Friday, May 16, 2008
West Belfast stuck in economic ‘siege mentality’?
Newton Emerson pours scorn on Forbairt Feirste’s investment conference, aimed at consolidating support for the establishment of a Ceathrú Gaeltacht (Gaeltacht Quarter) in west Belfast. (H/T Concubhar) In essence he argues that the economic aspect of case is flawed, not least since “residents of the lower Falls live within a mile of 30 per cent of all the jobs in Northern Ireland.” He goes on to accuse the area of excessively cleaving to a kind of internal separatism:
One point repeatedly raised at the west Belfast conference was that the Titanic quarter will shift the city’s economic centre of gravity to the east. But thousands of people from west Belfast once worked on Queen’s Island. They travelled there by tram and they could do so again if Sinn Fein regional development minister Conor Murphy would spend £1.86 million a year on a west Belfast light rail line.
West Belfast is a place and a community apart, not least due to the massive and traumatic population shifts of the late sixties and early seventies. Early attempts by some residents to move their families out into mixed areas, even well beyond the confines of the city ended in some of them being intimidated back into the safer reaches of their original communities. This is often underestimated by outside commentators. If there is a siege mentality, some of it arises from what many in that community would see as good reason.
But Emerson does have a point when he suggested that some of the Troubles-centric development decisions have helped deepen a sense of isolation from the rest of the city. Not least the deep (and widening) trench that is the Westlink:
One obvious and highly profitable solution would be to drop the road into a trench and roof it over, creating hundreds of acres of prime city centre real estate. It might seem perverse to suggest this while the current Westlink widening is still under way but that project ripped up years of recently completed improvements.
Even mundane cities such as Leeds manage to bury their urban motorways, despite having no local ministers with devolved powers. However, burying the Westlink has never been seriously considered throughout all the many opportunities to do so, including the Invest NI conference.
It appears that certain people, both inside and outside west Belfast, are only too happy with its tarmac moat.
He argues that Sinn Fein’s leadership on this issue is at best misguided:
Last week’s ‘cultural conference’ may have helped some republicans to cope with the stench of global capitalism emanating from the Invest NI conference. But few of the party’s constituents will be helped by pretending that a neighbourhood Irish-language quango will be a force for economic growth even if they find this tribal totem more pleasing to contemplate than the difficult decisions that are actually required.
“Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun,” Hermann Goering famously never said. Sinn Fein, conversely, has put down its gun and reached for the word ‘culture’. There is little reason to believe that this strategy will be any more successful than the last one.
Mick Fealty @ 12:30 PM
Neanderthal is the only way to describe the post at @ 09:17 PM
Unfortunately this type of brainless comment is often employed by assaulters of Irish Gaelic and its community.Mick, nach féidir sin a bhaint den suíomh?
Posted by on May 16, 2008 @ 09:31 PMTa sé imithe anois, just níl mé i mo shuí anseo ar feadh an t-am uilig. It’s a bit much to characterise the serious contra arguments on this thread by suggesting the compare with animus of one idiot.
Posted by on May 16, 2008 @ 10:15 PM“The Belfast Gaeltacht is no ‘false community’. It is a community in which Irish spoken and which was created honestly by the hardwork of a few people—“
A work mate of mine from west belfast told me that she regularly only heard Irish spoken 955% 0f the time, but then she had to admit she was never out of her house, cept for a wee loaf of bread
Posted by on May 16, 2008 @ 10:24 PMTa sé imithe anois, just níl mé i mo shuí anseo ar feadh an t-am uilig. It’s a bit much to characterise the serious contra arguments on this thread by suggesting the compare with animus of one idiot.
Posted by Mick Fealty on May 16, 2008 @ 11:15 PM
Sure there are lots of arguments not to do something positive - but the 9:17 let the cat out of the bag. The real reason the neanderthals don’t want to support the Ceathrú Gaeltachta project or other such positive ventures which would enhance NI as a place in which to live for all is their bigotry and hatred. So let’s not apologise for them and don’t let the patina of reason which they paint on the real reasons for their opposition fool anybody.
Posted by on May 16, 2008 @ 10:59 PMWhere is the post 09:17?
Posted by on May 16, 2008 @ 11:05 PM“The real reason the neanderthals don’t want to support the Ceathrú Gaeltachta project or other such positive ventures which would enhance NI as a place in which to live for all is their bigotry and hatred.”
