Comedy can often reveal unspeakable truths. There’s an exchange in Derry Girls where Orla asks: “Will we need our passports, Gerry?”
“For Belfast?” comes the reply.
Sibling rivalry between cities is not unknown: Glasgow-Edinburgh; London-Manchester; Munich-Berlin; New York- Washington; Dublin-Cork. Partition robbed Ireland of the Dublin-Belfast combo, for the moment at least.
Whether Belfast-Derry is in the sibling category is a moot point.
Their relationship has all the hallmarks of one. Fat and needy Belfast demands all the attention and gets most of the resources; lean, edgy Derry has had to fight for survival by being creative and punching above its weight.
But, increasingly, the relationship looks less like that of squabbling kids who really love one another and more like that between a master and its slave.
On the face of it you’d wonder why. For decades the political and cultural leadership of this part of Ireland has resided in Derry. At one point you couldn’t walk down Shipquay Street without tripping over Nobel prize-winners.
John Hume was a towering figure in global politics; Martin McGuinness helped make Hume’s vision of constitutional politics real; Seamus Heaney used poetry to reach deep into the human psyche; Edward Daly preached the gospel of reconciliation more eloquently than any cardinal-archbishop; and, in their own way, both Dana and Phil Coulter conquered Europe.
Yet in the 50 years since Dana’s optimistic ditty All Kinds of Everything won people’s hearts, her home city remains marginalised and unable to realise its potential.
That is not all Belfast’s fault. It too faces enormous challenges, and many there live in poverty.
The blame lies with the decision-makers. So-called strategic planners, and a civil service class ensconced in the leafy suburbs of south Belfast and villas of north Down, have contrived to keep Derry in its place while pouring scarce resources into Belfast and its satellite towns.
This policy started in earnest after partition, and has continued beyond the fall of unionism and after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
To get a measure of the determination to marginalise Derry, just look at the transport infrastructure. Shoddy road and rail links seem designed to persuade businesses they would be better off investing along the M1 corridor rather than looking to the north west.
The denial of a fully-fledged university – in the face of a cross-community campaign in the sixties – was sectarianism writ large. The refusal to right that wrong in the generations since has entrenched that sectarianism in our higher education system.
Ulster University’s lavish new Belfast campus is, in effect, a monument to the bigots who ruled Northern Ireland in the sixties and gave it life. And it is a constant reminder to the people of Derry that they should just be grateful for what they’ve got.
Paranoia? Maybe. But as the old saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
That sense that ‘the system’ is out to get Derry is evident in the dismissive treatment of the city in the so-called Programme for Government; the continuing refusal to get to grips with the north-west’s transport needs; and the Executive’s decision to deal with the university issue through UU, which is clearly part of the problem and almost certainly not the solution.
In Garrett Hargan’s book A Scandal in Plain Sight (Colmcille Press), the issues standing in the way of progress are laid bare: sectarianism, Belfast-centricity, failure to deal with regional economic and social imbalances, indifference and inertia in the Belfast-based civil service, media and political class, and, in the words of campaigner Garbhán Downey, “lack of political will and accountability”.
The British government will point to the city deal and the Executive will cite the Ulster University Magee Taskforce as signs that they are dealing with the challenges in a mature way. But neither wash. An Executive that does not appear to know Derry exists clearly cannot be trusted to deliver what Derry needs.
The Derry city deal goes nowhere near injecting the resources necessary to undo disinvestment which goes back to partition, and the taskforce merely covers UU’s embarrassment over its treatment of Magee.
Irish government take note: given Derry’s unique location, and its importance for the entire north-west, the city needs a more imaginative approach – economic, educational and cultural investment on an all-Ireland basis, with London making reparations for its annexation of the city in the seventeenth century and its failure to do right by it in the centuries since.