Letter to Editor: Paramilitary Displays At Belfast University

Dear Editor,

re: paramilitary displays at Belfast Univesity.

Questions need to be asked of a leading Belfast university after they have been found to have paramilitary displays and exhibitions including tributes to republican paramilitaries. The displays were found in a room at St Mary’s College, Falls Road teacher training campus, as part of an annual community festival in West Belfast this summer. The exhibition contained images of dead IRA terrorists and hunger strikers stitched into a large canvas.

It is completely disgusting that terrorists were being glorified as some sort of freedom fighters especially within a publicly funded educational establishment. Not far from the entrance of the teachers training college there was what can only be describes as a room of remembrance which contained a large tapestry with the names of many convicted terrorists and prominent republicans.

It is completely sickening that a facility that is training tomorrows teachers can justify such material as acceptable within today’s society. Teacher training facilities should be a neutral training and working environment and this should never have been allowed to have happened. If this was an exhibition of loyalist paramilitaries on a university campus they would have been an uproar but because this has happened in the heart of West Belfast it is deemed satisfactory. Well it’s not satisfactory or acceptable and if our politicians can stop playing hokey cokey with our political future long enough to do some real business they need to be asking some serious questions on how this exhibition came to be in a publicly funded education establishment.