evidence: During the Troubles, the city burned but, while the Troubles ended in Derry years before they ended elsewhere, the peace dividend never meaningfully arrived. Today, Derry is more economically disadvantaged than it has ever been, more poor, more marginal. It is also more distinctively itself: a "whole and rain-domed universe," as the poet Colette Bryce has it; "Monaco without the money," wrote the late broadcaster Gerry Anderson. A world unto itself: Derry Girls showed the city’s exuberance, its anarchic humour – and its underlying sadness and its loneliness. [...] Because this is Northern Ireland’s terminal phase. This place never made any ethical or economic sense – and Derry is the apotheosis of that wider failure. A century ago, the city was locked into a senseless connection with Belfast – and today, it is being sucked dry by this same connection: by the overwhelming Belfast-centrism of Northern Ireland’s economic and political life. When Northern Ireland is wound up, I hope to see natural patterns of society and economics revive, and a century of waste in Derry swept away. I often dream as I walk – I’m doing it again today: I imagine new university buildings, the campus spilling out from its old hillside grounds, reaching towards the city centre, regenerating neighbourhoods, bringing people to live, work, study in central Derry. The city buoyed up, able at last to reach its potential, to acknowledge the past – and let it go.