Irish on One Street, Ulster-Scots on the Next: Belfast’s Street Sign Policy…

A Belfast City Council committee has approved an Ulster-Scots street sign for Ravenscroft Avenue in east Belfast. If the full council ratifies the decision, the street will carry the name Corbiescroft Evvenye below the English name. It is the first Ulster-Scots approval under the policy the council adopted in July 2022; three streets received Ulster-Scots signs under the previous policy, which ran from 1998. Of the 110 occupiers surveyed, 19 (17.27%) were in favour, 10 were against, one had no preference, and 80 did not reply. Some coverage described the 17% as a share of those who responded. It is a share of all occupiers surveyed, which is the measure the policy uses.

In March, I argued here that the 15% threshold was defensible and that the difficulty lay in the mechanism, because a street-by-street survey moves a constitutional question about the status of minority languages into individual residential streets. The Ravenscroft decision exposes a further consequence of that mechanism. The applicant specifies the second language for each street. Where applications for Irish and Ulster-Scots arise on the same street or in the same neighbourhood, the resulting signs are likely to be read as statements of community identity, whoever made the application and for whatever reason. The council’s policy contains no rule for that situation.

Competing applications

On 14 April 2026, the council’s People and Communities Committee considered a report on streets where Irish applications had failed the threshold but further applications remained live. Four of those streets had Ulster-Scots applications pending. Isoline Street, off the Castlereagh Road, failed for Irish in March 2026 and had two Ulster-Scots applications pending. Lismain Street, near the Woodstock Road, failed for Irish in November 2025 and had one. Victoria Road in Sydenham failed for Irish in November 2025 and had three. Sunningdale Gardens, off the Ballysillan Road, failed for Irish in December 2025 and had one. The report records which applications were live; it does not show when each was lodged or why.

Officers told the committee that “the policy does not stipulate how such applications should be dealt with” and recommended that applications in a different language be processed under the existing policy. By August, according to the News Letter, Ulster-Scots applications on two east Belfast streets were on hold while Sinn Féin pressed for those streets to be retested for Irish first, and the council had begun a review of the policy. The same report described a Sinn Féin proposal to calculate the 15% among residents who return the survey, which would make approval easier in either language. By October the committee was approving signs again, including Ravenscroft Avenue and 48 Irish streets.

One estate, two languages

Sunningdale Park North and Sunningdale Gardens both run off Sunningdale Park in north Belfast, a few streets apart in the same estate. The People and Communities Committee approved an Irish sign for Sunningdale Park North in March 2025, by 11 votes to nine, and the full council left that decision in place in April. The Irish survey on Sunningdale Gardens failed in December 2025, and an Ulster-Scots application is pending there. If that application succeeds, someone walking through the estate will pass a sign in Irish and, a few streets later, a sign in Ulster-Scots.

A visitor who asked why this was so would need more than a linguistic explanation. A single bilingual street needs little clarification, and neither would a city where every street carried the same second language, as Welsh road signs do. To explain two different second languages within one estate, one would eventually have to explain that, in Belfast, the two languages are associated with the city’s two main communities.

The 2021 Census shows how close that association is. The share of residents with some ability in Irish ranges from 2.5% in Shankill ward to 34.7% in Falls Park; the share with some ability in Ulster-Scots ranges from 1.3% in Turf Lodge and Ballymurphy to 17.1% in Woodvale. Across Belfast’s 60 wards, Irish ability rises with the share of residents from a Catholic background, and Ulster-Scots ability with the share from a Protestant background, with correlations of 0.97 and 0.93, respectively. Regular use is low for Irish and lower still for Ulster-Scots: 5.7% of Belfast residents aged three and over speak Irish daily or weekly, and 1.2% speak Ulster-Scots that often. The highest ward figure for regular use of Ulster-Scots is 4.9%, in Ballysillan. These are associations between areas, measured in March 2021. They say nothing about why any individual applies for a sign, and people value a language for cultural and educational reasons as well as for daily use. They do explain why a street sign in either language can carry a meaning about community that goes beyond its linguistic function.