Hardly anybody speaks Irish in West Belfast, I rarely hear it, I live there, right next to Turf Lodge and Ballymurphy.
I’m not too pleased with the idea of it, in my own head I don’t relate it to Irishness, you see, I feel like one of those people who were scammed into throwing the stones at the Roxbury kids.
I feel shafted, by Sinn Fein and by storybook ideas of what it is to be Irish in West Belfast,
well I’ll tell you what it’s like, if you are old, it is to be too scared to walk out your front door. SF are in my eyes are the sniggering Tammany Hall party.
I bitterly regret every vote I cast for them, and every punter I drove to the polls.
It is faux democracy.
Scam merchants.
G.
Posted by on May 16, 2008 @ 11:12 PMWhere I work, there are more Welsh speakers than faux “irish”. We have 2 native Welsh speakers. That’s more than can speak “Irish” in West Belfast.
“Burger and Chips” in Irish please for those inclined to revive this dodo.
Why not forget about it kids? Latin and Greek have just about gone. Follow progress. Wake up to century 21!
What’s the “Irish” for a dead parrot?Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 12:22 AMSF are out to make Disneyland. They walk around sniggering, it has to be said that leaflets, these days, arrive via salaried individuals. That is not the way it use to be.
I don’t respect Gerry Adams as a person, he is our version of Turkmenbashy, thank goodness the folks in the 26 Counties kept the current running between their ears. I look forward to the day that SF doesn’t exist.
Tammany Hall, just doesn’t work and that is what the SF ‘finger in every pie’ philosophy is about. They announce conferences and they control everybody on them.
G.
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 08:39 AMGet real Driftwood.
They announce conferences and they control everybody on them.
Cac bó Gregory. I was at the Cultural Economy Conference and they certainly don’t control me.
The argruments put forward for An Cheathrú Ghaeltachta are valid and are more founded in reality than the Titanic Quarter. Not one person at the conference - from Birmingham regeneration expert Clive Dutton to Welsh Language Board executives and Catalan University lecturers - claimed that the Quarter would solve all the area’s problems. They did illustrate however how culture and language have reinvigorated urban areas throughout Europe and that the same opportunity exists in Béal Feirste.
Move on and leave politics to the side folks, all Belfast’s new Quarters are about making the city a better place. Give them a chance!
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 09:55 AMAs a West Belfast resident,
I am not supporting it, it *is* about politics, ordinary people in my part of town are, if they wanted to divorce yourselves from Big Brother No1, he shouldn’t have been invited.
So, he did infiltrate the confreence. As far as I’m concerned. Do you think it is easy living in WEst Belfast and objecting to the machavellian tactics of the SF party?
It isn’t.
G.Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 10:02 AMInteresting thread.
I also live in west Belfast and can’t think why people living here would be against the Ceathrú Gaeltachta. Ok, some people from SF are involved but aren’t most politicians involved in the Titanic Quarter unionist or loyalist?
What’s the big deal? Projects like this will only help west Belfast, attract more tourists and connect it with the rest of the city. It’s better than nothing!
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 10:10 AMGregory,
‘Big Brother’ was elected by an overwhelming majority.
In addition, there are five SF MLAs in West Belfast.
The will of the people in West Belfastmust be respected, even if not everyone agrees with it.
What support could anyone expect to gleam from the population in general if one deliberately disrespects their expressed will at the ballot box, you dont have to agree with it, but respect for it is a must in my book.
Your ideas that SF is some sort of over arching power really protrays to me inablility to take a view of anything divorced from Sinn Fein.
You imply that SF actually called the conference, a report without any basis in fact, indeed as COL as implied Sinn Fein have given practically no support to the scheme outwith Gerry Adams’ oral support.
However, whether SF have done the work on the ground or not, unionist, Emerson and conspiracy theorist give them the credit - an easy days work for the SF press office, and Cnocubhar wonders why they dont make a greater effort, it is all too easy.
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 10:14 AMAs was reported here on Slugger a couple of years back, I attended a panel event on the Gaeltacht Quarter project and was fairly impressed.
However, the point I made on the panel was that this should not be seen as some way of silo-ing off this part of the city from the rest of the world. Precisely on the contrary, it should be seen as a means of making the area an Irish language (in retrospect I might even have said minority-language) hub, delivering a training and broadcasting centre accessible to and usable by all those with an interest in the language - bringing people in, not keeping them out.
