A Letter from Ireland
a Chara,
This has been quite the week in Local government in the North of Ireland as local councils elected their Mayors or Council Chairs for the coming year. In the North, the Mayors and Chairs are elected by the council and serve a one-year term.
There are eleven councils, and this year Sinn Féin took the leadership role in six councils, including the largest urban councils of Belfast, Derry and Strabane, as well as councils covering Armagh, Fermanagh, and Tyrone.
In Antrim and Newtownabbey Council, Henry Cushinan became the first Sinn Féin member to serve as Mayor. Henry is a former political prisoner who served time in Long Kesh during the Blanket and Hunger strike protests.
In many ways, this first is a symbol of political change in Ireland. Before taking on the role, Henry paid his respects to those who had struggled in the gaols. His politics has not changed; he is a committed Irish Republican and United Irelander, but the growth of Sinn Féin and the peace process have changed the North.
For years, Sinn Féin did not contest elections in the North; all of that changed when Bobby Sands was elected an MP while on Hunger Strike in 1981. In 1983, Alex Maskey was elected to Belfast City Council in a by-election (special election) and became the first Sinn Féin Councillor in the city since the 1920s.
He would be banned from attending council meetings and would have to enter the building wearing a bulletproof jacket, such was the level of unionist threats. He would soon be joined by other Sinn Féin Councillors.
The first election campaign I ever worked on was for Máirtín Ó Muilleoir when he was elected to the Council in 1987. Whistles would be blown when a Sinn Féin member tried to speak, and the Irish language was banned from the council. In his book, “The Dome of Delight”, Máirtín details the rows, fist fights, court cases and protests that secured the right of Sinn Féin Councillors to be heard. All of that came at the cost of living with the threat of assassination and the loss of many party colleagues. Our offices were attacked, our members killed, a bomb was placed outside the party room in the Council, and we were censored by the governments from the media.
Alex would go on to be the First Sinn Féin Mayor of Belfast and would be joined by others, including Máirtín.
Belfast Council has fundamentally changed. That change has been frustratingly slow, and a minority still hold out for the old days of Unionist dominance.
Sinn Féin is the largest party, and the Council has unveiled a strategy to promote the Irish language. The City Council, like the city itself, is now a shared place. The time I grew up in is now gone, and the city is in the hands of a new generation. The new Sinn Féin mayor is Róis-Máire Donnelly, a Gaeilgeoir (Irish language speaker) from the Ballymurphy area of West Belfast. She has promised to prioritise the needs of young people in the city and to promote the shared heritage of the Irish language.
As the words of the song go, “the times they are a changin.”
Have a great weekend,