The risk to cohesion

In March 2025, the council’s own equality screenings of ten streets found that surveying for and erecting Irish signs there could give rise to community tension, while recognising that the process could also promote cultural and linguistic diversity. Two of those streets were Sunningdale Gardens and Victoria Road. Both went to survey, both failed for Irish, and by April 2026 both had Ulster-Scots applications pending. The east Belfast streets where applications have been contested lie in wards where between 12% and 19% of residents come from a Catholic background. Where applications for both languages arise in streets like that, the risk is that a process intended to recognise linguistic diversity will reinforce the community boundaries that public policy elsewhere seeks to soften. The policy already requires the council to assess each proposal for potential adverse effects on good relations before a survey, and its residual discretion lets it weigh local circumstances, but the published procedure does not require it to consider how applications in different languages interact across a neighbourhood.

The threshold and the chamber

The 15% figure decides less than it appears to. In June 2025, the committee considered Shandon Park, where 41 occupiers (16.80%) supported an Irish sign and 121 (49.59%) opposed it. The committee excluded the street on the chair’s casting vote, and the full council restored it on 1 July 2025 by 30 votes to 25. Discretion has also been used to approve streets that failed the threshold: the council’s published list records seven such streets approved in June 2026, and on 1 July 2026 the full council approved Caffrey Avenue and Glenwood View by 31 votes to 26. Discretion works both ways, and on contested streets the chamber vote can turn the outcome. That is another reason, beyond those I gave in March, to doubt that a council is the right body to settle a language street by street.

The Flags Bill

Paula Bradshaw’s Display of Flags and Emblems Bill passed its Second Stage on 22 September by 46 votes to 32. It would require the Department for Infrastructure to remove a flag or emblem from public street furniture where removal is in the public interest, and it creates a rebuttable presumption in favour of removal where a display near a sensitive place “demarcates that place as belonging exclusively to persons with a particular national or cultural identity”. The Bill’s definition of street furniture includes street signs, but clause 1(7) states that the section “does not apply in respect of a flag or emblem that is displayed by a public authority”.

The Bill would therefore not reach a council street sign, and a bilingual street sign is not obviously a flag or emblem in the first place. The Bill’s relevance lies in its principle. The Bill seeks to distinguish legitimate cultural displays on street furniture from those that mark a place as belonging to one identity, and it places that judgement on a public body applying stated tests. The council’s policy uses a 15% threshold, alongside initial good-relations assessments and residual discretion, but it does not expressly require the council to consider how signs in different languages on neighbouring streets might be read.

The objection

Defenders of the present arrangement can make three points. Minority-language provision matters most where speakers are few, which is why the threshold is low in the first place. Different signs on different streets can reflect Belfast’s diversity without implying ownership. A street sign is also a translation authorised by a public body after a survey, which distinguishes it from a flag tied to a lamppost by people with no authority to put it there.

All three points have force. The first is the argument I made in March, and I still accept it for applications from people who speak, learn, or value the language. The second is true of signs that arise independently; the risk lies where applications in the two languages arise against each other on the same streets, and the survey cannot tell the difference. The third cuts both ways. When the council erects a street sign it adopts the sign as its own, and so the test the council applies matters more than the test applied to an unauthorised flag.

Conclusion

Adjusting the threshold would not resolve this. Counting only respondents, as Sinn Féin has proposed, would make approvals easier in both languages and could increase the number of competing approvals. A 50% threshold of the kind proposed on this site last year would have blocked Ravenscroft Avenue, and most Irish approvals in recent committee reports fell below 50% as well. Neither change would address the underlying problem. The policy leaves the choice of second language to individual applications, street by street, without an express requirement to consider how those applications interact across a neighbourhood.

My March argument, that the status of Irish and Ulster-Scots in public signage belongs in statute at Stormont and should be applied to a common standard, has more force after Ravenscroft and Sunningdale. A rule set at that level could remove the street-by-street choice of language from which the competing applications arise. Until such a rule exists, the council will continue deciding second languages one street at a time, without a policy that expressly addresses the wider pattern those decisions may create.

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