SLIP SLIDING TO ANOTHER HOLYLAND

     Note: First appeared as an article in the Derry Journal, October 2024. 

Novelist Neil Hegarty asserts, in The Irish Times, that

This place (Northern Ireland) never made any ethical or economic sense – and Derry is the apotheosis of that wider failure. 

Inadequate university provision is an instance of that failure. 

In A Scandal in Plain Sight (Colmcille Press), Garrett Hargan writes:

Despite countless promises, plans and strategies, the decade 2010 to 2019 ended with an increase of fewer than 300 full-time students at Magee.

Students at the University of Ulster Magee (UU Magee) and the North West Regional College (NWRC) are welcome in the city. They bring a thirst for life and knowledge. They also bring cars.

Problems with parking plague the University Area. Some of the parking is thoughtless. Some is plain bad and illegal. Residents are afraid to use their cars for fear of not being able to return to their driveways. Access routes to schools and the doctor’s surgery are blocked. Delivery and drop-off points are compromised.

Furthermore, faced with the question: “where will our students live?”, rather than outlining plans for bespoke accommodation, the responsible agencies stand well back and rely on commercial interests. 

Family homes are converted to Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs), frequently not properly registered. Houses in the area bear the tell-tale keypad, facilitating Airbnb users. Young families struggle to find accommodation. Real estate values increase when the housing stock is converted to short-term occupancies. Laissez-faire development slurps up housing stock, building alongside detached and semi-detached houses, in blatant garden grabs. 

People using prams leave the pavements, with primary school children in tow. People using wheelchairs, sticks, crutches or wheelers are impeded. I use a mobility scooter, due to amputations, as well as vascular and respiratory problems. Corners are blocked, so I can’t access the ‘dropped kerbs’ necessary to cross a road. 

Residents welcome students, but feel ‘enough is enough’. 

Social media platforms comment that people in the University Area should not act like NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard). They say: “this is just business”. I say: “this is very bad business for the university, the neighbourhood and the city.” 

When did it become wrong to be concerned about your backyard?

Each time news of an increase in student numbers is announced, neighbours of the university search for news of accommodation and parking. When none appears, we know that the existing laissez-faire approach will intensify. The city suffers the public costs of pressure on services such as parking, sewage, water and refuse removal. Flooding on the Strand Road increases when green, soak-away areas are removed from the high ground of Rosemount.

The main-driver of congestion is expansion by UU Magee. What can we do? 

Residents can call out unsanctioned developments, by notifying Derry City and Strabane District Council (DCSDC). We can support our neighbours objecting to a change to HMO and informing DCSDC. The Planning Portal on the DCSDC website is not easy to use, but we can phone to lodge an objection or write a short note and hand/post it in to the DCSDC office. 

We can go with our neighbours to Planning Committee meetings in the Guildhall. This is an insulting experience, as the public cannot hear the discussions, due to an inadequate sound system. We can lobby councillors, especially ones on the Planning Committee, asking that they give attention to the needs of residents over developers and their agents.

We can support Glen Development Initiative (GDI), who are liaising between residents, DCSDC, UU Magee and the government-appointed Ulster University Magee Taskforce. The Taskforce published a welcome interim report and invited input from residents for its final report. Reliance on the private sector to handle student accommodation is not reassuring. The easiest option for commercial interests, often absentee landlords, is to accelerate HMO creation. 

Councillors can get fully up to date on the best approaches to take when HMO congestion threatens a street. They can charge officials with overturning developments that do not meet planning and building regulations. Councillors can lobby for a tighter cap on the number of HMOs and guest houses per street.

Ten thousand students are not suddenly going to land, though that is the current aspiration. Some people say it should be higher, as the University makes the changes for which it can secure public money. Plans for accommodation need to tangibly synchronise with these aspirations. 

UU Magee, as the major player, can decrease the pressure on congestion by combining each announcement of an increase in student numbers with accommodation and parking announcements. Green field sites can be considered for bespoke UU Magee developments. 

