IT has been a discouraging month for the Irish community in Britain.
As we go to press news that the Hammersmith Irish Centre is to be sold has shocked not just Londoners but also the wider Irish Diaspora.
The centre has been a continual beacon of cultural light in an area that has traditionally boasted one of the largest Irish communities in London.
In these straitened times, however, we can expect more of the same from councils that are coming under pressure from the British Government to cut their budgets.
And we must be ready to act. The Irish have many MPs in Westminster who are well disposed to the Irish community. These must be mobilised.
The Irish Government must be lobbied to provide funds to help buy the Irish Centre for the community. Not to put it too bluntly — the Irish Government owes it to us.
For decades it was the hard graft of the emigrant population that helped keep Ireland afloat during its subsistence years; now much of that population has reached retirement age. But because they never went home, the Government in Leinster House has been saved a fortune by not having to pick up the pension bill.
In the British Midlands a parallel story has emerged for our community. The regeneration of the Irish Quarter has stalled because financial problems have beset the developers. Administrators have been called in, and the future is unclear.
As a community we can’t let these projects come to nought. MPs, councillors, TDs, the Irish Embassy, and the Irish Government must be pressurised into taking action.
The Irish Post will be in the vanguard of those ensuring the continuation of projects that are vital to our community.
Orange disorder
FAMILIAR, and depressing, scenes unfolded in the North this week.
A total of 27 officers were injured during disturbances following July 12 celebrations. Hundreds of rioters threw petrol bombs, stones and bottles, while PSNI officers responded with water canon and baton rounds.
Meanwhile huge bonfires — mostly made of tyres — pump noxious fumes into the atmosphere. Many were bedecked with Irish tricolours bearing the letters KAT — “kill a Taig”.
Yet, Orange Order bosses are trying to market the 12th as ‘an Orangefest’, describing it as one of the finest examples of living folk culture in Europe.
But, as former Sinn Féin councillor Máirtín Ó Muilleoir put it, “Is there another festival in a European city which is so offensive to its citizens that they will travel to the ends of the earth to avoid it? The House of Orange has the audacity to call this week’s tension-filled, misanthropic outing a fest. It’s so much of a ‘fest’ that entire sections of the city have emptied on its eve.”
Huge strides have been made in the North towards peace, but ugly pockets of sectarianism continue to disfigure this still fractured society.
Maybe anything that was 800 years in the making was never going to be solved in a decade or so — but attempting to call an annual display of bigotry a ‘fest’ certainly isn’t going to help.