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South Belfast News
20 May 2012
IN 2012, Belfast’s tourism scene is more about Titanic than the Troubles, but the city would be wise not to forget the political and historical value of what was once dubbed “dark tourism”.
Those were the words of West Belfast MP Paul Maskey, who issued a challenge to local tourism chiefs, citing the huge interest that remains in the Irish conflict from a historical and educational perspective – an interest that still brings hordes of international visitors into the heart of his constituency on a daily basis.
With this year marketed as ‘Our Time, Our Place’, the One City debate of the same name saw Mr Maskey joined by Tim Husbands, the CEO of the Titanic Signature project, which hosted a section of the conference.
As One City took place in the conference rooms upstairs in the spectacular building, the hundreds of visitors downstairs – even early on a Friday morning – proved that a new chapter in Belfast tourism has truly opened. And Mr Husbands revealed that since opening less than two months ago, the building has had over 120,000 visitors through its doors.
“We have enjoyed worldwide media coverage and it’s important we build further on that,” he said. “We are pleased to see that every agency is helping bring visitors to us, and product development is key. We are keen to link our project to other historically related sites in the city, including, for instance, Conway Mill.”
Mr Maskey told the debate, which was chaired by the NI Tourist Board’s Howard Hastings, that although the Titanic legacy was key in bringing visitors to Belfast, it may not be enough to keep them here.
“The fact is, political tourism is big, and I don’t think it’s given enough attention by the Tourist Board,” he said.
The murals and memorials across West, North and East Belfast are still a highlight for many visitors keen to learn about the conflict and social history of the city, and numerous black taxi, bus and walking tours keep cash flowing into the local economy.
“This political and historical tourism needs to be invested in,” he continued. “Unfortunately there was a stage when it was called ‘dark tourism’, which I think was horrendous.”
Mandy Patrick of the Park Avenue Hotel highlighted how other cities have dealt with a difficult legacy – while also forging a new identity – to the benefit of the local tourism industry, including Berlin.
BBC
11 May 2012
The Ulster Hall is 150 years old
For 150 years, the Ulster Hall has been at the heart of Belfast’s cultural life.
It has witnessed the changes across Northern Ireland and the world, since 1862. The Grand Dame, as it is fondly known, has housed protest speeches and peace gatherings, rock legends, boxing matches and classical concertos.
Over the years it has played host to a diverse range of personalities: from the son of an American slave to the Dalai Lama and from Charles Dickens on his early literary tours to Led Zeppelin and their first-ever performance of Stairway to Heaven.
Robert Heslip, heritage officer for Belfast City Council said the Ulster Hall was “a window to the wider world for people in Belfast; it was the TV of its age”.
“It was designed as much for working class labourers as it was for wealthy socialites,” he said.
The Belfast Newsletter on 13 May 1862 described it as a place “the rich and the poor, the manufacturer and the sons and daughters of toil, may meet together beneath the arched roof of the new hall, to listen to sweeter sounds and more melodious strains than machinery can produce”.
Victorian trailblazers
Charles Dickens, who brought literature to the masses on his pioneering literary world tours, had entertained a small crowd in Belfast in 1858, but the newly built Ulster Hall allowed him to perform for a much larger audience – and in the process, sell many more tickets.
In 1867 he read from David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol, and he returned again in 1869.
The great storyteller noted that Belfast was a “fine place with a rough people” and “a better audience on the whole than Dublin”.
illustration of Charles Dickens Charles Dickens noted that Belfast was a “fine place with a rough people”
Historian John Gray said that one reason for the Ulster Hall show was that Dickens “really enjoyed performing, and was, rather unusually for an author, a great performer, but also – he desperately needed the money”.
In 1874, The Ulster Hall hosted a controversial speech which, according to historian of science Frank Turner, sparked “perhaps the most intense debate of the Victorian conflict of science and religion.”
It was delivered by physicist John Tyndall – the man who would later explain why the sky is blue – to the British Science Association.
Tyndall claimed that matter could create life on its own and that cosmology (the study of the universe) was the domain of science not religion.
The speech came to be known as The Belfast Address and would incur the wrath of religious leaders.
Locked out
The Ulster Hall is not just famous for those who performed within its walls, but also for those who were barred from entry.
In February 1912, Winston Churchill, who was due to talk in the Ulster Hall in favour of Irish Home Rule, found himself locked out.
Unionists, who favoured direct rule by Westminster, filled it wall to wall and refused to move. To add to the humiliation, the men who locked him out had been inspired by Churchill’s own father.
__________
Performers at the Ulster Hall
Red Hot Chilli Peppers
Green Day
Led Zeppelin
Rolling Stones
Fleetwood Mac
Johnny Cash
AC/DC
The Pixies
The Ramones
__________
Twenty-six years previously, Randolph Churchill had rallied supporters against Home Rule in the very same hall.
He had urged unionists not to let Home Rule come upon them “like a thief in the night” and famously told his supporters that “Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right”.
The hall’s place at the heart of Unionism is epitomised by the Ulster Day rally on 28 September 1912.
Unionists gathered here before marching to City Hall to sign the Ulster covenant – a petition to oppose Home Rule, which contained almost half-a-million signatures.
At the height of the Troubles in 1977, another lock-out would bring more change to Northern Ireland.
Punk band The Clash were due to play, but when insurance was cancelled for the gig, hundreds of disappointed fans were left outside the Ulster Hall with nothing to do and nowhere to go. They were soon met by riot police and violence erupted.
Terri Hooley, whose Good Vibrations record label galvanised the Northern Irish punk music scene and would later launch local band The Undertones to a worldwide audience said it may have been “the only riot of the Troubles where Catholics and Protestants were fighting on the same side”.
