Belfast Council to impose Irish signs on city centre street without asking if anyone wants them: Politicians vote to break own rules
Belfast Council is to build Irish signs along a city centre road without asking if anyone wants them – breaking its own rules in the process.
Raphael Street is to get signs bearing its name in both English and Irish after councillors voted to ditch their own policies and skip a normally mandatory procedure of giving the public a say on whether it should happen.
The decision to abandon usual processes, which one SDLP politician labelled “an unnecessary cost”, and build the signs anyway passed by a slim majority this week.
It’s happening as Raphael Street doesn’t have many homes, and anyone who lives there isn’t listed on the electoral register as a resident of it.
Little more than a through street connecting Ormeau Road with a fully residential area, the only feature of note there is a council-owned car park.
The local authority’s rules are that once a dual language sign process is triggered for a specific street, polls will go out asking any residents on the electoral register whether they think it’s a good idea. If at least 15% of those residents back the move, the signs will be built.
For city centre roads like Raphael Street, however, there are extra checks and balances in place.
Rules state that, after a successful poll, the council should advertise Irish sign bids in the city centre to see how the general public feels, effectively offering every single person in Belfast a voice.
Adverts should be placed in the News Letter, Irish News and Belfast Telegraph, states a council report, “to give the community of users an opportunity to provide representations in relation to the proposal”.
But with no one listed on the electoral register as living in Raphael Street, there’s nobody to poll – and the council has now voted to ditch the newspaper ads, skipping ahead to building the signs without checking what anyone thinks.
At the council’s People and Communities Committee this week, SDLP councillor Gary McKeown suggested the newspaper ads would be “an unnecessary cost”, stating: “I would propose that we go ahead with putting signs up in that street.”
Mr McKeown maintained he’s “not evading opportunity for democracy”, but believed “the model in place isn’t appropriate” in this case.
"You could have 10,000 people from across the city, you could have people from outside the city or outside of the country, responding to this,” he said. “I don’t think it’s doable in terms of identifying a way of erecting signage on this particular street.”
A council official replied that the advert process was set up to convey the opinions of everyone who uses the city centre to councillors, so is intended to go far wider than only people who live near the relevant street; wider, in fact, than just Belfast citizens.
The DUP opposed Mr McKeown’s idea, insisting that normal procedures should be followed and the adverts booked, but lost a vote on the issue by 11 to nine.
Raphael Street runs along the edge of the overwhelmingly nationalist Markets area, so erecting signs with its Irish name, Sraid Raphael, isn’t likely to prove controversial with nearby residents – though a road in the Markets that connects to it has already been denied dual language signs after failing to meet the 15% threshold.