On 5th October, 2010 I attended the 8th annual Open Days of the European Week of Regions and Cities in Brussels as Chairman of the Health and Environmental Services Committee of Belfast City Council, under the supervision of Suzanne Wylie, our Director . I was accompanied by the Deputy Chairman, Mervyn Jones, and the Head of Building Control, Trevor Martin. Team Northern Ireland in the form of elected members and officials from local government, as well as those from the Republic of Ireland, came together to meet key representatives from the Eu Institutions.

Facilitated by Laura Leonard, the European Manager of Belfast City Council, a seminar was held with the delegation in the Northern Ireland Executive Office in Brussels.This gave those present an opportunity to hear the latest Eu policy developments and funding opportunities relevant to local authorities in Ireland. It was an unique opportunity to develop relations with the policy-makers and resulted in an open invitation to return to Brussels to meet Commission officials and share direct experiences with managing and delivering Eu structural funds.

This was a key opportunity, given that 2011 would be a critical year when EU priorities and budgets would be agreed at Eu and member state levels. It was imperative that the needs on the ground in NI/RoI are communicated to the Commission at Parliament from both an urban and rural perspective.The delegation also met with MEPs, North and South, who pledged to facilitate a meeting with the Commissioner re Eu policy in January 2011 to communicate the priorities for Northern Ireland/Border Regional and ensure a voice to try and influence and shape the evolving Eu structural funds post 2013.

Team NI met Mr Jim Nicholson, MEP. I thanked him for his long-standing interest in the Ullans language. On 8th February 1994, he had spoken in the European Parliament on my behalf, saying that a number of dedicated people in Northern Ireland had set up the Ullans Academy to assist, develop and promote the Ullans language. He further said that Ullans was a culture and tradition all of its own, evolving from the Ulster-Scots tradition, a very honourable and noble tradition, and one that has been totally overlooked in Northern Ireland and received no funding or support at the present time.

He felt that as the Ulster-Scots community rediscovered their language they should also receive parity of treatment with Gaelic. For over 400 years there had been no development of the language. It was remarkable that Ullans had survived, not only in the spoken form, but also with its own literature. He wished to see the Ullans Academy recognised and allowed to develop to reach that full potential which he believed it had, and we would be able to create a new culture and a new tradition for those Ulster-Scots people in Northern Ireland.

In a letter to me dated 5^th June, 1975, from what was then the U.E.R. des Pays anglophones of the Université Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, Professor René Fréchet thanked me for my book, The Cruthin,[1] which had been published the previous year. This initial contact was to be the beginning of a long and productive correspondence between Professor Fréchet and myself, a liaison which lasted until his death in 1992. 

In his obituary, Mark Mortimer, who had taught at the British Institute in Paris for some thirty years, was to say that René Fréchet was for many years the voice of Ireland in Paris. This was by no means an exaggeration. Professor ofEnglish at the Sorbonne, and the spirit behind the University’s Institute of Irish Studies, set up in 1979, Fréchet served as guide and councillor to the increasing number of students engaged in research into Irish themes. His Histoire de l’Irlande (Paris, PUF, 1970) was only one facet of his numerous activities in the field of Irish studies.

Apart from his love of Irish literature – his translation of the poetical works of Yeats (Paris, Aubier, 1989) is a model of precision and sensibility – he followed closely events in Northern Ireland which he covered in a series of often outspoken articles published in the French Protestant weekly, Réforme. An acute knowledge of facts as well as an indefectible affection for every aspect of life in the region guided his particular interest in the North. As a young lecturer he had spent two years at Queens’ University Belfast. The experience he acquired, and the long-lasting friendships he made at that time gave him an indisputable authority to comment on developments in the political situation there. There is no doubt that it was through him that the point of view of the Ulster Protestant found its most articulate and sympathetic spokesman in France. His convictions and courageous declarations did much to counter-balance the often superficial representations of this community in the mainstream French press.