The nine month saga surrounding a Belfast Council decision to place Irish street signs on a North Belfast street has come to a conclusion - with the authority voting conclusively to erect four signs along the full length of the road.
In January the DUP had 'called in' the decision to place Irish signs at Clifton Street, which connects the city centre with the north of the city, for legal advice, on the grounds the local approval rating for the signs did not meet the council criteria at the time.
The application for Irish signs at Clifton Street hit 64.3 percent in favour, just below the 66.6 percent figure required under the council’s policy to erect the signs at the time. However councillors were given legal advice at last December’s People and Communities committee that given such marginal figures the committee could have “discretion” to go ahead and approve the signs.
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Despite this advice the DUP went ahead and used the council mechanism to delay the decision for a further check of legal competency. This month, to further complicate the Clifton Street application, a new dual language signage policy was finally adopted, 18 months after being agreed by the council.
It will mean at least one resident of any Belfast street, or a councillor, is all that is required to trigger a consultation on a second nameplate, with 15 percent in favour being sufficient to erect the sign. The Clifton Street responses therefore would have satisfied the incoming criterion.
At this week's full council meeting 39 councillors, from Sinn Féin, Alliance, the SDLP, the Green Party, People Before Profit, and the UUP, voted for the Irish signs, and 14 from the DUP and the PUP voted against.
The saga began last October when it emerged that the application for Irish street signs could involve one being placed on the Clifton Street Orange Hall, which sits on a junction. Despite Sinn Féin discounting this as a possibility, a final decision on the signs was further delayed, firstly to await the response of the Orange Hall, and later another from one further outstanding property that had not responded during the initial survey.
The DUP all along the process used delaying tactics to try and stop the plan, and at one point proposed placing Irish signs on three out of four locations along the street, but not at Carlisle Circus near the unionist lower Shankill area. Last week the Clifton Street Orange Hall erected an Orange arch over the street for the first time.
If the arch erection is repeated next summer, Clifton Street will have the unique honour of presenting Irish street signs and an Orange arch from the same vantage point on the same street. There will be a cost of approximately £450 to cover the cost of the manufacturing and erection of the four street signs.
DUP Councillor Dale Pankhurst told the chamber this week: “It says in the report that the threshold for the application has not been met, it is under 66 percent under the current policy. It does state the council has the discretion in exceptional circumstances, however the report goes on to state neither the applicant nor anyone else states that there are exceptional circumstances in this application.”
Sinn Féin Councillor Ronan McLaughlin said: “This call-in has been shown on both counts, on procedural and community impact grounds, not to be valid.”
Alliance Councillor Michael Long said: “We have just passed a new policy in terms of this and the application would easily be cleared with that, as it requires a 15 percent threshold rather than 66 percent.”
People Before Profit Councillor Fiona Ferguson said: “If you look at the numbers from the report, it is clear there are a large number of people who actively want to see these signs erected. I find it stunning that there would be a suggestion that we would go against this.”
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