“This was a time when the IRA were blowing the city apart and loyalist gangs were killing Catholics – punk was a very united force against that – to be a punk was to be different from the past. The kids were fed up with the Troubles for the first time and the Ulster Hall would have played a big part in that,” said Terri.
Winston Churchill and The Clash were both locked out of the Ulster Hall Winston Churchill and The Clash were both locked out of the Ulster Hall
Many believe that what became known as the Battle of Bedford Street kickstarted the punk movement in Belfast.
Led Zeppelin debuted Stairway to Heaven at the Ulster Hall. Although the nonplussed audience were presumably unaware of the moment of history they were watching. John Paul Jones, the band’s bassist, recalled that the crowd were “all bored to tears waiting to hear something they knew”.
The Rolling Stones only managed to play around 13 minutes of their set before hysterical fans broke up the show. The hall was so packed that fainting girls had to be passed overhead and onto the stage, before being removed from the hall – some of them strapped to stretchers to contain their excitement.
A changing world
On Easter Tuesday 1941, Irish singer Delia Murphy was performing in the Grand Dame when Belfast was blitzed by German bombs.
As the city turned to an apocalyptic scene outside, Murphy played on, entertaining the crowd who could do nothing but wait to see what morning would bring. Around 900 people were killed that night, and more than half of the homes in Belfast were destroyed.
During World War II, Belfast was the first port for American soldiers before the battlefields of Europe. The Grand Dame was an important centre for entertaining the troops.
They jitterbugged the nights away with such enthusiasm, that on one occasion the floor gave way. So important was that dance floor to the morale of the troops the American Embassy paid for a new solid oak replacement.
Rinty Monaghan and Barry McGuigan Rinty Monaghan and Barry McGuigan both won titles at the Ulster Hall
Unfortunately, the American floor was not quite strong enough to match the dancing force of the fans that flocked to support Dexy’s Midnight Runners in 1980.
The floor again collapsed as the crowd danced to Come on Eileen, but they simply moved to the back of the hall and kept the show going.
The Ulster Hall hosted many high profile boxing bouts including Rinty Monaghan winning his Ulster title there – he would later become flyweight champion of the world.
The promoter of many of his fights in the hall was Clara “Ma” Copely.
This 22 stone woman from a circus family was awarded a silver fruit bowl by the patrons of the Ulster Hall “for services rendered to the sport of boxing.”
Rinty Monaghan paved the way for another slight but powerful boxer: Barry McGuigan, who won his first Ulster, British and European titles in the Ulster Hall in 1983 and 1984.
The Grand Dame of Bedford Street has stood for 150 years, and watched the changes in Ireland, Britain and the world.
Just like its founders said “it will stand without a compeer, at least till the generations now living will all have passed away. This building has been well named The Ulster Hall.”
The Ulster Hall: A select chronology.
Led Zeppelin debuted Stairway to Heaven at the Ulster Hall
• Built in 1862 – making it older than the Royal Albert Hall, London
• Dickens read there in 1867 and 1869.
• 1874 – John Tyndall’s ‘Belfast Address’
• 1886 – Randolph Churchill’s speech against Home Rule
• 1909 – James Joyce tries to buy the Ulster Hall for use as a cinema
• February 1912 – Winston Churchill is locked out by unionists
• September 1912 – ‘Ulster Day’ rally is held in the hall before Unionists marched to City Hall to sign the Ulster covenant
• 1936 – Paul Robeson, singer of ‘Ol Man River’ performed, the son of an American slave, turned civil rights activist said at his concert “I’ve been made to feel you people understand me, the warmth of your welcome has gone to my heart”.
• 1942 – The dance floor gives way during the war
• 1964 – The Rolling Stones played, but it was too much for many young girls who fainted during the concert
• March 1971 – Led Zeppelin played Stairway To Heaven for the first time
• 1977 – The Clash gig was cancelled, kick starting Belfast’s ‘Punk era’
• July 1980 – Dexy’s Midnight Runners fans broke the solid oak dance floor, bought by the American embassy during the war
• 2000 – The Dali Lama gave a guest lecture for Amnesty International
Buses drive into Belfast to allow tourists to gape at the massive walls and sites of bombings. This is simply exploitation
Chris Jenkins
Guardian – Comment is free
7 May 2012
Peter Robinson, Northern Ireland’s first minister, described the redevelopment of the Maze prison site (pictured here in 1979) as a ‘mecca for tourists’. (Photograph: PA)
Visit Northern Ireland. Come to Belfast and see our magnificent city – rejuvenated, regenerated and re-energised. Take a walk through the streets in the shadows of the division walls. Why not stop to get your photo taken beside a mural of men in balaclavas? If you really want, why not write a message of hope and peace on one of our walls, a truly symbolic sign of human solidarity?
It is surprising that given the lack of humility in Northern Ireland’s exploitation of conflict, that an advertising campaign using the language above has not been launched yet. Tourism in Northern Ireland has rocketed within the last decade. The continued perception of increased stability and relative peace has attracted people from all over the world to see the many things that Northern Ireland should and does advertise to the world – the Giant’s Causeway, the Antrim glens, the Fermanagh lakes.
However, there is something deeply immoral about the rapidly expanding “conflict tourism” sector. Buses drive into the heart of inner city Belfast to allow tourists to gape at the massive walls dividing Belfast’s communities – murals depicting violence. Tourists take photos of the division lines that are not consigned to history, but are a part of living Belfast: children play football against the walls that tourists flock to. The places and the people themselves have become a spectacle, an attraction.
