Hunger Strike Moviemaker Barred From Council Facility

The DUP has effectively blocked a bid by an English moviemaker to use a building owned by Belfast City Council to film part of a new movie about the 1981 IRA hunger strike.

Sinn Fein was hoping to overturn the decision at a full council meeting last night, but the move has come too late.

Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, who is currently making the film - focused on Bobby Sands and the last six weeks of his life - has already arranged for a different venue after the initial rejection.

He wanted to set up in an empty old peoples home at Wilmont House in south Belfast’s Lady Dixon Park to film a scene showing the murder of a prison officer during a visit to his elderly mother.

But at a Parks and Leisure Committee meeting in October, the DUP blocked the bid, though the full council was supposed to debate the issue at the beginning of November.

Sinn Fein abstained during the initial meeting and said they wanted more information about the film and were then ready to oppose the DUP motion claiming it is censorship.

However, Robin Newton, an MLA and councillor said that the party saw no point in dragging up past hurts, and said that allowing council premises to be used in the movie would have sent out all the wrong signals.

“We are now in a new era of cooperation in the Assembly and no good can be served opening old wounds and causing fresh hurt,” he said.

(BMcC)