Belfast City Council to look at spending £56,000 on Irish street signs for whole Gaeltacht Quarter

By Michael Kenwood - Local Democracy Reporter

Sinn Féin have proposed Belfast Council spends over £50,000 to put up Irish language street signs across the whole of the West Belfast Gaeltacht Quarter.

Councillors from the party argued this week at City Hall that the move would save money and time in the context of a huge backlog of applications for Irish street signs in Belfast, mostly coming from the Gaeltacht.

Last month, a report into Belfast council's processing of new Irish street signs was commissioned after it emerged not one new sign has been made since the council changed its policy.

In the seven months since Belfast City Council policy on dual language street signs was changed to make thresholds easier, over 600 applications have been made for Irish street signs - with not one yet having been processed.

During Wednesday's full meeting of Belfast City Council, a proposal by Sinn Féin Councillor Ronan McLaughlin to look at a bulk application was agreed unanimously at City Hall.

He told the chamber: "We need to be innovative on how we do things in the council. I have been told we don't have a data sharing agreement with the electoral office, which we need to be looking at.

"In wider dual language policy within the council, we still haven't had the equality impact assessment on the Olympia. That should be included in the Strategic Policy and Resources report coming back.

"The days of dither and delay for the Irish language are over, and certainly we as a party are not going to accept that anymore. The stakeholders group, which was part of the overall agreed policy six months ago, still has not met."

He added: "We have applications for over 600, and quite a lot of them are within the Gaeltacht Quarter, a part of West Belfast that takes in a large proportion of the Irish language speaking community.

"There have been 110 streets done, and there are 330 streets left.

"It would be a cost saving proposal if we were to erect dual language signage all across the Gaeltacht Quarter, with indicative costs of £56,000.

"A lot of those streets are part of the 600, which are going to have to go through the exact same rigorous process that is going to cost this council more.

"If we were to run that through the whole process, we would be talking about nearly £300,000. We need to be agile and innovative on this, we need to get the stakeholders group going, and we need to get the report back as soon as possible."

Alliance Councillor Michael Long said: "I think it is regrettable that we have had a policy in place for six or seven months and we haven't seen a single street sign going through that process yet. We were previously seeing five go through every month, so there are issues that need to be dealt with."

Chief Executive John Walsh told the chamber Conradh Na Gaeilge were meeting with council officers next week.

Sinn Féin Councillor Ciaran Beattie said: "This has been a frustrating process, on what has probably been the longest ever period of implementation of policy by this council."

He added: "One lady in particular has been contacted six times by the council asking for the same details, after correctly filling in the form in the first place. After twice being told she had given all the information she needed to submit.

"And then they contacted her again, and asked her again. It seems this process is an absolute shambles, and we need to rectify it as soon as possible."

Last month City Solicitor Nora Largey gave a brief explanation for the hold-up at a council committee. She said: "To give the context, when those initial requests were received, a lot of them were by email.

"They weren't part of an application form, so a lot of verification was required, and we had to go back individually to those people who had submitted requests, for certain details.

"We asked for the absolute minimum of details to get clarification for those applications to be progressed. There has been some difficulties in terms of securing regular access to the electoral office, and also to get some translations back from Queen's University.

"I think they are under significant staffing issues, which hopefully should be resolved in the next few weeks.

"Obviously until we get research and translation back, we are a bit hamstrung. In addition to that, there are a few issues about which we need some clarification from the committee, in terms of policy, that we will be bringing back next month."

Last July councillors agreed the controversial new policy would finally be implemented - 18 months after the policy was originally given the go-ahead in the chamber. Sinn Féin, Alliance, the SDLP, the Green Party, and the People Before Profit Party all support the new street sign policy, while the three unionist parties, the DUP, UUP and PUP, are against it.

The new policy means at least one resident of any Belfast street, or a councillor, is all that is required to trigger a consultation on a second nameplate, with 15 percent in favour being sufficient to erect the sign. Non-responses will no longer be counted as "against" votes, and there will be an equality assessment for each application.

Up until last July, the policy required 33.3 percent of the eligible electorate in any Belfast street to sign a petition to begin the process, and 66.6 percent to agree to the new dual language sign on the street. There will be a maximum of five signs processed per month.

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