If this were history perhaps it would be more acceptable – but it’s not. These lines are still a very real part of everyday life for communities in Northern Ireland. Our politicians may say otherwise – that we are now at peace, and that nothing will destabilise our progress – but divisions aren’t removed.
As a country, we have come to realise the financial gains that can be made by marketing our conflict while also exaggerating the “stability” of Northern Ireland; painting a picture of those who dissent as being in a vast minority with no support whatsoever. The reality is manipulated, history exploited.
An example is the 1993 Shankill bomb that killed 10 people. Touring companies make money from that tragedy; tourists stand at the site of the bomb and take photos. The residents of the Shankill Road carry on, the money doesn’t filter down. The process passes them by.
Just last week Peter Robinson, Northern Ireland’s first minister, described the redevelopment of the Maze prison site (infamous for housing political prisoners during the Troubles) as being a “mecca for tourists“. The Maze/Long Kesh site needs a role within our remembrance process, but not a commercial role. The proposed “conflict resolution centre” for the site (at a cost of £20m) is not just another example of politicians U-turning all over the place, but also of the entire trend of ethics being sidelined for supposed financial gain.
I am not against tourism – quite the opposite in fact. But it seems to me that aspects of the current rebranding of Belfast are not only highly immoral, but also detract from the reality and the severity of our history. We need remembrance and we need reflection – such things will aid our reconciliation as a society. But we don’t need the exploitation of our conflict.
By Steven McCaffery
Belfast Telegraph
Saturday, 28 April 2012
Police have discovered two bombs following separate security alerts in Belfast and Newry.
The explosives were described as “viable devices” and were found in Belfast and near the Irish border.
Police said the dissident republicans suspected of being behind at least one of the bombs had shown a “callous disregard” for the public.
This comes after police investigating the activity of dissidents opposed to the peace process found guns and ammunition in a separate search operation in Belfast yesterday.
The first bomb alert began in the Fathom Line area of the border town of Newry after an abandoned car was found on Thursday evening.
Police confirmed overnight that a “viable explosive device” was found in the vehicle.
It was made safe by army bomb experts.
Police also said a viable device was found under a parked car in the Ballygomartin Road area of north Belfast.
Chief Inspector Ian Campbell said several homes had to be evacuated while the security operation was carried out late last night.
He said: “Those responsible for this have shown callous disregard for members of the public.
“The operation resulted in the evacuation of up to 80 people, including families with young children and elderly residents, for several hours.”
He added: “The finger of suspicion points towards dissident republican terrorists and I appeal to anyone with information to come forward to police.”
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of last night’s weapons find, Chief Superintendent George Clarke, District Commander for North and West Belfast, said the police had succeeded in combating activity by the dissident groups.
“The actions of police have undoubtedly thwarted the attempts of criminals to inflict death, injury and misery on the community of north Belfast,” he said.
“Police are determined to protect communities from these threats.”
Police said a number of weapons had been seized, but no further details were available on the arms find.
Mr Clarke appealed for the public’s continuing assistance in combating dissident activities.
Belfast Telegraph
23 Apr 2012
The new MAC building in St Anne’s Square in Belfast opens its doors to the public. The art and theatre space is free entry and has a number of exhibitions and theatres
Artists, architects, couples and curious sightseers milled through the MAC’s doors yesterday, as Belfast’s new Metropolitan Arts Centre opened its doors to the public.
Ten years in the making, the MAC and newly opened Titanic Belfast building could generate up to £50m in extra revenue, attracting an additional 800,000 visitors to the city, according to current predictions.
Tucked away discreetly in the centre of Belfast’s cobbled Cathedral Quarter — and adjacent to St Anne’s Cathedral — the building looks deceptively small from the outside.
Visitors who walked through its doors yesterday said they were struck with the feeling of being outside as they stared up through the building’s sunlit central atrium.
A total of 400 copper strands cast in the colours of the rainbow cascade down the central staircase — intensifying the feeling of being outside.
Constructed from Belfast brick and basalt from Antrim, the MAC is rooted in the city.
It has also opened with a new exhibition of Belfast’s William Conor.
Belfast-born Conor — whose work hangs alongside paintings by the world-renowned LS Lowry — was commissioned by the Government during World War I to produce official records of soldiers and munitions workers.
In another gallery, celebrated Chicago-born artist Robert Therrien displays a series of his works, including his renowned Table and Four Chairs — an Alice and Wonderland-esque take on a household table and four chairs.
Meanwhile, in the Sunken Gallery, second-hand tables have been stacked haphazardly in an exhibit by Dublin-based artist, Maria McKinney.
The £18m six-floor building houses two theatres, three art galleries, a dance studio, cafe and bar.
At its gala opening this week, Social Development Minister Nelson McCausland predicted the MAC would be a “jewel” in the Cathedral Quarter.
He said: “The MAC is a hallmark example of a successful regeneration project.”
Roisin McDonough, chief executive of the Arts Council, said the breadth of work on display was exciting in itself.
“Conor, Lowry and Therrien will certainly be popular, but the real surprises will come when the visitors see the inspiring new work by our local artists.”
Anne McReynolds, MAC chief executive, said the facility is the product of a vast amount of work.
RTÉ
15 April 2012
A minute’s silence was observed after wreaths were laid at the memorial
A new memorial garden was opened alongside Belfast City Hall this morning to mark the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic.
More than 1,500 passengers, crew and musicians died when the liner struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic on 15 April 1912.
A feature of the garden is a series of plaques listing the names of the 1,512 people who lost their lives when the vessel sank en route to New York.
A minute’s silence was also held after the memorial garden was opened.