There is a legitimate ‘siege’ mentality in parts of West Belfast - it’s only recently they received any kind of visit from the city’s first citizen, and decisions still tend to exclude them, be they by “obvious” sources such as the IFA (Donegal Celtic’s exclusion from the invitational league is an outrage, and I say that as a Bangor fan), or by less obvious sources (how exactly is this lovely new EWAY going to help West Belfast, Conor?)
But as I said on the education thread (kindly picked up by Pete), it’s a two-way process. After all, part of relieving a siege is opening the gates…
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 10:28 AMWB is not a civic democracy,
SF only represent those people who sign up for the bus trip. They’re arrogant, and a paramilitary linked party.
They evolved the way they did after decades of branding people as ‘wrong-minded’, as ‘trairors’ as ‘colaborators’ or for undermining the will of the Irish people to ‘resist’ etc.
People were murdered for opposing SF, their historical track record is little better than that of MI5 or SB.
Big Brother No1 is running a one party group-think emporium in West Belfast. SF are also behaving in much the same way as the Orange Junta did.
GErry Adams wasn’t too pleased with Squinter was he? SF went bananas. SF are a grubby little party who found a friend when they met Tony Blair, they’re Blairites.
Nobody voted for sex offenders working in our schools. So SF are, because of that, a pro-perv party without having that manifesto endorsed by the electorate.
It was a little private arrangement between Ruane and the NASUWT.
G.
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 10:29 AMTotally agree IJP.
An Cheathrú Ghaeltachta would open up the area to those interested in Irish Gaelic and would be a top attraction for cultural tourists.
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 10:33 AMRG, IJP,
I was reported last night on th radio that language and culture are actually only a small part of this development, a bit like the Titanic Quarter, you know the ship isnt actually there.
It is about branding an economic regeneration, economic generation which all off us, outwith absolute bigots / eejits can acknowledge is needed. As a brand it is as goo as any? No?
But, like I said, I am still out to be convinced about the scheme - not the economic side, but the branding itself.
I think alot more activism is needed on the ground in West Belfast with regards to the language, in particular we need new Shaw’s Road like developments.
I must say but, without any doubt, the Irish language has brought more fresh blood and thinking into West Belfast over the last thirty years than anything else - think about the people who work for La, Gaelscoileanna, Culturlann etc. It is healthy as far as I am concerned.
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 10:43 AM“An Cheathrú Ghaeltachta would open up the area to those interested in Irish Gaelic and would be a top attraction for cultural tourists. “
You mean more folks to get robbed and raped?
If it is not safe for us to walk around, it is not going to be safe for them.
G.
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 01:50 PMSome of the posts on this thread remind me of the time Wagner (Heinrich, subsequently Professor at QUB) was doing the Irish Dialect atlas:-
http://www.celt.dias.ie/publications/cat/e/e2-7-1.html
Well, he was in a village in Conemara, interviewing some old fellow in a room, and the windows were open and people outside listening. Anyway, one of the words he was comparing from village to village was broim or as I would say it, braidhm.
Some time later there was an election in the place, and on the hustings an aggrieved member of the opposition party was heard to declaim, “ We’ve been trying to get a bridge built here for twenty years and the Government sends a man down to put Irish on a fart!”
Several points here: the idea that Wagner “was sent be de Government” as opposed carrying on his ordinary work as an Irish scholar is a bit outré. I think if you looked at the work of your average professor of English (generally feminism and Lacanian gibberish) you would find more cause for concern than with the very scholarly work of Celticists.
The savings made by eliminating the word ‘broim’ from the Dialect survey would not be sufficient to build a bridge. In fact, they would hardly pay for a fart.
Equally, the idea that the West Belfast Gaeltacht only exists by virtue of a subsidy of millions of pounds from the South of England is, to be fair, on a par with the above. It’s not as if Irish speakers are paid by the word for speaking Irish. They just go around doing the things that they would be doing if they were speaking English. The above link to the website of “An Cheathrú Ghaeltachta teo” Suíomh á thógáil (site presently under construction) suggests that they haven’t received any subvention at all yet. But then if you resent the very air we breathe, you’d complain about that wouldn’t you?
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 02:38 PMDon’t speak it myself any more (not since school) but I know a few Irish speakers in Dublin. They’re charming, literate, open-minded liberal people.
The polar opposite indeed of the sectarian, insular bores who predominate in debates on the language in the north, as evidenced here.
