The Northern Irish town and surrounding area is getting a $460,000 fluff-up in advance of next month’s G8 summit. Gum is being scraped off sidewalks. Roads will be freshly paved to ensure a smooth ride for convoys of world leaders. Virtual Potemkin villages are springing up on the road to the Lough Erne Resort, where heads of state will gather to discuss tax evasion and reforms, food security, trade deals and the crisis in Syria.
While these costs are all about looking good under the intense glare of the world’s media spotlight, appearances can be deceiving.
A fresh coat of paint does little to hide what simmers underneath — an economically depressed Northern Ireland dealing with a 24 per cent youth unemployment rate and Prime Minister David Cameron’s controversial austerity cuts.
“They know all the cameras will be there for two days. You don’t want bad press. You want the positive, glossy Northern Ireland image to be on display,” said Caroline Bracht, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s G8 and G20 Research Group.
The summit will be held at the remote Lough Erne Resort in County Fermanagh on June 17 and 18. The five-star hotel has been preparing for months, making sure every detail is complete, right down to the type of exercise equipment Russian President Vladimir Putin uses.
Lough Erne’s general manager Ferghal Purcell told RTE radio news that pictures of all eight world leaders have been posted throughout the premises so the staff know who they are.
“We’ve had to do three separate posters because every time we turn around there is a new prime minister in Italy,” Purcell told RTE last week. (A coalition government was finally formed in late April with Enrico Letta as Italian prime minister.)
County Fermanagh is in the isolated western end of Northern Ireland. Enniskillen, with a population of 13,500, is the closest town to Lough Erne. It’s hoped the summit will bring a $62 million boost to the local economy at a time when “business is a challenge,” according to David Morrison, the general manager of the local Killyhevlin Hotel.
“This is an opportunity to put Fermanagh on the world stage,” Morrison said in an interview. “This isn’t the sort of booking you get every day, every week or every year.”
The local council has been cleaning up the streets and storefronts for months, Morrison said. Businesses were encouraged to apply to a special fund to spruce up the outward appearance of their shops.
“That is not necessarily a bad thing. It helps the overall look of the town,” he said.
Hosting the world’s most powerful leaders isn’t cheap, as Canada found out when the bill to put on the G8 and G20 in Huntsville and Toronto in 2010 came out to $857 million. That money was spent on everything from the fake indoor Muskoka lake at the Direct Energy Centre in Toronto to temporary housing for the RCMP in Huntsville and police overtime costs.
For Cameron’s G8, the security bill is expected to surpass $78 million, according to some British press reports. But 10 Downing St. told the Star it has not released a figure on security costs.
The scars of the G20 summit, where more than 1,000 people were detained or arrested by police, are still felt in Toronto.
Parts of Fermanagh will essentially be locked down for Putin, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others. Obama is also planning to make his first visit to Belfast before the summit, complicating the security situation.
Nearly 8,000 police officers, including 3,600 imported from across Britain, will be at the G8, Downing St. said. Drones will be used to monitor the exclusionary zone of Lough Erne — only those who live there or are accredited to be there will be allowed in and a giant security fence, similar to what was constructed in Toronto, is being built.
A legislative amendment also could give the Irish Republic’s government the power to block mobile phone signals, for fear the devices could be used by terrorists to detonate bombs, reports the Belfast Telegraph. Lough Erne is near the Irish border.
In March, a car bomb was discovered in Fermanagh, on a road near the Lough Erne resort.
Anti-G8 protests are planned for Dublin, Belfast and London leading up to the summit.
Protests are a healthy part of any democracy, noted U of T’s Bracht. But it is the unknown “extreme” events that are worrisome, along with the fragility of the Northern Irish situation, she said.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Tanya Talaga
No comments:
Post a Comment