It happens like clockwork: Stormont re-unites after every break-up and conjures up new ways to suck the life out of Derry.
In 2011, the Executive reduced the 100-plus page Derry One Plan, which promised inter alia 9,400 full-time students at Magee by 2020, to a single line in its Programme for Government – and then dropped it entirely.
In 2020, within a month of New Decade, New Approach guaranteeing a minimum of 10,000 full-time students at Magee by 2030, the budget was blown bailing out Ulster University’s north Belfast folly. Derry, an ancient city of saints and scholars, already waiting 60 years for its own university, was told sorry but the money isn’t there.
On Monday, after seven months ensuring that every penny of its forthcoming budgets was being allocated to greater Belfast, the Executive relegated the north west to less than a paragraph in its new 88-page Ladybird Book of Waffle.
A task force was offered to Derry by way of a diversion, while any and all real money was pre-spent on the ‘capital’.
Even by Stormont’s standards, the new draft Programme for Government document was shocking. Indeed, it is hard to believe that the same party which produced such a forward-thinking, socially-innovative and meticulously-costed Housing Plan in the south last month could allow its name on it.
The downgrading of Derry and the north west has been going on for 100 years now in various forms, ranging from neglect to outright discrimination.
If you doubt us, just read Frank Curran’s Derry: Countdown to Disaster (1986), Garrett Hargan’s A Scandal in Plain Sight (2024) and economist Dr John Daly’s regular bulletins from the Northern and Western Regional Assembly, and then ask yourself: how in the world is this still allowed?
It is nothing short of a travesty that our university, established 160 years ago, which could and should be the centre of north west regeneration and our future livelihoods, is still being run with a death grip by Stormont and Belfast York Street.
Derry is tired of being tied to Belfast and of being abused by Belfast. It was a connection most of us never sought, never cherished and which most of us now wish would end.
Smarter minds than ours know this too – indeed, the Royal Irish Academy has now produced two separate reports (2021 and 2024) explaining how Derry’s university must be independent of Belfast if our region is to prosper.
Today, the North South Ministerial Council meets in Dublin and Derry will have to be on the agenda, if only for the south to ask Belfast what it has been doing with the €45 million it gave it for Magee.
But we need more than that. It is time for a realisation that the north west as a unit, in both jurisdictions, needs urgent attention.
If you seriously want to deliver equality across the island, and live up to the spirit and letter of the Good Friday Agreement, it is imperative to move it to the top of the agenda and keep it there.
Conal McFeely and Garbhán Downey
Derry University Group, Ráth Mór, Derry
