No legacy from 2013 celebrations without a university
Garbhan Downey is a former editor of the Derry News and was Director of Communications and Marketing with the Culture Company until January 2013 when he was sacked for gross misconduct after he spoke out publicly about concerns he had over the marketing budget for the City of Culture year in Derry. He subsequently lost an industrial tribunal which he took for unfair dismissal. Downey has edited a new book about the 2013 celebrations which was launched last week. In this article, he highlights what he believes would be a fitting legacy for Derry from City of the Culture year.
Derry’s transformation since the summer of 2010, while imperfect and incomplete, has been big and bold and beautiful.
The release of the Saville Report, coupled with winning the City of Culture title a month later, marked the start of a ground-shift, which saw cynicism give way to ambition, inertia to energy, and disillusionment to hope.
For the first time in generations, Derry began to take control of its own civic destiny again. It started to look forward, outwards to the world, together as a civic community. And in 2013, the world came to Derry to witness this change for itself.
Guildhall Press’s new book, 2013: A LegenDerry Year, while also imperfect and incomplete, provides a timely, and highly colourful, record of that velvet revolution.
Through roughly a thousand pictures (whittled down from 5,000), it tells the story of how a simple idea became a plan that brought together the city, and, in turn, produced the biggest showcase of culture this island has ever seen.
The images in the book – contributed by tremendously talented Derry photographers – show a continually improving city. The physical transformation of the landscape and river-scape is evident everywhere – in buildings, bridges, walkways and new performance spaces.
Social change, too, is visible throughout; we see a city where entire communities take to the streets to sing, to dance (or to Riverdance), play music, play sport and stage monumental parades. And where all traditions are valued and respected.
The big question, after the highs of last year, is where do we go from here?
Other cities have talked in terms of a light being switched off or complained that it was impossible to sustain that sense of upward momentum.
And in Derry there certainly has been a lull, with jobless figures showing no signs of improvement and the continued stasis in third-level education figures.
The example of our closest peer – Liverpool – however, gives us cause for great hope.
Within five years of the end of its term as European Capital of Culture, the city was back attaining the high level of visitor numbers it first achieved during 2008. There has also been strong and sustained growth in the city’s cultural, tourism and creative sectors.
Central to Liverpool’s success has been its vibrant third-level education sector, which is integral to the city’s growth, development, management, leadership and cultural promotion.
Significantly, three of that city’s four main third-level institutions – John Moores, Edge Hill and Hope – have only attained university status within the past two decades.
The lifeblood of culture, and civic society, is education – how we pass on our skills, learnings and traditions to the generations that follow. Our city’s single greatest civic failing – as identified 50 years ago, and all-too-regularly since – is the lack of university provision here.
We currently have less than half the lowest third-level provision of any other town on this island – an appalling statistic for an internationally-acknowledged capital of culture that 1,500 years ago was a cradle of European learning.
We have spent five decades asking politely for our share of the pie. And, never wishing to be accused of being unreasonable, we have stoically accepted our status as that of a minor adjunct of a disinterested Belfast institution.
In the interim, Derry was guaranteed a post-graduate medical school – which was then established in Coleraine. We saw a burgeoning IT department shift focus to Jordanstown, half-emptying Magee’s labs and this city’s digital sector in the process. And we then witnessed a proposed new campus – the much-vaunted Northland Road university corridor – being developed instead in North Belfast.
Over the past five years, this city has learned one thing above all else: if change is going to happen, the civic community has to deliver it itself.
In this vein, a simple idea, which persisted across the city, became a £20m project, which ended up drawing in hundreds of thousands of new visitors and upwards of £100m in revenue and capital funding.
The city envisaged, sourced finance for, and ran the 2013 project itself. With outside help, of course – and everyone is grateful for that. But it was no more than our due.
There is an opportunity now to apply that same civic determination anew to secure not just a legacy but a future for our city and its cultural heritage. And the most meaningful and permanent way to secure this future would be to establish of a new university in this city.
Queen’s has the Seamus Heaney Centre; Maynooth has the John Hume building; and Berkeley, California has an entire university town named after a Derry bishop.
What Derry has always deserved – and needs now - is its own university to educate new generations in the city’s skills, learnings and cultural traditions.
There is a clear demand for post-secondary education in this city.
We know this from the large numbers of our young people who leave the city every year in search of education, and from the huge popularity of Further Education facilities like the NW Regional College.
Likewise, within the communities, alternative adult learning paths are proving successful in hubs like the Nerve Centre, the Gasyard, Clooney, and the Hive. What is blatantly lacking is the university at the end of the process.
Guildhall Press’s book of 2013 will provide a lasting record of the city’s extraordinary recent history – and it will also give some idea of the magnitude and magnificence of our achievements.
But it is only scratching the surface.
If we are to do any justice to our recent past, and to our world-acclaimed cultural heritage, we need, as the poet says, to raise a monument more lasting than bronze.
We need a university – and we need it now.
Most importantly, as the events of the last few years have shown us, it is time to stop waiting in line for our slice; it is time to make our own pie.