The boat was built in Belfast and relatives of workmen who made and work on the vessel were present for today’s ceremony.
Dr Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck in 1985, was in Belfast for today’s ceremony and delivered a memorial lecture yesterday.
He spoke about the next 100 years, of preserving the wreck and making it available to all via communications technology, beaming live images from the depths.
This afternoon the Taoiseach officially opened the Titanic Memorial Park in the village of Lahardane in Co Mayo.
14 people left the parish of Addergoole to board the Titanic for America; 11 died while three women survived. Some of their descendants have returned from America for the commemoration.
Local people fundraised to build a memorial park, which includes life-size bronze sculptures of Titanic passengers and the bow of the ship.
A hearth has also been built with stones collected from the cottages of the Addergoole 14.
This weekend villagers unveiled an 80ft replica of the Titanic on the water beside Addergoole Cemetary. It was built in secret over four months by local men.
This morning at 2.20am – the precise time of the sinking of the ship – the lights on the model ship were extinguished as the bell tolled in the church at Lahardane.
Elsewhere, a wreath-laying ceremony took place this morning aboard the Le Eithne at the Titanic’s last anchorage in Cork harbour.
There have been other ceremonies across the world to recognise the ship’s sinking.
Out in the Atlantic, a cruise ship tracing the liner’s route across the ocean paused at a point over the wreck.
A memorial service was held on the MS Balmoral and wreaths were thrown into the sea.
In the Canadian city of Halifax, where 150 victims of the disaster are buried, church bells rang out to mark the anniversary and there was a candle-lit procession.
Meanwhile in Lichfield in England, more than 1,500 candles were laid at the statue of Edward Smith, the Titanic’s captain.
News Letter
13 April 2012
THE area where the Titanic was built by Belfast’s working men a century ago is in danger of becoming “a foreign country” to many of their descendants, a former Presbyterian moderator has warned.
The Rev Dr Norman Hamilton said that an area which has long been associated with the working man in Belfast could become somewhere only accessible to tourists and the well-off.
Writing in today’s News Letter, the north Belfast minister says that Belfast’s new Titanic Quarter – with its expensive apartments, multi-national bank headquarters, gleaming visitor centre and film studio – is in danger of economically excluding many in Belfast.
Dr Hamilton stressed he wants the vast Titanic Quarter regeneration project to be successful but said that the £7 billion project could do more to welcome those at the margins of society.
“I had the privilege of standing on the fifth floor (the conference level) of the new Titanic building a few days ago and looked out across the Lough to north Belfast and my part of town,” he said.
“I couldn’t help but think that it was a very far distance for so many of my neighbours to travel if they too were to be able to stand where I was at that exact moment.
“The Titanic Quarter is no longer the natural habitat of those whose grandparents helped to build the Titanic.”
He said that Belfast Metropolitan College’s Titanic Quarter campus provided some hope that those educated there may find employment in that part of the city.
But he added: “Yet my angst has not diminished that this wonderful Titanic building and the long-term vision that has made it happen may not be fully owned by a younger generation who face long-term unemployment, and that they will see it as being in another country populated by tourists, visitors from cruise ships and conference delegates.”
The Presbyterian minister said he was concerned that almost everything in the area was commercial in nature.
Titanic Belfast chief executive Tim Husbands said in a statement: “Titanic Belfast is a massive opportunity for Northern Ireland to put itself on the international tourist map, but it’s also very much a project for the people of Belfast.
“We’ve worked hard with Belfast City Council and the Titanic Foundation to engage with schools and local communities across the city and that will be an ongoing process.
“In comparison to other attractions of this standard, Titanic Belfast is competitively priced and there is already free access to Titanic’s slipways and Titanic Belfast’s plaza.
“Public realm areas are integral to the wider Titanic Quarter development and the objective is to ‘build communities where once we built ships’.
“The aim is to develop these spaces into a new urban park which is as much part of the fabric of Belfast as City Hall is.”
By Conor Humphries
Reuters
13 Apr 2012
(BELFAST – Reuters) – For much of the century since the Titanic sank, the story of the doomed liner has been a taboo subject in Belfast, an unwelcome reminder of industrial failure and bitter sectarian division in the city that built her.
Now Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, buoyed by 14 years of peace, aims to salvage the liner as a symbol of one-time industrial might, hoping the Hollywood glamour around its story can create an icon for a new, united city.
Cast as a monument to the 1998 deal that ended three decades of violence, a 97-million pound Titanic museum was opened by Catholic and Protestant leaders last month to mark the centenary of the ship’s launch and fateful first voyage.
The museum’s 38-meter-tall glass-and-aluminium facade redraws a skyline long dominated by the yellow cranes of Harland and Wolff, the Protestant-dominated shipyard that built the Titanic and the scene of some of the worst sectarian rioting before 1920 partition and beyond.
“For too long, perhaps more than anything because of a sense of profound sorrow, the Titanic has never been truly remembered at home, but all that has now changed,” said Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness.
“These buildings… are being used to write a new history, to write a better history,” he said.
McGuinness himself, long despised by Protestant shipyard workers for his role as a commander in the Irish Republican Army paramilitary group in the 1970s, recently discovered that one of his relatives had helped build the Titanic.
TURBULENT HISTORY
The period around the launching of the ship was one of the most turbulent in Irish history as Protestant industrialists led a campaign to prevent the government of Ireland being moved from London to Dublin.
The struggle led to sectarian bloodshed in Belfast and a civil war in the south and helped pave the way for the carving out of a Protestant-majority northeast, which remained part of Britain, a decade later.
Hundreds of Catholics were expelled from the yards during sectarian riots in the months that followed Titanic’s launch.
