The EconomistAugust 10th 2019 Britain 23O
nly lastautumn, Northern Ireland’s
second city was eagerly awaiting the
opening of a graduate medical school. It
was billed as the centrepiece of an urban
renewal plan, which over time would im-
prove health care as more doctors stayed in
the region. Then came the bad news: the
startup was to be postponed until at least
the end of 2020. Because of a political im-
passe that has seen Northern Ireland’s gov-
ernment suspended for more than two
years, there was no local minister to sign
off the new faculty. It was “bitterly disap-
pointing”, says Paddy Nixon, vice-chancel-
lor of Ulster University (uu), who had mas-
terminded the plan.
To grasp the anger in Derry, recall that a
lack of higher education has been a fester-
ing grievance in this mainly Catholic city
for over 50 years. In a land of long memo-
ries, people still fume over the decision by
Northern Ireland’s unionist masters in 1965
to launch the region’s second university
not in Derry but in Protestant Coleraine.
The recent medical snarl-up is one of
many bad effects of the collapse of North-
ern Ireland’s power-sharing administra-
tion in January 2017. The damage, in stalled
projects and investments, could reach £1bn
($1.2bn) by the end of this year, according to
the Confederation of British Industry, a
business lobby. Across the region, deci-sions over schools, health care and waste-
water treatment have been postponed.
Now Brexit, particularly of the no-deal
variety, threatens to make matters worse.
Households, businesses and students in
Derry rely on seamless transport over the
adjacent border with the Irish county of
Donegal. About 15,000 people in the vicini-
ty cross every day to work or study. The civil
service has warned that a no-deal Brexit
could cost 40,000 jobs in Northern Ireland.
With about 5% of Derry’s population draw-
ing the dole, its unemployment rate is al-
ready twice the regional average. Ire over
Brexit has helped to fuel a local resurgence
of dissident nationalist violence, of which
the nastiest sign was the killing of a young
journalist, Lyra McKee, in April.
Yet the mood among the city’s movers
and shakers is not uniformly gloomy. On
the contrary, people say they want to build
on the gains of the past decade. First among
those is the habit of seeing Derry not as a re-
mote extremity of Northern Ireland, but as
a hub of the whole island’s north-west.
“You can either see us a town of 110,000 on
the edge of the United Kingdom, or as the
linchpin of a region of Ireland that already
has 350,000 people and is likely to grow,”
says Philip Gilliland, a former president of
the Londonderry Chamber of Commerce.
In many ways, all-Ireland casts of mindare already established. The county of Don-
egal and the council encompassing Derry
and nearby Strabane work in lockstep in ar-
eas ranging from libraries to sport. They go
on joint missions to America to tout for in-
vestment. For the tourist business, Derry’s
historic walls and Donegal’s gorgeous
beaches are a single product. John Kelpie,
Derry council’s chief executive, has argued
that the city straddles the two countries, as
its outer edges are in the Republic.
The Irish government thinks in a simi-
lar way. Its national development plan,
“Project Ireland 2040”, incorporates only
one Northern Irish place, Derry. Common
sense, rather than nationalist zeal, seems
to underlie that decision. Its authors ex-
pect Ireland’s population to grow by anoth-
er million or so and they want the north-
west, including Derry, to absorb much of
this expansion.
Some recent initiatives give a hint of
what could be possible if the logic of geo-
graphy were followed through. Altnagel-
vin, Derry’s main hospital, has a newish ra-
diotherapy unit that treats people from
either side of the border. That saves North-
ern Irish patients a two-hour ride to Bel-
fast, and those in Donegal a much longer
hike to Galway or Dublin.
Improvements to uu’s Derry campus,
known as Magee, have been helped along
by cross-border ties with the Letterkenny
Institute of Technology, which is growing
and hopes to morph into a university. De-
spite the dashing of its medical hopes, Ma-
gee has set up research centres in robotics
and cognitive data analysis. These outfits
will hardly stop talking to their Irish coun-
terparts after Brexit, says Mr Nixon.
Businesses will draw on the ingenuity
which even the existing situation has
forced them to hone. Companies already
cope with two currencies, two tax regimes
and two sets of laws, says Andrew Fleming,
managing director of a group of small engi-
neering firms that sell mainly to farmers.
His group keeps manufacturing units on
both sides of the border, serving clients in
each jurisdiction. “We locals are used to
working around the border,” he says.
“Though for an outside investor, extra has-
sle could be a huge deterrent.” His firm
started in a Donegal village, just south-
west of Derry, five generations ago when
Ireland was a single political unit under the
crown. It has proved resilient through
many vicissitudes.
For all its current and looming woes,
Derry still generates pleasant surprises.
Who would have predicted its latest cultur-
al export, a globally successful tvseries
called “Derry Girls”? Set in the 1990s, it gets
a laugh out of foul-mouthed schoolgirls,
angry nuns, Catholic-Protestant prejudice,
bomb alerts and runaway gunmen. Now
the city must face Brexit with the same
black good humour. 7DERRY-LONDONDERRY
Brexit or not, the habit of thinking in all-island terms will not be lostNorthern IrelandBracing in the border lands