Nothing will change because of the City of Culture award, everything will still be the way it is, but some, hopefully most, will have benefited. By the way Im not positive but I think Glasgow had it and did very well out of it.
Maybe if she said……
‘While we are a city of culture there has to be a recognition that we don’t want to be part of the UK….’
everyone would be happy.
Maybe even Pedantic Pete.
She’s discovering what it means to be a non-sovereign nation but forgetting that her party voted to renounce those sovereign rights that are a part of national rights.
The state promotes the culture of the nation within a nation-state and within a transnational state such as the UK, so if you give your sovereignty to a foreign state then it will of course promote its culture and not yours.
This right to self-determination is enshrined under international law in the first article of the UN’s ICCPR and in the first article of the UN’s ICESCR as “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
Since the state is the means by which the nation “freely determine” and “freely pursue” that nation’s “cultural development” that nation has no means to do that when it has renounced its right to self-determination and declared that it has no right to live within a nation-state. So you end up with the culture of the nation that controls the state, i.e. British culture.
It’s simply crying over the milk after you’ve poured it down the drain because you preferred a nice glass of Coke.
Oh dear! much more of this ‘tunnel vision’ and the City of Culture award will go to bloody Birmingham.
I mean Birmingham for gods sake!
In fact if I had to put my money on it. I would say the Brit govt would rather it came to any city other than one in the north of Ireland.
What’s the problem? The British state will promote its culture as is its proper function, but the plus side is that it isn’t a nation-state but a transnational state that also includes the Irish nation and its culture. Therefore you are included in a “UK of equals” with “parity of esteem” between the four non-sovereign nations.
Pippakin
By the way Im not positive but I think Glasgow had it and did very well out of it.
Glasgow won the European City of Culture award in 1990. Apples and oranges etc
Alias
Actually if the Brit govt dont get their fingers out of the pie as soon as the award is made, and let Derry get on with its own promotional activities I for one will be very upset!
Of course Derry is a part of the UK.
Just look at how warmly its people greeted British troop during Operation Motorman.
Oh dear! much more of this ‘tunnel vision’ and the City of Culture award will go to bloody Birmingham.
I mean Birmingham for gods sake!
Hold on, you mean Birmingham with a population of a million people? Birmingham as in the birth place of Brum Beat? The home of half of Led Zeppilin, the ELO and more? The home of the oldest jazz festival in the UK? Birmingham with it’s National Indoor Arena and O2 Academy? With it’s dozens of theatres? Birmingham with ‘one of the largest collections of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world’? Birmingham as in the home of Washington Irving and Arthur Conan Doyal?
Why would they get it eh? When Derry’s in the mix what does Birmingham have (apart from a population that somewhat eclipses the 83k people who still haven’t left Derry)?
What with Derry’s Nerve Centre and um, the Strand Bar before 9 at night (when the blood starts to flow). Oh and the walls, mustn’t forget them. Especially in the context of celebrating diversity – after all Derry’s citizens do admirably well coping with the diversity of the two different types of white Christian living in the place.
Derry’s a shithole. I lived there. Tell me in plain English what it is you think Derry has to offer that nearly every other city in the UK hasn’t got in spades (apart from sectarian violence, obviously)?
In fact if I had to put my money on it I’d say the Brit government would be off their tits on glue to give it to Derry, given that a) there’s fuck all in Derry and b) in terms of celebrating diversity, Derry’s contribution is trying to murder people who think that their shared God did/did not change the bread and wine into flesh and blood.
Dec1
Thanks, now I know the difference. I suspect then that this is the UK attempting to jump on a successful advertising band wagon.
I know what will make everyone happy, Dublin does a ‘City of Culture’ award and nominates Belfast or even bloody Birmingham. Hows that for equality.
The City of Culture bid is no threat to anyone’s sense of nationality unless their nationality is insecure.
This is a great opportunity for Derry to look beyond a narrow sectarian position and recognise that both/ and can work for everyone!
Best to just ignore the bogtrotter and the begrudgers.
I have always liked Derry. I consider it my second home, my mother having been a Derry woman and having gone to Grammar School there.
Neil forgot to add Slade, Black Sabbath, Wolves, West Brom etc.
Can I just add a ps to ask what happened to Gonzo’s thread? I suspect legal factors but it would be nice to know.
Neil
Im guessing you hate Derry and love Birmingham. I dont think Birmingham is as good as you think, mind you it does have that motorway thingy. And, I seriously doubt Derry is as bad your memory suggests.
The thing about this award is its a method of enticing visitors to the chosen city to spend their money in great quantities. I would like that money to come to Ireland please, in large denominations of used notes. Is that too much to ask? I dont give a flying fuck which church, if any, either the residents of Derry or the visitors attend.
Dec1 @ 01:53 PM:
I know I’m risking something here, but I thought it was “the European Capital of Culture”, and the “city of culture” thing was a newly-minted, UK-specific imitation. I expect to be corrected.
Somewhere on the net there is a study of the regeneration resulting from being designated “Capital of Culture” (after all, the EU is rarely slow in publicising its
excessessuccesses). The programme has now been expanded: there were eight or nine “Capitals of Culture” for the millennium. I think there are three for 2010: Essen, Istanbul and Pécs. The last of which is semi-twinned with Peterborough (better believe it!), and uses the slogan “The Borderless City” — which probably sounds better in the original Hungarian, and might usefully be borrowed by Derry. I believe, too, that Ireland gets a nomination around 2020, and the UK a couple of years after.Now this “culture” lark. No one in a moment of sanity would suggest Birmingham is anything less than multicultural. There might even be a few inhabitants who can speak decipherable English.
