Derry comes from the Gaelic word Doire, meaning 'place of the oak trees'. Not only did the Ulster Plantation (euphanism) take the land of the people who lived there, it also started a process which tried to destroy their culture and language.

A majority of people living in both the city and county now wish for the place to be called Derry. As they are the residents, surely their view should be the only one that matters.

PS After Saville, any chance of a return of the Elgin Marbles to their country or origin?

Yes, get it over and done with and re-call Derry City in the ancient local language name. That should divert all this nonsense from the last few centuries. Works very well in Wales/Cymru in the last few decades. Only got to look at the confused English tourists to see it is working well!!

I quote:

"Nationalists tend to prefer the name that served perfectly well for centuries before the inhabitants of the large island next door decided to occupy the neighbouring lands across the Irish Sea - "ye that have harried and held/ ye that have bullied and bribed, tyrants, hypocrites, liars!", as Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Easter Rising, called them in his poem "The Rebel"."

It is clear even from this paragraph that you have very little knowledge of Ulster, or wider Irish history. Where, pray, do you think you get all these Catholics called Hume and Adams and Hendron and Morrison and Sands and Hendron and Nelson? Judging by their surnames, all of the above are (or were) the descendents of English or Lowland Scots settlers, who somewere along the line "went native" married a Catholic girl and saw their children brought up as Catholics. This process of assimilation worked the other way round: during Penal times, Catholics, especially the more affluent ones, frequently converted to Protestantism, sometimes out of genuine religious conviction, more often for careerist reasons. For example, Capt Terence O'Neill, Unionist PM in 70s was a descendent of the ancient Gaelic aristocracy who anglicised em selves and changed their religion in order to hang on to their estates. One can think of plenty of famous (or infamous) Ulster Prods with "Catholic" surnames: Louis McNeice, Judge Basil Kelly, the late unlamented Lenny Murphy, John McMichael, one time head of the UDA, James Galway etc etc.

The Plantation of Ulster got under way in earlyy 17th C: involved 3 sep (and frequently mutually antagonistic) ethnic groups - ie the English, the Lowland Scots and the Gaelic speaking Highland Scots, who were themselves far more closely related racially and linguistically to the native Gaelic speaking Ulster Irish than they were to the English or Lowlanders.

Prior to the Reformation, Plantation and spread of English lang and culture to the Celtic fringe, ulster and the Highlands basically formed a single cultural unit: Look up the ancient kingdom of Dalraida.

The Prot maj in E Ulster was reinforced in later 17th C mainly by immig from Scots Lowlands, but also by large scale immigration of French Hugeonots (see Danny Blanchflower, Sean Lemass etc etc)

Derry please. Not Londonderry, nor Lady London's derriere thank you.
Thanks @johncronin for putting the record straight.
Ulster is the last outpost of Englands colonial Empire.
It was serviced by Scots Protestants and enabled England to keep its steely grip on that offshore island of Ireland.

As my surname shows, I have Irish blood. It didn't matter in my home town, Dundee. It would have, though, if I had been brought up in Glasgow where many people of Ulster and Southern Irish descent settled, bringing their prejudices and sectarianism with them.
However, I have spent much time in North and South Ireland and have met people their of both faiths and both parts of Ireland who are decent and only want to get on with life.
Most people in Scotland, thankfully, couldn't care where you came from or what your religion is.
I was educated as a Catholic and always disliked that church intensely. I was free to do so because people where I lived respected my rights.
The problem with history--Irish, Scottish or any other--is that people are attached to it by emotions rather than plain facts. So you will see it and understand it from those emotions. And that's the problem.
The famous Irish writer James Joyce, said of his alter ego Stephen Daedalus, "Stephen was trying to awaken from the nightmare of history."
We haven't learnt from history and so the nightmare goes on.