My Articles to the Newspapers

The city’s name

We could call our city Four Wheel Drive City, Fancy Car City, Dining Out City, Designer Fashion City or Big House City in that it is a city full of people who aspire to having a better standard of life for them and their children. This might annoy some of the ordinary decent people in the city who simply aspire to having a life free of poverty and to whom the thought of aspiring to having regular meals in hotel restaurants, clothes costing a small fortune, a second family car, a conservatory or a four bedroom home in a plush part of the city so as to be part of a growing elite would be enough to make them feel offended.

I am simply making the point that, sadly, we are a city divided along traditional western cultural lines between those who have and those who have not. We are not simply divided between Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Nationalist, British and Irish lines. We are divided between rich and poor, with the working-class and underclass making up a majority of the city, and a substantial and growing middleclass together with a growing upper class making up the remainder.

The name of the city should of course aspire to overcome all the differences that lay claim to our city. But should it not reflect the aspirations of the vast majority of our citizens who aspire to and live by conventional western cultural values? Or should it reflect the timeless, unifying, and eternal values of the Christian faith that first brought settlers to this region?

The western cultural aspirations might be better served by the term Londonderry, given that it expresses a desire to be linked to one of the great centres of capital in the western world. There will undoubtedly be objections to this from some of the more discerning of our aspirants, as we might call them, on the grounds that the Celtic Tiger is dominating the Republic and nobody is calling anything after London. No, but they might as well call Ireland Little England, as it has lost so much of its beauty.

The poor might take the view that we can never use London in our name after Bloody Sunday, a view that I share, since the London government demonstrated in 1972 just how much respect they have for our people.

The Christian faith might be best served by the term Doire Colmcille, Columcille’s Derry, so named after the bringer of the faith to our city.

But I feel that the most unifying name of all is Derry, a name which oozes humility, excludes the offence of the prefix “London”, rejects the empty gestures that some of our population are making to international capital, and reasserts the love of ordinary decent people for little blessings (like oak groves) inherent in the Christian way.

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*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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