Dr Stephen Goss is a freelance historian, lectures in history and politics in London, and is a Conservative councillor in Reading.
Earlier this month, Belfast City Council voted to actively promote the Irish language in the city. This was passed despite the strident opposition of unionist councillors. The Council’s policy – hailed by Sinn Féin and SDLP representatives as a ‘historic moment’ – will ensure Irish is used in official communications, signage, and Council branding. According to the Council’s announcement, this marks the ‘first ever Irish language policy’ for the city, intended to ‘promote, protect and enhance’ Irish as part of its cultural diversity.
As this is of course a column and website for current affairs, I will resist the historian’s temptation to delve into a discourse on how Ulster protestants – and Belfast Presbyterians in particular – were, in the 18th and early-19th Centuries, at the forefront of preserving Irish culture, language, and music.
There was, for a considerable period of time, a shared heritage in what now constitutes Northern Ireland. However, today, language in Northern Ireland is never neutral. To many unionists, this decision feels less about cultural inclusion and more about political assertion — the latest in a long line of symbolic battles where heritage is weaponised to advance a nationalist agenda.
The path to this decision has been fraught. For years, Sinn Féin and nationalist councillors have pushed for formal recognition of Irish, often citing HM Government’s commitments under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The Council’s new policy, passed without the broad cross-community consensus that the hallowed Belfast Agreement (signed on Good Friday) is supposed to provide. Unionist councillors immediately announced their intention to seek legal advice, arguing that the decision breaches the Council’s statutory duty to promote good relations.
Their concern is not unfounded. What for one community is ‘cultural visibility’ is, for another, cultural imposition. The symbolism matters deeply because, in Northern Ireland, identity has always been entwined with territory. Even a street sign can be read as a statement of sovereignty.
Unionists should ask: what problem does this policy solve? Belfast City Council already had mechanisms to facilitate using Irish where requested. For decades now there has been a ‘Gaeltacht Quarter’ in the city. There, everything from street signs to bus stops and bus onboard information is bi-lingual. The new policy, far from unifying appears to many as (yet another) incremental concession to nationalism. What’s more, from a loyalist perspective it, ‘sets community relations back a decade’.
Beyond the immediate controversy, the deeper question is what kind of Belfast the council wants to build. If the goal is reconciliation, symbolism matters. Public policy cannot merely declare inclusivity; it must embody it through balance and sensitivity. Elevating one cultural tradition at the expense of another is not inclusion — it is inversion.
In that sense, the Irish language debate is a proxy for wider anxieties about identity, governance, and representation in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Unionists increasingly feel that the equilibrium of the peace settlement is tilting away from them. Whether over flags, policing, or UK internal trade, the narrative has been one of gradual loss — of being managed rather than valued. Against that backdrop, a council decision on signage takes on disproportionate significance.
The furore over Belfast’s Irish-language policy is about far more than signage. It is about ownership of story: who tells it, whose symbols are sanctioned, and whose history is given public voice. In that respect, it belongs to the same family of disputes as the current chatter (for no good reason) about a border poll. Both are less arguments over policy than over narrative. Each asks, in its own register, who speaks for Northern Ireland and who decides when its story changes.
That is why talk of a border poll — however remote or unnecessary now — hits with such intensity. For unionists, every new debate framed in terms of ‘preparing for unity’ sounds like another chapter being written without them; for nationalists, every hesitation reads as an attempt to stop what they see as inevitable. The politics of language and the politics of borders are both, at heart, about legitimacy and belonging. When one community feels that its symbols are being overwritten, and another that its aspirations are being deferred, the result is the same: mistrust.
Alliance leader Naomi Long has called for clear, published criteria to determine when a poll would be triggered, arguing that ‘non-aligned’ voters (apparently now a growing portion of the electorate) deserve certainty rather than conjecture. Nationalists, meanwhile, sense momentum. In the Republic, Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald has used the Dáil to urge Dublin to ‘plan and prepare’ for unity, spelling out how health, tax, and institutions would function after a vote. Figures such as presidential candidate Catherine Connolly describe unity as a ‘foregone conclusion’.
These debates mirror those that have animated Belfast’s language dispute. Both reveal how, in the absence of agreed frameworks, political questions mutate into identity tests. Unionists fear a referendum process that feels pre-cooked; nationalists resent any delay that seems obstructionist. The risk – as with the Irish-language rollout – is that procedure becomes provocation. The lesson is identical: when change is perceived as managed rather than consented to, trust collapses long before any ballot is cast.
There are, of course, positive ways to promote Irish. Funding community classes, supporting voluntary cultural initiatives, and recognising the Presbyterian contribution to its preservation would all foster shared ownership rather than sectarian competition. The council could have chosen that path. Instead, it opted for symbolism over substance — a gesture more likely to entrench grievance than to enrich understanding.
The tragedy of the Irish-language episode is that it need not have been divisive. Irish, like Ulster-Scots, is part of the shared cultural fabric of the island. To make it a partisan emblem is to diminish it. Belfast City Council had the chance to tell a more generous story, one in which a language connects rather than divides, and in which Presbyterians and Catholics alike can see their ancestors’ fingerprints. Instead, it has turned a cultural inheritance into a political instrument.
The uncomfortable truth is that Belfast’s Irish language policy and the talk of a border poll spring from the same impulse. Both elevate symbolism over substance, and both gamble with the delicate balance on which Northern Ireland’s stability depends. Painting new signs or speculating about unification are easy gestures compared with the harder work of governing well: improving public services, building confidence, and ensuring fairness across communities.
If the aim is reconciliation, this is the wrong route. Forcing cultural initiatives without consent or constitutional debates without cause risks turning a contested peace into a constant plebiscite. Northern Ireland does not need more theatre; it needs competence and calm. The task for those in power – in Belfast, London and Dublin alike – is not to chase history’s headlines but to preserve the quiet conditions in which ordinary people can get on with their lives.
Until that lesson is learned, each new ‘inclusive’ initiative will do precisely what this one has done: deepen division, drain trust, and remind unionists that their place in the Union is treated as something to be managed rather than respected.
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