Jim Shannon

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I thank the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) for bringing this debate to Westminster Hall today. I am thinking back to when my mum and dad were shopkeepers. This was 1959, when I was only four years old—that is my age out now. I remember our shop in Ballywalter, in the country. It was the shop where people bought everything. They could buy all their groceries. They could buy anything from a nail to clothes—my mother dealt with that side of the shop. We had coal. We had venetian blinds—my goodness, can you remember venetian blinds? We also had all the meal for the cattle. Those were the shops that people had way back in those early days. I am blessed to have not one but two great high streets in my constituency. Ballynahinch has wonderful shops, yet we all know that it would massively benefit from the proposed bypass to allow people to nip into town and come out without worrying about the commuter traffic. Newtownards, the central town for the constituency, has been a market town since its inception in the 1600s. It has a great history. It has one of the UK’s oldest market crosses—an indicator of the business carried out over hundreds of years. Indeed, we still have a thriving Saturday market. We also have independent boutique retailers that can kit people out—man and woman; boy and girl—with everything. That is the sort of shop we have. Unfortunately, what we also have now is a rise in store closures. That is something we did not have in Newtownards for a long time, but we have definitely had it over the last year.