For Protestants the liner, the largest floating vessel at the time, was supposed to symbolise Northern Ireland’s industrial prowess.
But instead of a triumphant arrival in New York, the news that came was of catastrophic failure as the ship sank on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912, with a fraction of the lifeboats required, killing 1,500 of the 2,200 people on board.
The sinking dealt a huge blow to the prestige of the shipyard and the North’s industrial legacy. Fearing what the bad publicity could mean for the province and the shipyard, generations swept the story under the carpet.
TITANIC TABOO
“There was such a shock that everyone just clammed up about it,” said Susie Millar, the great granddaughter of a Harland and Wolff engineer killed when the liner sank.
“When I was at school it was never mentioned. It was ‘don’t mention the ‘T’-word’. It was taboo.”
The shipyard declined rapidly in the 1980s and 90s as British heavy industry lost out to lower cost competition from Asia – its workforce is just hundreds today from 30,000 at its peak – and memories of the ship’s sinking stayed deep.
The success of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster film and the security promised by the 1998 peace deal raised the possibility of a lucrative tourist industry and kindled the overwhelming desire by most in the province to return to normality.
“Northern Ireland desperately needs to make cash. I think that supersedes any idea that it was a Protestant project, a Protestant ship,” said Millar, who has built a business around the Titanic, offering customised tours.
The shipyard, which has given up shipbuilding for servicing ships and marine infrastructure, is steering clear of the fireworks, concerts and banquets marking the anniversary; its only involvement is sponsoring the composing of a requiem mass.
But books and films testify to the ship’s use of state-of-the-art technologies and highlight the hundreds of other successful ships built at the yard. The city steadfastly maintains the ship’s design was not at fault in its sinking.
“She was fine when she left here,” is the slogan emblazoned across t-shirts and mugs on sale across the city.
“Any other vessel afloat would have went down in a much shorter time” on hitting an iceberg, said David McVeigh, a spokesman for Harland and Wolff. “It was built as well as man knew how at that time.”
ANY OPPOSITION MUTED
When Derry was named 2013 British city of culture in 2010, Irish nationalists opposed to Northern Ireland’s position in Britain responded with several bomb attacks.
By contrast, any opposition to the Titanic project has been muted. But that does not mean the revival is universally loved in Belfast.
“It’s an attempt to airbrush history,” said Brian Feeney, a columnist with the Irish News, newspaper of the city’s Catholic Irish nationalist minority.
“Nationalist Belfast has no connection with the Titanic.”
In the 1960s, only 400 of Harland and Wolff’s 10,000 workers were Catholic and Protestant shipyard workers were a mainstay of mass rallies that helped to raise tensions in the city.
More than of 3,600 people were killed in the next 30 years of violence between Catholic Irish nationalists, who wanted a united Ireland, and predominantly Protestant Loyalists who wanted the province to remain British.
“Most people have just kept quiet because they are aware of the attempt to create a new Belfast, attract visitors, tourists and all the rest of it,” Feeney said.
In recent years the government has taken to using the Titanic as a glamorous and relatively neutral topic to build bridges in divided communities.
On the Lower Newtownards Road, the working class streets of dockland workers which became a centre of violence, murals of paramilitaries have been replaced in government-sponsored schemes with images glorifying Titanic and its designers.
In a church where hundreds in 1912 pledged to fight the “calamity” of rule from Dublin, Catholic children were recently invited to paint posters of the Titanic’s builders.
“This would not have been possible even 10 years ago,” said Dan Gordon, a writer from the area who has written plays about the Titanic and the shipyard that chart the hardships suffered by Protestant workers and explore its legacy on the city.
“What has made Titanic acceptable is time… it’s about time healing,” he said. “That is what is happening with the so-called Troubles.”
• Additional reporting by Matt Cowan; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall
Clonard Church, where Fr Alec Reid hosted Hume and Adams, has been restored
GERRY MORIARTY
Irish Times
6 April 2012
Clonard Church in Belfast, which was first opened in 1911, has been restored at a cost of about €3.6 million.
AFTER 100 years, Clonard Church, in the heart of west Belfast, has had a big makeover. The Redemptorist church – where the peace process had its roots, where women and children from the Shankill and Falls roads sought sanctuary in its crypt during the Belfast Blitz, and where every year thousands flock to the annual Clonard Novena – is now transformed, all fresh and gleaming after a badly needed refurbishment.
On the outside the granite and sandstone are clean and sharp, the stones pointed, the downpipes freshly painted. Inside, looking from the back of the church up the central aisle to the altar and all around, there is a sense of bright renewal, the roof restored, the mosaics shining.
It took six years to get the church back into shape. “We weren’t too far away from being closed. The roof was leaking, the rain was coming in, the brickwork was crumbling,” says Fr Michael Murtagh, a native of Newtowncashel in Co Longford.
Since he came to Belfast as rector in 2008, much of his time has been dedicated to seeing the restoration completed. The church was closed for the past year as the final parts of the work were carried out.
A century ago the original plan was to have a bigger church, but the local bishop, under pressure from some rather jealous Belfast priests who had concerns about the creation of a Redemptorist “cathedral” or “basilica”, decided its size must be restricted.
There were other problems too. The McNaughton Brothers of Randalstown, Co Antrim were contracted to build the church at a cost of £20,600, but they had difficulty getting supplies of granite blocks and pillars, while stone from Mountcharles in Co Donegal proved hard to cut. Costs spiralled, and in the end the construction company went bust.
Eventually the building was completed at a final cost of £32,000. For the formal opening in October 1911, there were entrance charges of five shillings and a half-crown – two shillings and six pennies (almost £20 and £10 in today’s money). This caused resentment, as it excluded many local people. There were many empty seats.
