LETTER: Belfast will never deliver a 10,000 student university for Derry

It seems that everybody with a voice in this city, including the editorial writer of this newspaper, wants to see a university with 10,000 students in order to greatly improve the economy and create jobs and prosperity.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, if I may – there will never be a university of that size in this city while it is in the UK. The problem is that Belfast’s unionist politicians and business leaders do not believe that Derry should get that much development.

To them Derry spells trouble and giving Derry what will amount to an ever greater degree of autonomy over its own affairs will simply lead to ever greater demands for more investment, leading to demands for more political alignment with Dublin.

To them Derry is a burgeoning black hole whose economy keeps taking and whose citizens will never do what they want them to do, and that is to give allegiance to the UK state. There is simply no benefit to them.

Indeed, investing in Derry – other than in the current pedestrian way designed to maintain things the way they are now – gives them the opposite response to the one they want. Derry cannot be trusted. That is the bottom line.

The antidote to that political malaise is to make an effort to get our city out of the grasp of British secretaries of state and unionist elites.

A fulsome united Ireland will not happen while there is so much division in our society whatever the result of a border poll. Unionists see an existential threat to them in a united Ireland.

A successful border poll will lead to civil conflict with repartition being used to stabilise the North. Power-sharing would be finished.

The reality is that there is really no alternative to grasping the nettle now of a repartitioned country, shaping it in our own image, not the unionists’, and preventing the humiliation of yet another generation of the city’s politicians and their supporters.

Yours faithfully,

John O’Connell,

Derry