Kinnock pays last visit to Derry as Labour leader: June 1992

Derry regeneration impresses Kinnock

Neil made his last official visit to the North West as leader of the British Labour Party when he toured yesterday, seeing at first hand community business projects.

Mr. Kinnock, who last visited Derry in 1989, said the city had made significant progress in the intervening years and he praised the obvious determination of local people to rise above the area’s poltical and economic problems in order to try and forge a secure future for the North West. Mr. Kinnock singled out the SDLP leader and Foyle MP, John Hume, as someone who had made a great contribution to the North West and to Northern Ireland as a whole, and said it had been an honour to work with him on many occasions.

‘Don’t make Rectory site into a carpark’

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Derry City Council has backed local environmental heritage groups in their fight to prevent the Department of the Environment turning the site of St. Augustine’s rectory into a car park. At this week’s meeting of the council’s planning committee deputations from the Foyle Civic Trust and the Diamond Project Trust lobbied the council for support in their battle against the D.o.E. plan. If the D.o.E. plan goes ahead the Rectory’s dwelling and garden, situated at Bishop Street, will be demolished to create more space within the city walls.

The two heritage groups told councillors that, if anything, the D.o.E. should be moving to create fewer carparking spaces inside the walls in order to help preserve the historic walled city area.

Boston bans Derry exhibition

An exhibition of photographs and memorabilia of the Hunger Strikes put together by a Derry-based arts group has caused a furore among Irish-Americans in Boston, U.S.A., following the decision by that city’s Irish Cultural Centre to ban the exhibition, ostensibly on the grounds of it being ‘too political’.