Fast forward 100 years and a wonderful restoration of the church has been completed at a cost of £3 million (€3.6 million) – almost 100 times the original cost of building the church. When the church was formally declared open at a special Mass celebrated by the Bishop of Down and Connor, Dr Noel Treanor, on Sunday, March 25th, there was no admission charge and the church was overflowing. Local people contributed hugely by supporting fundraising efforts, such as buying 25,000 new tiles for the church at a cost of £5 per tile.
Clonard has been part of the community through hard times and good times. It has seen two World Wars in which many people from the city fought and died. In 1941, during the German bombing of Belfast, women and children from the Protestant Shankill and the Catholic Falls used its crypt as a shelter.
It also witnessed the troubles of the 1920s and the longer conflict stretching from 1969. In July 1920, a Redemptorist member, Br Michael Morgan, aged 28, was shot dead by a British soldier when looking out from an upper-storey window of the monastery adjoining the church. The church is also just beside Bombay Street, in which Catholics were burned out of their homes in August 1969. Many of the church’s parishioners ended up interned, or in the IRA, or killed or badly injured in the fighting.
Clonard also played a significant part in the peace process. It was there that local priest Fr Alec Reid hosted the Hume-Adams talks which, though at first faltering, carried through successfully to the first IRA ceasefire of 1994 and to the process that led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
There’s a great quote from the chronicle kept by the community of priests. Under the date of January 11th, 1988, is written: “John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, and Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Féin, are having secret talks in Clonard. Fr A Reid seems to have brought them together.” The “seems” is typical of Fr Reid, because such were his clandestine ways that his colleagues under the same roof were in the dark. Journalists at the time found him equally unforthcoming.
Fr Murtagh is delighted that the 14 or so active priests at Clonard are able to hold Easter services in the church and that the famous Clonard Novena in June will be back in the building. During the novena, 10 Masses are celebrated each day over nine days, and some 12,000-15,000 people attend each day.
“It’s nice to be back,” he says. He feels the work just completed is about more than physical renewal.
“When you think of what we washed off the walls here, the 100 years of candle grease, the candles of pain, the tragedy that came here, the grinding poverty when this place was born – and of how people survived all that; when you think of that sense of a common bond of solidarity and of people struggling together; when you think of the people, their resilience and how they have come through so much, that’s what gives me hope.”
BBC
31 Mar 2012
The new Titanic Belfast tourism project has opened to the public.
It was officially opened in a ribbon-cutting ceremony by the first and deputy first ministers.
Also attending is a 105-year-old Cyril Quigley who saw the Titanic being launched as a young child in 1911.
A limited number of on-the-day tickets are being sold and a queue of several dozen people waited for the opportunity to purchase. Most tickets have been sold online in advance.
Performing the ribbon-cutting, First Minister Peter Robinson said the complex was “a must-see attraction up with the best in the world” and was a symbol of a new era in Northern Ireland.
About 60 journalists from around the world attended the opening.
The complex cost £77m to construct – with most of the funding (£60m) coming from the public purse.
Based on projected visitor numbers, it is one of the most expensive buildings of its kind in Europe.
Visitors will be guided through nine exhibitions, spread over four storeys, charting the history of the Titanic from its construction in the nearby Harland & Wolff shipyard to its final resting place at the bottom of the Atlantic.
One thing tourists will not see though is the replica of the ship’s famous staircase. It has been incorporated into the banqueting hall on the upper floors and is not part of the tour.
It will only be on view to the more business-type guests who will attend sit-down functions on the two upper decks.
Entrance fees are £13.50 for an adult and £6.75 for a child. A family of four gets in for £34 and a family of five will pay £40.75. Parking is extra.
World leader
On Friday, First Minister Peter Robinson said the building was a celebration of the workmanship that led to Belfast being a world leader in shipbuilding.
The splendour of a first class cabin recreated The splendour of a first class cabin is recreated in the complex
Mr Robinson was asked on BBC Radio Ulster’s Evening Extra programme about the significance of Martin McGuinness standing beside him in shipyard surroundings that many Catholics previously regarded as hostile.
“I think it further demonstrates that we are indeed in a new era,” he said.
“There’s a new spirit in Northern Ireland, there’s a strong confidence for the people of Northern Ireland that they can move forward, that they can work towards prosperity.
“So I think it’s a sign of the times that people in Northern Ireland have now left the Troubles behind and they are wanting to see a bright future.”
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said: “It’s an absolutely stunning building and as I predicted in the United States last week, this would be a world news story and it certainly has been in the course of the last couple of days.
“At the time when we were taking our decision at the executive to pour something like £40m into this, some questions were asked, because of the history of it, if we should be doing this.
“I have to say I was always very much in favour of this, because this is our attempt to write a new history, to move forward in a positive and constructive way, a very inclusive way.”
Mr McGuinness said he had a “great stake” in the weekend’s events because his father’s uncle, Hugh Rooney, worked in the shipyard as a carpenter-joiner and helped with fitting out the Titanic in 1911.
“I’m very proud of that and I’m very proud of our family’s association with that event at that time,” he said.
:::u.tv:::
9 Feb 2012
**Video onsite
A former boxer who worked in the docks in Belfast during the 1950s has won a High Court battle against his former employers, which proved the impact of asbestos.
Arthur Rafferty was one of thousands of men taking bags of the deadly material off ships and onto the shore.
“No-one ever told us about the dangers of this, we never got as much as a paper mask,” he told UTV.
“It was a dangerous job, we reported that to our union a couple of times about the dangers of it and the dust, but our union did absolutely nothing about it.”
