UNESCO: 80th Anniversary

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I want to say a big thank you to the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies) for setting the scene incredibly well on a subject in which we should all be interested. It is wonderful to be here to celebrate UNESCO’s 80th anniversary—I am just 10 years behind it. It is the specialised agency dedicated to strengthening our shared humanity through the promotion of education, science, culture and communication. I and others believe that we must continue to protect UNESCO and advance education, so it is great to be here for that purpose.

I love history; indeed, it is probably the only subject I excelled at in school, or did well at in school—that may be a better way of putting it. I also love the idea of UNESCO’s 80th anniversary, and—without being morbid—I love going round graveyards, looking at the old headstones and getting a bit of the history of the area. I love going round churches as well, where we have the same experience, and going round UNESCO sites. Their designation can go back 80 years, but churches may go back 300 years or more, and graveyards go back to whenever people were first buried, which is the beginning of time.

For Northern Ireland, there are a few important UNESCO-related milestones to note, so I am pleased to be here to give the local perspective. The first relates to the Giant’s Causeway. It is said that that is where the giants walked and lived—I am sure it is quite true. It is one of Northern Ireland’s UNESCO heritage sites and was designated as such in 1986, meaning that its 40th anniversary will be celebrated next year. Hundreds of thousands of people visit each year; it is a much-loved attraction.

In July 2024, only very recently, Gracehill in County Antrim was added to the UNESCO world heritage list as part of the Moravian Church Settlements. Northern Ireland is famed for its religious settlements—for its religious beliefs—and it is only right that we should have something like that. If we look abroad through UNESCO’s website, there are 1,248 properties on the world heritage list, so that gives people an idea; it is quite selective. They are properties that the world heritage list considers as having outstanding universal value.

UNESCO has revealed that climate change is one of the biggest threats to world heritage properties. The issues range from coral bleaching to severe forest fires and droughts. We are increasingly seeing the devastating impacts that climate change has on all aspects of our world and especially on world heritage sites, which we must endeavour to protect.

The UK National Commission for UNESCO launched a report to coincide with the opening of COP30 in Brazil, alongside 2025 being the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. The findings were shocking, to say the least. Since 2000, glaciers have lost some 6,500 billion tonnes of ice, which threatens the water supply of more than 1 billion people. I hope that someday, perhaps, my constituency of Strangford will become a UNESCO site, because it goes back to when time began. When the Vikings came to Strangford, it was called the strong fjord. That is where the name Strangford came from. We have a history that I believe someday we may even realise to our advantage.

Those things all matter and it is crucial that we look to the future, and at how our current actions are impacting the future of our globe and our listed properties. As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of UNESCO, we are reminded of the power of education, science, culture and communication, and that much more must be done to preserve it.