The development behind the Tower Museum, at the foot of Magazine Street, is a good example of re-purposing. UU Magee has a relationship with the Inner City Trust (ICT), which could renovate derelict buildings as student housing, working alongside the Department, the Council, the Chamber of Commerce, Residents Associations and other groups.

UU Magee can move colleges and accommodations beyond the Magee site, including to the Waterside. Translink can move students around, offering reliable and safe late-night services.

Riverside sites are under consideration for development. The Fort George site may not be used for residential purposes, due to the toxicity of the ground following a stint as an Army base, while it may be considered for a health centre.

The area around UU Magee is changing. With the change driving in one direction, social problems follow. We don’t want students living in cars, as reported in Galway and Dublin. Or, as witnessed in Belfast’s Holyland, in an unregulated mono-culture of HMOs, which became a by-word for anti-social behaviour. 

No one wants Derry to slide further into that situation.

Nerve Centre published Dave Duggan’s new collection of essays, Journeywork, a creative life, in November. Available in Little Acorns Bookstore, Great James Street, and other bookshops.

www.facebook.com/Dave DugganWriter

irishtimes.com

derryjournal.com

A Scandal in Plain Sight, book, Garrett Hargan, Colmcille Press, Derry, 2024

WATCHING SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE

The image of coal merchant Bill Furlong (played by Cillian Murphy) ploughing his shovel into a wall of coal, a further bank of the black nuggets rising like damnation behind him, stays with me. 

Furlong is a film-everyman, in the tradition of Atticus Finch, as played by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Furlong is not driven by a legal search for salvation, but by a rooted urge for solidarity, mined from his own life, the loss of his mother and his fears for his family. Ultimately he is driven to do the right thing, despite advice that if he wants to get on in this life he has to ignore certain things.

‘Small’ is in the title and it is a small story, set in a small town in the south-east of a small country. Ireland, at Christmas in the 1980s, seems like Ireland in the 1950s, because much of Ireland changed very little in those thirty years. The phenomenal, often unnerving, social and physical changes in Ireland since then fail to mask the grimness of those years, as the victims of the power of church and state call for redress.

The ‘power of church and state’ is present in the nuns who run the secondary school, beside the laundry, where incarcerated young women and local people launder the dirty linen of the clergy, the hospitals, the local elite and the public, in an industry so craven that its stains will never be cleansed, but will sully Ireland for years.

I almost fall over, as I exit the cinema. I lean against a wall. I’m not helped by being on crutches, due to a disability. My wife checks with me, knowing I am liable to medical collapse. I reassure her I am moved, not ill. She has seen both manifestations before. I didn’t speak for almost 12 hours after seeing Tom Murphy’s play Conversations on a Homecoming.

I am stunned. 

It is the art that stuns me. The art of the writers. The art of the actors. The art of the film-makers. Art making imagination manifest. There is good factual work on the mother and baby homes, notably Margo Harkin’s film documentary Stolen. I favour fiction over fact. Imaginings that stun, move and silence me. I write, in Journeywork, a creative life,

Facts are disputed. Fictions are enjoyed, relished and savoured. Truth is brought to bear. 

Fictional images move me to tears.

Caitriona Cunningham’s play The Marian Hotel fictionalises her lived-experience in a mother and baby home. When a pregnant child, carrying a doll, joins the young women joshing and joking on stage, the characters and the audience are stunned to silence. All jocularity is stilled. Tragedy is vehemently presented and can’t be denied. 

Art is achieved. Deep truths, beyond facts, are accessed.

In Small Things like These, Bill Furlong makes soda-bread toast on a griddle pan and passes slices to his daughters, seated at the table, doing home-work. He urges them to eat up. His primary care, alongside his wife, is for his family. And then, in the ordinary course of his work, a young woman, incarcerated in the laundry, appeals directly for his help.

