Garbhan Downey's Foyle Election Diary 2017
Unchartered territories
There were flashbacks to 1925 in the Dáil last week, when Fine Gael voted against a motion to back special EU status for the North.
Our cousins in the South were also caught sending up inspectors from the Customs and Revenue Commission to scout new locations for ‘hard’ border posts.
An Taoiseach Enda Kenny, in fairness to him, could care less about us. He and his ruling party are much too focused on their own imminent Ides of March.
Fianna Fáil, however, voted for the Sinn Féin motion to save the North, which was subsequently passed with barely a mention in the press.
It rapidly became apparent, though, that Destiny’s Soldiers were just playing it green for the optics. And the comments made by FF party leader Micheál Martin after the vote gave a more profound insight into their defeatist thinking. The South does not intend to challenge against a hard border on our behalf.
“I believe that some form of special economic zone status should be sought for Northern Ireland and those counties which involve the most North-South trade. However, this now appears unlikely,” said Mr Martin.
“Because of the refusal of the British government to allow different arrangements for the devolved governments, there will be a customs border and there will be regulatory issues which will grow over time.”
If he’d had wrung his hands any more he’d have gotten a job at the Easter pageant.
Nineteen twenty-five, you will of course recall, was the year that the Boundary Commission arbitrarily partitioned our island - so consigning Derry to 100 years of solitude in the North.
Despite the fact that both the pro and anti-Treaty groupings had assured us that the Commission would award Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, South Armagh and South Down to the Free State, Northern Ireland got its full six counties – and its breadbasket. And in December 1925, the Dáil – ara, sure, we’ve no option – voted the new arrangements into law.
Interestingly, 1925 was also when the Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot predicted that the world would end ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’
Even the DUP…
Almost a century on, and Derry topped the unemployment figures for roughly the 1200th consecutive time again last week.
We are more than twice as dependent on European funding (through ERDF and ESF programmes) as any other ‘UK’ area. Investment in our industries is controlled through Belfast, which, incidentally, awards itself four times as much per capita as it does us.
We have fewer than half the number of third level students, per head of population, than another other city or town on the island. We have no direct rail or road links to the island’s two main cities. And, as of this week, Dublin wants to cut its bus services to and from here.
And this is before we are walled off again from our nearest neighbours and told that our European citizenship is no longer valid.
A man could go on and on, but having recently been accused of being long-winded, it might be better to sum up quickly as follows: Derry is already on its knees economically. The imposition of a hard border will finish it off. Academics say so, financial experts say so, politicians say so, and our children opting to emigrate say so. Even the DUP’s David Ramsay is saying so.
In short, there is no city on these islands that will be harder hit by a hard Brexit than Derry.
The problem is that unless we step in and stop it now, the new land border is going to be agreed by default. Just as it was in 1925.
Remember: this is how it ends…
Derry’s unique case
On a more optimistic note, however there is some imaginative thinking coming out of Derry City & Strabane District Council.
Council CEO John Kelpie’s proposal of a ‘localised’ solution, along the lines of a Cross-Border Free Trade Zone in the Derry area is worthy of serious consideration.
Brexit, says Kelpie, will exacerbate weaknesses in our already weak economy, and it is time ‘to present mitigations unique to our region’.
Others, independently, have been calling openly for Derry to secede from the North.
And while never a fan of re-partition – I have too many deserving friends, relations and colleagues on the Belfast coast - if the North as a whole cannot get special status, someone has to be forcing the argument on behalf of the most pro-European sub-region on these islands.
Seventy-eight percent of Foyle voted to remain in the EU. We do not want, and we cannot afford, a hard border walling us off from the South and from Europe.
The question is, when it comes to the crunch, would we (and perhaps some of our neighbours) be better off if we were walled off from the North instead?
The new partition isn’t fixed in stone – not yet.
Maybe it’s time for those Southern Revenue Commissioners to begin scouting along the River Bann for sites for their new border checkpoints.
Glaring gap
The departure of Martin McGuinness is once again keenly felt at this juncture. Derry, for the first time in generations, is bereft of a go-to statesman or obvious champion it can look to for civic leadership and direction.
Our current representatives are all capable individuals, but none of them would merit a sit-down with a European head of state in the way that the retired Deputy First Minister, or John Hume before him, could.
This city is also cursed with too many competing interests and selfish agendas in the pursuit of power – there is a real need to tie our efforts together.
We are failing to tackle huge areas of common ground and common crisis. Our sectors – commercial, voluntary, political, public service - are increasingly factionalised, self-serving and impotent.
We cannot spend our days shouting our positions from the top of our silos. We need joined-up thinking.
And importantly, we can no longer afford to sacrifice our local partnerships, and priorities, in favour of either Six County or Ireland-wide strategies.
Ultimately, neither Stormont nor Dublin has ever met our needs before, and neither is likely to do so, at least in the short term. Derry needs to be speaking for itself.
Our two most influential voices outside the North are currently Martina Anderson in Brussels and Mark Durkan in Westminster. Both are determined operators, hugely passionate about Derry.
But they are currently singing, independently, off the same hymn sheet, with no visible recourse to one another.
Yes, there are semantic differences, between their parties on Europe – and they could spend years blaming each other for their past lives - but on the central matter of special status for the North, or Derry, there is barely a hair between them.
I, for one, would be curious as to how often Mr Durkan and Ms Anderson sit down together to discuss their common agenda?
And I wonder too how much more impactful it would be if the two together, as the senior elected representatives from Derry, were speaking openly as one voice on behalf of our city?
Dissembling with Doyler
For more details on how Stormont divvies up its spending, can I suggest reading Emmett Doyle’s most enlightening blog, ‘Beyond the Pillars’. In his latest post, the former Stormont advisor shows that Derry was allocated less than 5.5% of all infrastructural funding in the North over the past five years.
This is the same five years in which we had expected to build two new roads and university.
In that entire period, we got less than £61m out of a total of £1.4bn. It wouldn’t have built a quarter of Belfast’s new university campus at Springfield.
Belfast, by the way, is currently hoping to lean on Derry’s considerable cultural weight in a bid to become ‘joint’ European Capital of Culture in 2023.
It might be worth sending the bid-team a boxful of young Emmett’s charts to inform their reading on regional distribution? Along, perhaps, with another boxful of roadmaps for those who have forgotten how to get here. (Though of course, by 2023, they might well have to go through a border post or two as well.)
Holy Pictures
My father’s favourite joke: what happens a body after it is immersed in water? The telephone rings…
Or, has been happening more regularly of late, the doorbell goes. And by the time you’ve dried off and reached the vestibule, the unbidden visitor has gone leaving, not that envelope of cash you are owed, but rather a bunch of straight-to-blue-bin election literature.
Thankfully, however, all parties are now tweeting pictures of their canvassing teams so, with just a small amount of cross-referencing, you know precisely who to shout at loudly, or slap in the mouth, when you meet them in Tesco.
Some truly bizarre photos are emerging too – possibly related to new religious practices yet to be experienced by this columnist.
The SDLP has posted a picture of their team assembled prayerfully around what appears to be a healing tree in Foyle Springs, while the Shinners have tweeted one of Raymond McCartney with a Brigid’s Cross taped to the side of his head.
The Catholic Right, it seems, has little to fear in Derry.
And finally
I always thought ‘man flu’ was a dose of fake sniffles that chancers used to con you into giving them sympathy - or to get out of something they didn’t want to do, like talking to the little people. I wonder will it work at the RHI Inquiry?