Less than 10 turn up for protest over road scheme

A PLANNED protest at a new interpretative centre dedicated to Seamus Heaney ran out of road yesterday when only handful of people showed up.

Protesters, angered by a plan to bulldoze a four-lane highway through the south Londonderry fields that inspired the late Nobel Laureate, had been expected to use the opening of the HomePlace centre in Bellaghy to highlight their concerns.

But when fewer than 10 people turned up, an eyewitness said that the protesters decided that there weren’t enough to make their point.

The £160m A6 road plan given the go-ahead by Infrastructure Minister Chris Hazzard has outraged literary society.

But yesterday, Heaney’s brother waded into the controversy, saying he believed his late brother Seamus would have approved of the road — “that it was very good”.

“I have no objection whatsoever going where it’s going,” Hugh Heaney told the BBC.

“It’s going through Heaney country, but it will not do Heaney country any harm at all.”

Speaking last night, poet Stephen Connolly — a PhD student at QUB’s Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry and a prominent cam- paigner against the A6 upgrade plan — said: “There was no protest.”

Mr Connolly said the small group of would-be protesters spotted in Bellaghy yesterday were “nothing to do with him”.

He also denied there was any rivalry between the two centres at Queen’s and in Bellaghy over the literary legacy of Ireland’s most famous poet.

“No protest at all has been officially organised by the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, by Queen’s or any other statutory body,” Mr Connolly added.

Earlier this week, Professor Fran Brearton, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, said there were probably Queen’s students involved in the protest, but they were not from the poetry centre. However, Mr Connolly and Prof Brearton have been vocal critics of the road scheme in the media, including in a New Statesman interview the PhD student carried out with the senior academic.

Asked what direction the dual carriageway was now heading, Mr Connolly said that a legal challenge to the road scheme on environmental grounds had been launched this week.

The legal bid, backed by Friends of the Earth, claims proper environmental assessments weren’t carried out ahead of ministerial approval.