Fears mount over huge bonfire at City entrance
**Poster’s note: This defies description or explanation. People who engage in this kind of behaviour in order to celebrate their ‘culture’ need to grow a brain. If it’s illegal, it needs to be demolished and taken away immediately and anyone caught dumping there arrested–or are the police too busy busting women and children in peaceful marches?.
By Seanin Graham, Health Correspondent
Irish News
09/07/09
WORRYING: Wooden pallets stacked 40ft high at the entrance to Belfast’s City Hospital in preparation for a bonfire on Sunday
CONCERN is mounting about the siting of an illegal bonfire next to the entrance of one of Northern Ireland’s biggest hospitals.
Wooden pallets were yesterday still being added to the 40ft-high bonfire on the Donegall Road in Belfast, just yards from the City Hospital where the north’s regional cancer centre is based.
Hundreds of cancer patients attend the cancer unit while the hospital is also the location of one of the north’s busiest A&E units.
Organisers say the bonfire will be “twice as high” by the weekend with plans to light it on Sunday.
While the main hospital entrance is on the Lisburn Road, many patients use the Donegall Road gate due to its close proximity to the M1 motorway.
SDLP assembly member for South Belfast Carmel Hanna, a former nurse, said that, as well as people feeling intimidated by the bonfire, there were health and safety issues around where it was situated.
“It is not appropriate to have bonfires on a street, never mind next to a hospital,” she said.
“There are environmental health and safety issues, as well as access problems.
“A lot of work has been done by Belfast City Council in the management of bonfires, which we reluctantly agreed to. You can imagine how people who are not part of the bonfire culture would be intimidated.”
A spokesman for the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust said the trust was not aware of any bonfire-related access difficulties to the hospital in recent years but stressed that access to hospitals “should be kept clear at all times”.
'So venceremos, beidh bua againn eigin lá eigin. Sealadaigh abú.'
--Bobby Sands