The city of Derry will tonight find out if it will be the United Kingdom's first-ever city of culture in 2013.
The city’s cultural community has linked with its people at local community level in an unprecedented manner for the competition, in which it is competing with Birmingham, Norwich and Sheffield.
James Kerr, executive director of the Verbal Arts Centre, explains that Derry “has loads of history, but it is contentious history”. The city of culture bid offers a chance to “crack the cultural code” to offer “purposeful inquiry” into what has happened inside and outside the famous city walls either 300 or just 30 years ago.
“Derry is offering both cultural celebration and examination. We could be a model for elsewhere,” he argues. “Prejudice is defeated firstly intellectually, then legally and – finally – emotionally. And that is where culture comes in.”
The outgoing mayor of Derry, a Sinn Féiner and one-time republican prisoner Paul Fleming, summed up the mood: “We are all Derry now, and the bid for the year of culture is about who we have become, not who we were.”
The city has more than its fair share of backers from the world of politics and the arts and the area in between where they overlap.
As expected, those with Derry blood in their veins – like Phil Coulter and Dana – are to the fore. But the impressive list of backers includes some rather more unlikely names.
“For too long Derry has been associated with its recent past. The city of culture designation would allow people to go beyond the perception, experience the real Derry and appreciate it as a unique place of talent, creativity and warmth.” So says actor Gabriel Byrne.
Add to that the names of the outgoing Belfast lord mayor Naomi Long, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, Brian Cowen and even Barack Obama, and it is clear the extent to which the city’s famed political pedigree has reached beyond the confines to engage powerful support.
Yet this is no top-down bid being pushed by an elite with local power and cash. What is now so striking about this city is the breadth and depth of public support for the city of culture bid.
While the council provides the focus and the financial backing, it is the people of Derry – 40 per cent of whom weren’t yet born on Bloody Sunday – who provide the vital emotional backing.
The result will be announced on BBC television's The One Show tonight.