Hacked off loyalists hack off Irish section of East Belfast street sign

A street sign in an affluent East Belfast suburb has been vandalised with an angle grinder, slicing the Irish section of the bilingual location guide off. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) estimate the damage was done at 20:15 on the evening of October 11. They are treating the attack as “hate-motivated”. Residents of Shandon Park had, in a vote this year, exceeded the 15% needed for inclusion of the Irish Páirc an tSeandúin on the street’s signage, with 16.8% in favour and 49.9% against.

The path to approval had been circuitous – an initial decision in June by the Belfast City Council’s People and Communities Committee to block the new signage was reversed in July by councillors at their full monthly meeting. 30 councillors voted in favour (the Green Party, People Before Profit, Sinn Féin, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party), with 25 against (Alliance, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Traditional Unionist Voice, and the Ulster Unionist Party).

Shandon Park sign’s placement followed intense council debate

Since 2022, the procedure to trigger potential addition of Irish to a sign requires only one resident of a street to put in a request for the change. Residents of the street are then canvassed, and if 15% or more approve, it goes before the council for a final decision. The previous process set a much higher bar, with 33.3% of those on a street needing to sign a petition to kick off the consultation steps, and 66.6% of the street required to agree on the new signage.

DUP councillor Andrew McCormick had accused Sinn Féin of using its strong council presence to:

…impose [the] Irish language in communities where it is not wanted or it is not needed.

Jenna Maghie of Alliance argued her party backed minority rights, but pushed for “discretion” in areas where there is high opposition to inclusion of Irish. In the June meeting discussing the issue, Anthony Flynn of the Greens criticised the Alliance stance, saying:

We see this as a minority rights issue, it is very clear, and black and white, for us. It is quite disappointing that the Alliance Party particularly continues to go against a minority rights issue.

Loyalists speaking to the Belfast Telegraph said signs will continue to be removed by people taking “matters into their own hands”. They vowed that the Shandon Park one “won’t be the last Irish sign removed”.

Increased role for Irish met with threats of mass burnings

There has been heightened hostility to the Irish language in the last couple of weeks, after Belfast City Council voted in favour of more widespread use of bilingual signage. It will see Irish used on council facilities, such as leisure centres and transport infrastructure, along with revamped council uniforms. The vote was met with a vicious response from loyalist paramilitaries, with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) pledging to:

…embark on a campaign of burning any council vans or centres displaying Irish language signage in order to make the Belfast City Council policy unworkable.

There has been similar enthusiasm for destruction of public property in the wake of the East Belfast sign damage. Speaking on X, unionist hatemonger Jamie Bryson took time off from supporting Zionist genocide to claim that:

The real hate crime was [the sign’s] imposition, not [its] removal.

He also spoke of “fundamentally misguided” people imposing a supposed “nationalist supremacism”. Similar fevered siege mentality imaginings emanated from veteran unionist politicians in a letter to the Belfast News Letter, in which they hallucinate a future where Sinn Féin:

…require every school child to have to learn Irish, every private company and public body to have to adopt bilingual practices; and the penalties for not doing so will be exclusion from participating in public sector contracts or holding public sector jobs. Their objective is to remove any vestige of Britishness from our country.

Language parity – a fundamental right

Quite where the evidence lies for this leap – from slowly transitioning to giving English and Irish equal footing, to removal of all Britishness (whatever that is) – is anyone’s guess, but such fantasies are standard fare for previously dominant groups being asked to cede to an egalitarian future. South African whites imagined mass murder and ethnic cleansing if the African National Congress were to take charge of the country, and the deranged ramblings about white genocide in the United States represent the same sort of irrational panic as that nation’s demographics shift away from a pale-skinned majority. Similarly, Enoch Powell was in 1968 raving delusionally about soon “the black man [having] the whip hand over the white man”, at a time when 2% of Britain were people of colour. 57 years on, this fiction has not come to pass.

The arguments from Bryson and co. about imposing something when a potential 85% oppose may be worth considering on the narrow basis of assessing the pace of, and manner in which, change occurs. The counter-argument, however, is that in a properly democratic society, fundamental rights can not simply be torn away by a majority. In nations with constitutions that guarantee free speech, it doesn’t matter if 90% of the population are in favour of stripping, say, a Muslim minority of their freedom to exercise it. It is conferred as an inalienable human right, something no one has the authority to remove, regardless of how much support they garner.

It seems appropriate that the people of Ireland ought to have a similarly unalterable privilege to access information in the native language that was robbed from them by colonial domination. That the response to a gradual move for simple parity between that language, and the English installed largely by force, is one of vandalism and threats of mass burnings, ought to inform us of the true source of supremacist mentality.

Featured image via the Canary