The image of Furlong dishing out the toast and speaking quietly to his daughters sits alongside images of his restlessness at night. He rises early and walks to his coal yard through the dark streets of New Ross, evoking memories of the dark streets in Waterford where I grew up, where my mother, my aunt and their neighbours worked in a Magdalene Laundry, alongside abandoned women chained to the drudge of machines, steam, heat and hard labour under the stern admonishments of nuns and priests, who delivered power over them as a matter of grace. 

The dis-grace of that historical institution stinks. The collusion with the State reeks. The actions of the men who impregnated and abandoned many of the women are criminal.

Images of my mother and the women she worked with are in the film. Seen at the sink, the back of Eileen Furlong (Eileen Walsh) is an image of my mother. The fiction wrenches my heart crossways.

How any young woman or man, called to service in the name of their God, can commit to an authoritarian, patriarchal institution, in the face of that history, shocks me. Are there no other vehicles for their service?

Ireland is fortunate in having writers like Clare Keegan and Enda Walsh, alongside actors like Eileen Walsh and Cillian Murphy, making films such as Small Things like These. Performances are excellent throughout. Murphy carries the film on his stooped shoulders, a ten hundredweight (cwt) bag of slack to bank the fire raging inside Furlong. The darkness is gripping and vivid. A sense of people doing their best runs through the film.

Go see it. Be moved to grief and anger. And admiration, as I was. 

A small thing, part of a big picture, as imagined by Richard Rorty.

… human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognised by clearing away ‘prejudice’ or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see suffering people as fellow sufferers. 

Recommended.

Small Things like These, film drama, Artists Equity/Big Things Films, Ireland, 2024 

To Kill a Mockingbird, film drama, Universal, USA, 1962

Stolen, film doc, Besom Productions, Ireland, 2023

The Marian Hotel, stage-play, Caitriona Cunningham, Sole Purpose Productions, Derry, 2024

Conversations on a Homecoming, stage-play, Tom Murphy, Druid, Galway, 1985

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, book, Richard Rorty, Cambridge, 1989

Journeywork, a creative life, book, Dave Duggan, Nerve Centre, Derry, 2024

A blog post on the novella Small Things like These by Claire Keegan

https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2023/05/reading-small-things-like-these-by.html

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SPECIAL ASSISTANCE

Perhaps its because of my work, or simply a feature of my personality, but I am interested in people, their origins and their lives, arguably to the point of nosiness. Thus I observe that it took four men of African heritage to get me through Manchester Airport and onto a flight home to Derry. 

I use crutches, a wheelchair and a mobility scooter at home. I used the same set of equipment, hired in Manchester, to help me have the fullest possible visit to my daughter and her family on the occasion of ‘the big girl’ starting school. Her ‘wee sister’ did the school run in her buggy, occasionally craning her head round and looking back, making sure I was keeping up. Nanny, my wife, pushed the buggy. The ‘big sister’ trotted gamely beside us. 

Where equipment supported me on the school run, four men supported me at the airport. I had my own crutches and I took them with me in a taxi from a local firm in Thameside. If the driver ever fills in a Home Office questionnaire on national identity, he will tick ‘White English’. I tick ‘White Irish’. 

The journey was enlivened by the driver’s chat and our enjoyment of it. We all liked Thin Lizzy, playing on the taxi radio. We suggested he search out Rory Gallagher. When the chat turned to football, he revealed he was a Manchester Red and made a racist remark about Manchester City and Pakistanis. 

I pulled him on it, saying he was out of order. He echoed the worst of racist verbiage that underlies racism in England and football. He didn’t make another racist remark and we parted on cordial terms at Terminal 3. 

I crutched my way into the Terminal Building and readily found the Special Assistance area, where airlines and airports provide a support service for people with disabilities.

A man, ‘White English’, confirmed my booking and we took a seat. All the other staff were of migrant stock, first or second generation. They would tick boxes as ‘African English’ or ‘Black English’. The language gets clumsy, when you try to pin identity on colour, countries or continents.

