Giant St Columba Statue a Good Thing

The UK has never been big on big. Even Canary Wharf in London, home to the UK's tallest building at a mere 50 floors, huddles on the edge of the city where its towers can safely cast their ballooning shadows over the half-empty streets of nearby housing complexes.

Now one small city in Northern Ireland hopes to make its big mark on the world with its answer to Rio's Christ the Redeemer - a giant 160ft high statue of Saint Columba.

After months of intense bidding for the UK's first supercasino, which went recently to Manchester, it was a breath of fresh air to read on BBC Online last week that Derry City Council is currently considering a bid for a giant sculpture dedicated to an Irish saint who was so central not only to the spread of Christianity in Ireland but also in Scotland.

Ok, so at 160ft it comes nowhere close to the Eiffel Tower which rises - TV mass and all - 1052ft above Paris. But with the monument's planned location slap bang in the middle of the Derry's River Foyle it is sizeable enough to dominate the city and become its defining landmark.

In a city that has had its fair share of divisions between the Roman Catholic majority (nearly 80 per cent) and the Protestant minority, the monument of St Columba has the real potential to unite the city under a positive symbol of the Christian faith that few can find fault with.

If anything, casting eyes on St Columba can't help but remind any believer in the city that Christ's message of unconditional love and forgiveness is so great that one man was willing to devote his whole life to spreading this message.

And at a time when many local councils want nothing more than to drive anything Christian from the public square, it is refreshing to see a city council actively vying for the erection of a giant Christian statue. Sure, most people are not going to meditate deeply on the life of St Colomba each time they pass the statue but all the subconscious messages are right.

The estimated cost of the St Columba sculpture? £15m. The cost of the Manchester supercasino? Remarkably little has been said on that front; Newcastle's estimate for a supercasino and hotel complex in the city was £143m so we can safely put it at lots of millions. The social cost of Manchester's supercasino, meanwhile? Unknown, but we can all hazzard a guess. And yet, just as the St Columba statue will be if it is given the green light, the supercasino is set to become a landmark in Manchester.

As Christians we know that a little bit of bad yeast can work all the way through the dough. And that's exactly what the supercasino is: bad yeast ready to eat into the hearts and souls of Manchester's most vulnerable people like an unchecked cavity. By the time any social impact assessment results are in the damage will already have been done.

Thankfully a small amount of good yeast can also work through the dough to great effect. At £15m, the St Colomba statue would be a mere snip. Footballers have been bought and sold for more - Rio Ferdinand was transferred from Leeds United to Manchester United in 2002 for £29.1m. £15m would be worth every penny to give the city of Derry such a positive and uplifting, unifying and - dare we say it - spiritual symbol at its heart.

It is sad to think that so much time and money has and will continue to be wasted on the creation of a giant gambling pen which will only be divisive to families and increase the risk of problem gambling for the most vulnerable people in Manchester. How long have we got until supercasino number two arrives at another city?

We can only hope that Derry's bid for a Christian statue will inspire many more cities to invest in building positive testimonies to the nation's Christian heritage and the life-giving message of Christ. Derry is clearly not ashamed of the gospel and that can only be a good thing.