At last! A plan to celebrate the Olympic athletes from Northern Ireland
An event to honour Northern Ireland's Olympic and Paralympic competitors will be held at the SSE Arena in Belfast , Communities Minister Gordon Lyons has confirmed.
Mr Lyons told MLAs that it was right that the achievements of local athletes should be marked.
Northern Ireland enjoyed its most successful ever Olympics at Paris with six athletes bringing home seven medals, four golds, a silver and two bronze. Prior to Paris , there had not been an Olympic gold medal winner from Northern Ireland for 36 years since Stephen Martin and Jimmy Kirkwood were members of the Great Britain hockey team in Seoul and no individual gold medal winner since Mary Peters won the pentathlon in 1972.
However, Paris saw gold medal success for Rhys McClenaghan in gymnastics, Jack McMillan and Daniel Wiffen in swimming and Hannah Scott in rowing. Some Northern Ireland athletes represented the Great Britain team in Paris while others represented Ireland.
There is no date yet for the celebration at the SSE Arena.
Last month the former rugby international Trevor Ringland called for a celebration of Northern Ireland’s Olympians days after the Olympics ended, and then a week later with no sign of such a homecoming he said should take place within days – given that the games had already been over then for more than a week.
The ex-Ireland star said that if the government did not step in to organise such an event, then businesses should take up the reins and do so themselves and hire an open top bus to drive the winners through Belfast city centre.
The News Letter supported Mr Ringland in this call and said that a celebration should happen soon, not weeks or months after the games.
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