Roisín McDonough, Arts Council Chief Executive,  launched the Aisling Awards 2001 at a breakfast held in An Cultúrlann in Belfast on October 3rd 2001.

Ms McDonough took the opportunity to thank the Andersonstown News for its foresight in establishing the awards, which recognise the crucial role that individuals play in the generation of ideas and the focusing of communities. She went on to make a ringing endorsement of Belfast’s bid to be European City of Culture in 2008.

"This city, this Belfast, has been the site of contention, cultural dispute, communal upheaval, for more decades than any of us, I think can bear to contemplate. Its streets are pock-marked with sad remembrances, unhappy events, tragic happenings. Is there a corner, or a gable wall, or an entry or a landmark which does not have attached to it some other atmosphere of deep personal loss? I doubt it. It has not been an undivided city. It has not been a city which, historically, could claim the easy allegiance of many of its citizens.

And yet! This is our city. Nowhere else. Belfast. This is our city. There isn’t anyone in this room, who hails from this city, who can or would say otherwise. Even most who don’t hail from Belfast, but who have lived here for even a short time, find it becoming them, suiting them, in funny, subtle and enduring ways. It runs through the way we speak, marking us out. The attitudes we have and which we have grown with are visible all around us in the sometimes shabby, sometimes spectacular perspectives this place affords us.

All of us have roots sunk in this place from the big migrations into the Falls and the Shankill in the late 19^th century. The mills that lined this road itself and which still stand as beacons of labour right across the city, symbols of how we lived, how we worked, how little we had. As I came up here this morning, along streets that are still peopled with character and stinging humour and the simple neighbourly concern, I was reminded of Joe Tomelty’s remark about Belfast, when it was said that he had wasted his life writing about the little houses of Belfast. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘little houses. But not little people.’

It is important to make these observations this morning, because we have within our grasp a new understanding of this hospitable, generous, cack-handed, perverse, sad old city in the sunlight.

We have the most awake population in western Europe. To match that alertness, we are going to build a cultural city to house it, recovering the city for the people who live, work, hurt, argue, sing and laugh in it. It was those people who made its art, from Gerry Dillon and Dan O’Neill, self-taught Falls men in the 40s whose paintings now sell for £100,000, to Sam Thompson and Marie Jones, playwrights from the east. This is a vision, too. It is a vision of bringing new light to the old streets, new jobs for the lost industries, recovering the whole city as a place of social, cultural, and communal commerce.

Upon that vision depends every value we might place on the arts themselves and on all those of us whose creativity we seek to encourage, nurture and expand. This vision is in the process of being tied to objectives, targets, with associated actions, delivery mechanisms and deadlines. It is about re-imagining Belfast, revealing the city to the people who live in it who may not always be the ones who see it best.

To back such a vision, the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure has charged the Arts Council with the distribution of £500,000 in support of the City of Culture bid for 2008.

The bid is about standing up again, looking about us and saying, in spite of all the that has happened and all that has been said about us, this is what we have achieved, all of us, this is what we have done, this is what we can do. It is, ultimately, for the health of the city, its future and the future of the children we want to bring up in it. They deserve to live in a place with joy in it. A bit of cultural roughness, as well as a bit of financial roughness, as the old saying goes.

The tribute these Aisling awards pay to the spirit of individuals needs to be paid to our whole various, unexpected, unreliable, dependable, unruly, uproarious, stubborn population. One by one. Thank you."