Five veteran Ulster Unionists speak out against Belfast council plans saying 'imposing Irish is contrary to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that we helped to negotiate'
Five veteran unionist figures who played a role in forging the Good Friday Agreement have issued a joint statement denouncing the recent move to spread the Irish language across Belfast City Council's area.
The group said that republicans have not honoured the "word or spirit" of the agreement, and that Sinn Fein's current effort to "impose" the language officially across the city – "aided and abetted" by Alliance – amounts to a breach of the deal.
Writing in today’s News Letter, see below, the five say that "the extent of unease and anger right across unionism” over the issue “should not be under-estimated".
As reported, on October 1 the city council voted to put bilingual signs on every council-owned building, park, playground, leisure centre and sports pitch, including unionist areas where the language is essentially unknown.
The council's logo will also be reworked to be bilingual.
DUP group leader on the council Sarah Bunting has previously suggested that the price of all this will possibly be met by bumping up the city’s rates bills, saying: “We’re spending money like it’s going out of fashion on a fantasy programme."
Now the five signatories of the letter , click here to read it in full, objecting to this have said: "Unionism needs to wake up to the fact that this is just the thin end of the wedge."
The end objective, they argue, is "to remove any vestige of Britishness from our country".
The five are: Lord Rogan (current UUP peer), Lord Kilclooney (crossbench peer), Michael McGimpsey (UUP MLA for South Belfast from 1998 to 2016), David McNarry (former David Trimble advisor and MLA for Strangford from 2003 to 2016, first for UUP and later for UKIP), and David Campbell (who was UUP chairman for seven years up until 2012).