It’s a worthy interest but to dress it up as a viable ‘community’ is as hilarious as it is doomed. The Brits have done their major spending in the north, bought peace of sorts, kept their flag flying for the forseeable future and times are getting tougher. There will obviously be no subvention of this tribal chimera.Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 03:34 PM(re the Irish speakers I know - none of them would ever be so crass as to hold forth in the language in company where they were aware a proportion of those present did not speak it. We cringe in the south when Adams et al do so at press conferences and in the assembly. It is as uncouth as it is embarrassing.)
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 03:37 PMsms,
Ní hé sin ceart ar scor ar bith. Just thosaigh mé a mo laethanta saoire ar ndóigh, agus achan duine ag gabhail ar meara.
Guys,
There is a lot of ad hominem rubbish going abroad on this thread. I’m not pointing figures, because it is coming from all over the place, but if it persists, I’ll just take the thread offline.
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 07:08 PMTá athas orm go bhfuil daoine stuama, faoi dheireadh, ag cur speise san ábhar seo. GRMA GGN, RG, Paddy Reilly agus Cuairteoir.
Praise be that some more enlightened contributors have joined the debate. When you read some of the arrogant nonsense being spouted by some, you despair.
Not pointing any fingers - but the idea that the Irish language and the Ceathrú Gaeltachta project is a ‘tribal chimera’ illustrates how well British/Unionist propoganda about Belfast has worked south of the border, especially in Dublin’s Post Colonial Quarter.
And the idea that the Ceathrú Gaeltachta project might work to attract people to west Belfast where they would be ‘robbed and raped’ is of course further propoganda. The Executive has a duty to govern West Belfast - what is being suggested by those who wish West Belfast be abandoned to the rapists and robbers is that it would be ungovernable. That’s not responsible democracy.
I don’t doubt that visitors to west Belfast have been robbed and some have been raped. That’s not to say that this situation can’t be turned around so that the streets of the area will be safe once again. The Ceathrú Gaeltachta project is about the regeneration of the area, to a specific theme, which would contribute (not entirely cure) to the resolution of some of the area’s economic ills. And because we’re led to believe that social cohesion and economic prosperity go hand in hand, we can only hope that this will work in West Belfast. The alternative is chaos.
No doubt there are some who would prefer chaos in areas like West Belfast. Not I. I also believe that a successful regeneration of West Belfast as a Gaeltacht Quarter could lay down a template for other cities in Ireland for their regeneration - they wouldn’t necessarily be urban Gaeltachtaí like Belfast but there’s definitely interest in the idea in cities like Cork and Galway.
Perhaps, even, Dublin could have its own Ceathrú Gaeltachta…
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 07:28 PMCOl,
“you despair.”
Which is what they want, which is why they troll.
That is why Emerson writes. That is why the DUP put in endless anti-Irish motions in the assembly. That is why they threaten our schools.
Unionism can only effect the amount of Irish spoken in the North is we let them, if we allow ignorance and hatred to grind us done.
Ignore them.
Turn the over cheek, smile and walk on, smile because you actually know something about the gaelic language, place-names, surnames, music etc. that they chose to ignore.
McRae can call Irish foreign but it doesnt bug me because I understand what his name means and it doesnt suit, the same whay as McNarry’s is quite suitable!
Agus mar a duirt an Don e fein, ‘na taispean do dhuine ar bith taobh amuigh den chlann cad ata ar d’intinn’.
Adh mor, tog go bog e agus dean dearmad fa na daoine BOCHTA seo.
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 07:41 PMYet more of what can only be described as bad manners. You’re well aware that some people contributing to this debate don’t understand the language, yet you insist on fluctuating between that which everyone can understand, and Irish.
Symptomatic of what I have been highlighting. The linguistic equivalent of unfurling a tricolour and giving two fingers to those who are of a different creed. Depressing, but hardly surprising.Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 09:03 PMWhat the poor democrat doesn’t understand is that a translation was provided of my remark as Gaeilge - but then again he’s one of these democrats that doesn’t believe, it seems, in freedom of expression....
As for his charge that speaking in Irish is the linguistic equivalent of unfurling a tricolour, what rubbish. Does that mean that speaking in English is running up the Union Jack?
And, for Gael Gan Náire, I don’t despair really. Every time the Irish language comes under attack from trolls, it sustains further my belief that I’m on the right track....
Posted by on May 17, 2008 @ 10:44 PM