At Belfast’s Mater Hospital in 2002, Mr Rafferty was diagnosed with asbestosis, a lung disease which can result in cancer. His doctor told him there was nothing that could be done.
“That in itself knocked me out because I was a professional boxer,” he explained, “I never drank, I never smoked, I always kept myself fit.”
Following the diagnosis, Mr Rafferty decided to sue his former employers. However, five years later, doctors told Mr Rafferty that he did not have asbestosis, but would one day develop the disease.
A judge then explained to him that a compensation case against his employers could not be pursued.
As he had been treated for asbestosis for five years, Mr Rafferty decided to visit a specialist in Liverppol to seek a second opinion on his medical situation.
“He point blankly said yes you do have asbestosis and you do have bronchitis.
“Yet these radiologists here in Belfast, three of them one from the Mater, one from the City and one from the Royal, couldn’t find anything,” said Mr Rafferty.
The final diagnosis meant Mr Rafferty could once again begin his legal fight. On Thursday he received an undisclosed sum of money from his former employers, on winning his case.
“Even two barristers in the court that had been following my case and I don’t know them from Adam, they came up to me and shook my hand. He said that was a David and a Goliath,” Mr Rafferty explained.
But the legal action is not over yet, as Mr Rafferty plans to take a case against doctors in the Belfast Trust whom he alleges are responsible for his misdiagnoses.
By Maurice Hayes
Irish Independent
Tuesday January 24 2012
Cupar Way peace wall – Photo from Boston.com
ROBERT Frost, in his folksy way, wondered whether there was “something” out there that did not like a wall. In Belfast they love their walls, especially peace walls, to the extent, it seems of wanting them kept up forever.
Many outsiders may be surprised at the news that the International Fund for Ireland, which has such a distinguished track record in supporting imaginative strategic initiatives which will help heal the scars of conflict, should have committed £2m (€2.4m) to projects designed to lead to the removal of peace walls in Belfast.
That such an enterprise is necessary a decade and a half after the Good Friday Agreement will be disappointing to those eternal optimists who thought that peace should have broken out when the governments had ordained it to be so.
Others will be disappointed to learn that, far from crumbling or being demolished, such walls have trebled in number in the interval, and now extend to a cumulative 21 miles in Belfast alone.
Before rushing to judgment, we might ask how far this is different from the gated communities and estates which increasingly mark the more affluent areas of cities and towns. Walls built by the rich are an advertisement of power and possessions, those required to assuage the fears in poorer areas, a symbol of impotence and insecurity. Both are indications of a dysfunctional society.
In both cases, the need for a wall is based on fear and mistrust.
Called into use in the 1970s in order to protect communities from sectarian attack from the travelling gunman or invading mobs of recreational rioters, the walls have themselves become a barrier to peace-making in the wider sense, by literally cementing difference and division in a society that is trying desperately to get its act together. They inhibit movements across streets to shops and community facilities and even playgrounds, the sort of everyday activity which helps to integrate a society.
In particular, they produce, on the one hand, a siege mentality; on the other, the wall and the community behind it become the targets, something to be attacked simply for being there.
Perhaps too often peace walls were built as a political sop, as a quick-fix solution to a local problem without identifying the underlying problem, a classic case of treating the symptoms while leaving the underlying virus of sectarianism to develop its own immunity.
Some of these walls mark sites of sectarian strife which have been running sores since the early 19th century. Others resulted from population movement during the Troubles which hardened boundaries. However, once built, they became part of the furniture.
Ironically, the first peace wall in Belfast (which still exists) is a nine-foot high brick construction, sunk underground in the city cemetery at the behest of a Catholic bishop in Victorian times, presumably to ensure that the resurrection of members of his flock on the last day would not be impeded by Protestant fellow travellers or the sins of unbelievers.
It is characteristic of the more strategic approach of the International Fund that the immediate object of the current initiative is not so much the removal of brick and concrete as of barriers in people’s minds.
They are funding, not bulldozers and wrecking balls but the slow, painstaking task of building networks of trusting and trustworthy individuals, and mutual confidence in separated communities that their security is better ensured by good neighbours than by the stronger and higher walls.
It is a serious reflection on political leadership that the Office of First and Deputy First Minster has been unable, yet, to publish an agreed community relations strategy which would support the valuable, if necessarily unheralded work being done on the ground by dedicated community workers and activists on both sides.
In the meantime, local initiatives need to be supported. Providentially, cutbacks in public services could promote sharing of community facilities on a cross-community basis, and the end of expensive duplication.
Falling numbers in inner city schools and threats of closures present an opportunity to educate young people together, or at least to reduce segregation.
Unless, of course, another bishop wants to build another wall.
- Maurice Hayes
A ‘peace gate’ has been opened in the barrier that divides Belfast’s Alexandra Park, allowing Catholics and Protestants to mix – during the day at least. But a walk to survey the city’s 99 peace walls offers vivid evidence of communities riven by hatred
Sean O’Hagan
The Observer
21 Jan 2012
The Cupar Way ‘peace wall’, which divides the Protestant Shankill Road from the Catholic Falls Road. (Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer)
Alexandra Park in north Belfast is a gently sloping expanse of green that looks, at first glance, like any other small, well-tended public park in any other British city. It has winding paths, tall trees, a pond and, down towards its lower end, a pleasantly leafy area that could easily be turned into a nature walk for local children. To reach it, though, you have to pass though a newly created gate in a 3m-high, reinforced corrugated steel fence that bisects the park.