Almost immediately, a slim young man brought a wheel chair towards us and said he would take us to bag drop. I have never been to the north east corner of the African continent, but by his build and expression, I wondered if he would tick the box ‘Ethiopian English’, ‘Sudanese English’, ‘Eritrean English’ or ‘Somali English’. 

We chatted about how quiet the airport was. He advised it would get busier later. He took us to the RyanAir Bag drop area. He lugged our suitcase onto the conveyor belt, then he pushed me back to the holding area, where we sat again, our wheelchair beside us. We were in the system. Our Assistant smiled, as he said good-bye and was immediately given another assignment, an older ‘White English’ woman with a bag to drop.

We weren’t seated long when a tall man came to us. He was neatly dressed in the livery of the company handling Special Assistance, right down to an expertly knotted neck-tie. He introduced himself as Jallow. I missed his first name, being in mid-swing back into the wheelchair. I said I was Dave. I said I knew people called Jallow when I lived in West Africa. He said he was from The Gambia and a member of the Fulani people. The Fulani are renowned traders and pastoralists. Some 30 million of them live along the western side of the continent. He said his wife was related to the politician Adama Barrow. My wife walked beside us, joining the conversation.

The chat livened up, when I told him myself and my wife met in The Gambia in the late 1970s and that we had been visiting our daughter and grandchildren in Manchester. He said he had two grownup daughters in Germany and a wife in The Gambia. He returned home as often as he could. When we said we were with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), he said he knew VSO people, mainly teachers in schools and agriculturalists in the villages, but of a later generation than us. He knew the Canadian equivalent, Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO). He knew Irish Catholic mission people-priests and nuns. He was born and raised between Basse and Fatoto, where the river Gambia acts as a colonial border between British imperialism in The Gambia and French Imperialism in Senegal.

My wife told him she had taken books to the primary schools in the villages in that area, as part of her role as stand-in national children’s librarian. A Gambian was in Nigeria on further training. She said she still had a carved and painted wooden crocodile given to her as a gift on a visit to the school in Song Kunda. Jallow told us, without missing a beat in his wheelchair pushing, that it was the village where his mother was born.

It was like getting news from an old friend. 

He told us how much change the bridges across the river had brought, some good, some not so good. He sounded like he missed the ferries, though small manually-punted ones still traded. He named people and places with which we were familiar. It was the classic discourse of an economic emigrant recalling his homeland with pleasure. We were glad to be with him on the long push to the security area, where a Nigerian Londoner deftly managed the intimacies of getting me in and out of the wheelchair, through an x-ray gate, dealt with the dilemma of ‘shoes on/shoes off’, given my inability to stand for an extended period or walk in stockinged feet.

He passed us back to Jallow again and we pushed on to the departure gate, where Jallow settled us in a final holding area. We saw some of the travellers we’d seen earlier. We said goodbye to Jallow and thanked him.

We started the last leg, well-negotiated now by a man I guessed to be of North African heritage – Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian? Like his colleagues, he spoke clear English, though there was not much chance of a chat, as we were deep in the hubbub of converging crowds for departing flights. He took me to the bottom of the steps of the plane and I climbed them, one step at a time, holding hard to the handrail, right to the top, then turned to make my way into the cabin and to my seat. The flight was short. I read a magazine article.

On landing, I expected to hobble along the passageway to the front, then down more steps and into an awaiting wheelchair. Instead I was directed to the rear exit, met by a member of ground staff (White Irish?, White British?), who directed me to turn left, away from the steps and into another wheelchair in the hoist, a crate on stilts. I hadn’t been in one for a number of years.

We descended and I was pushed across tarmac once more. The light drew my eyes west to the low ground where the river Foyle ran and, beyond that, to the rolling hills of Inishowen. It was dry and sunny. I was home.

People from countries on the continent of Africa have been exploited for centuries, by a form of ‘special assistance’ known as colonialism. A contemporary version of that assistance helped me get home from a visit to my emigrant family. I am grateful to those men and their families. Without them, my life would not be as good as it is.

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