Norwich (of which I am fond, and is similarly linguistically-challenged) has occasional parallels with Derry, not excluding a bloody, insurrectionary past. It also feels itself isolated and “end-of-the-line”: natural when the service is dependent on Class 86 locos, and later on Class 90 Virgin Trains cast-offs.
I’d like to see a survey on local opinions: do the Norvicians see themselves primarily as British, English or East Anglian? There is a small contingent of beer-bellied, tattooed gents with bull terriers who’d give a predictable response. Beyond that, I recollect anyone from more than a day’s walk being a “furrener”, especially the black-leg labour imported to break the agricultural workers strike. The spirit of Boudicca still walks those frozen Icenian wastes (and the wind is straight off the Urals for the next few days).
So, does Sinn Féin in Derry/Londonderry oppose the Good Friday Agreement now?
>>…home of Washington Irving and Arthur Conan Doyal?<<
Neil
Birmingham does not get to claim Conan Doyle just because he worked there the odd time, c’mon! I don’t think anyone calling Derry a shithole can do so whilst bigging up birmingham. It would be like Paisley calling Allister a bitter un reconstructed bigot. true…….but what a cheek!
I may be overselling it a bit but it’s to underline the ridiculousness of the whole thing. I ask again, what does Derry have? I understand people being fond of a place where they grew up etc., but at the end of the day it’s a simple question: what does Derry have going for it?
Diversity is a theme mentioned on the web site for the City of Culture award. In terms of diversity in Derry, there is very little and given the hostility displayed towards fellow Christians who happen to follow the same God in a different way.
IMO it boils down to the fact that Derry’s a tiny little city, in any other country on Earth it would be a medium sized town. At least Birmingham has some people in it, along with all the ‘culture’ on offer. I ask again, what is the culture that Derry has to offer that sets it aside from any other city on the list?
Malcolm
I know I’m risking something here, but I thought it was “the European Capital of Culture”, and the “city of culture” thing was a newly-minted, UK-specific imitation. I expect to be corrected.
According to wikipedia, the European City of Culture programme was renamed the European Capital of Culture in 1999.
what is the culture that Derry has to offer that sets it aside from any other city on the list?
Neil,
you might ask Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey, or actress Bronagh Gallagher. Anyone of them will give you the goods.
I take it you won’t be voting for Derry then, Neil.
Neil @ 03:40 PM
You are fully entitled to judge what amounts to:
For the record, Derry is an urban area of 90,000 of which 83,000 live within the chartered city. That’s comparable with Durham, Worcester, Bath in England: all of which are definitely and proudly cities.
I see that Maza, ND, has a population of five, but was recognised by the last US census as a city.
The resident population of the mighty City of London amounts to 8½% of that of Derry.
Be careful who you are dissing. Ahem!
Dec1 @ 03:49 PM:
Thanks for that. You learn something new every day.
The world capital of shoulder chip manufacturing.
there goes Alias and his obscurities about sovereignty.
More proof that most PSF supporters did not even read the GFA. They simply voted Yes, because Martin said Yes and Ian said No.
There was a letter in the Derry Journal last week by a concerned citizen asking why Sinn Fein were canvassing for the U.K City of Culture, given the obvious connotations.
This is their (several months) belated comeback to an obvious question.
Like the guys with fatigues and sunglasses in Stabane last Sunday. This is phoney politics and posing whilst playing to their audience.
Pretending to be rad whilst administering British Rule.
You know what, if the majority of the people in ‘Derry’ don’t want to be city of culture.. then they it doesn’t happen.
If peoples, frankly, ignorant views cannot see the benefit that this would bring to their local community while helping celebrate all that is supposed to be good about the city, then they don’t deserve it.
I’m sure republicans will be bothered by this, but for one year lets actually try and be civilised and do something that would actually benefit.. wishful thinking I guess.
wishful thinking I guess
Yes, given that SF are expert moaners.
The poor woman is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Derry is a city where the substantial majority of residents reject UK sovereignty and want to join a different state. It’s a city where some current community leaders, still young, have engaged in armed violence against Britain. The middle-aged can remember a time when the UK was militarily unable to exercise authority in some neighborhoods. The most interesting parts of the city are full of huge murals glorifying military insurrection against the UK. Surely making Derry a “UK city of culture” would say more about Britain than Derry. What it would say would be funny as heck. SF should love this idea. When did Irish people lose their sense of humor?
Mr E Mann
Actually the ‘young community leaders’ have, yet again, been engaging in violence against their own.
For the intellectually challenged the Brits have always been able to exercise authority. If you think not try living in the W Bank. The Brits chose not to enforce the law because they had no problem controlling the situation. No one shits on their own doorstep and Derry is a long way from the Brits door step. As for the occasional bomb. You are referring to a country that let a city the size of Coventry be demolished to save their spy codes. A building here or there wont shift them.
The city of culture would be a good thing for the whole of Ireland, forget S/F and republicanism, think employment, tourism and the possible opportunity to get rid of some of the monumental debt everyone in this country is labouring under.
A real republican would put his countrys future not its past first.
The Irish people haven’t lost their sense of humour. It’s just that the few hard core SF types never had any; generally a rather dour lot who are happier moaning than having fun.
joeCanuck
But victimhood doesnt work if you are smiling.
Agree pippakin.
BTW just call me joe. I added the Canuck bit when another guy called joe started blogging.
Not blogging, of course; commenting on Slugger.