On a overcast afternoon last November, the park is all but deserted save for myself, Antonio Olmos, the Observer photographer, and a solitary figure with a large dog we glimpse though the open gate. Then, as if on cue, a council van arrives and two workers jump out. It is 3pm and they are here to close the gate in the fence. As they do so, Alexandra Park once again becomes two separate parks: one Catholic, the other Protestant.
The “peace gate” in Alexandra Park was officially opened amid much media attention on 16 September last year. Attended by politicians, residents and children from two local schools, one Protestant, the other Roman Catholic, the ceremony was weighted with symbolism and there was much talk of “a new beginning”.
To an outsider, though, unused to north Belfast’s tribally defined geography and deeply ingrained religious identities, the sight of the high steel fence running the breadth of the park, with or without the open gate, is heart-sinking. When I mention this to local parks’ manager, Liam McKinley, he seems slightly affronted. “The gate is a big step forward, a real positive development,” he insists, adding that, since the gate has been open, there have been no sectarian clashes in the park.
Liam puts me in touch with a local Sinn Féin councillor, Conor Maskey. “For a long time, the fence did its job,” he tells me, “but lately there was a growing sense that the reasons for it being there had, if not disappeared, at least abated. Community workers from both sides canvassed opinion door to door around here and found that 99% of people were in favour of the gate being opened. Basically, they wanted their park back.”
In the context of the patchwork quilt of conflicting loyalties that is north Belfast, the opening of the Alexandra Park peace gate was progress. “No matter where you go around here, you eventually come to a dividing line between the two communities,” says Kate Clarke, a community worker from a nearby nationalist neighbourhood, who works for the North Belfast Interface Network to improve relationships between the two sides. “A lot of the interfaces don’t have physical barriers, but there is an invisible dividing line that local people are aware of, because, historically, they were, and to a degree, still are, threatening and unsafe places.”
A park employee closing the peace wall at 3pm in Belfast. (Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer)
Alexandra Park was divided by a “peace wall” on 1 September 1994, the day after the IRA declared its historic ceasefire. Throughout the Troubles, it had been a flashpoint for sectarian conflict, a fiercely contested space where regular pitched battles broke out between loyalists and nationalists. “There was hand-to-hand fighting down there,” says Sam Cochrane, an ex-political prisoner turned community activist from nearby Tiger’s Bay, a fiercely loyalist neighbourhood. “Several young lads were carted off to hospital with serious head injuries from slates. Sometimes there was shooting.”
The barrier, which grew over the years from a high fence to a solid steel structure, stopped the violence and made the people who lived in the houses around the park, and whose homes were often attacked, feel a whole lot safer. Like the majority of the peace walls in Belfast, it was erected at the request of locals.
According to a report published by the Belfast Interface Project, there are now 99 interfaces – or peace walls – in Belfast. Some walls date from the early years of the Troubles, when sectarian tit-for-tat killings and violence were a regular occurrence on the strife-torn streets of Belfast. An estimated one-third, though, have gone up since the IRA and Protestant paramilitary ceasefire in 1994. Many existing walls have been made longer and higher in recent years. Last week, too, the International Fund for Ireland, an independent organisation promoting reconciliation in Northern Ireland, announced that it will fund a £2m project aimed at bringing down the Belfast peace walls “by building confidence between the communities”. Given the slow pace of political change in Northern Ireland, that may take some time. Read the rest of this entry »
Antonio Olmos photographs the walls built across Northern Ireland’s capital city as a means of defusing sectarian tension. There are 99 of them, dividing nationalist Catholic neighbourhoods from loyalist Protestant ones. Some of the walls date from the early years of the Troubles, but an estimated one-third have gone up since the IRA ceasefire in 1994. Now, ‘peace gates’ are being opened in some walls in an attempt to foster greater links between communities
**Please click on the Observer link to start the gallery of 15 images.
Antonio Olmos
The Observer
21 Jan 2012
By Gráinne Brinkley
Andersonstown News
3 Jan 2012
**Via Newshound
Filming on Divis Tower
A NEW documentary film featuring a popular community worker and McGurk’s Bar campaigner has been named as ‘Best Debut’ at the Netherlands Film Festival.
‘When the War Ends’ which features Robert McClenaghan is directed by Dutch filmmaker Thijs Schreuder and was shot in and around west Belfast in the run-up to Christmas last year.
It examines how local people have coped with the legacy of the Troubles after the conflict ended. The film was given an exclusive screening in the Felons club recently to a rapturous response and will be shown as part of next year’s Belfast Film Festival.
Speaking to the Belfast Media Group Thijs said he initially came to Belfast to film a different type of documentary.
“I wanted to do something on how the borders of Europe were disappearing yet new borders were appearing within countries,” said Thijs.
“I arrived in Belfast and spoke to Coiste na nIarchimi [the ex-republican prisoners support group] and EPIC [Ex-Prisoners Interpretative Centre for loyalist prisoners]. I was struck by their stories and so my plans changed. In Holland the war in Northern Ireland is seen as over, but from doing this film I found that people are still fighting the war in their heads. It was a subject I was interested in.”
Thijs and his crew were filming around Belfast when the area was covered in heavy snow. He chose to focus on Robert McClenaghan, whose grandfather Phillip Garry was murdered in the McGurk’s Bar bombing and who also works as a guide for Coiste’s political tours, as he felt viewers “would connect with him”.
“The story also has to be understood by an international audience not familiar with the conflict here so I knew people would connect with Robert,” said Thijs.
“He is a unique character with a unique outlook on life who has the capability to reflect on his own life. Some people are on the edge of collapse after coming through conflict while others find a way to cope, and Robert found a way to cope. It was also important that we filmed the documentary in the run-up to Christmas as it’s traditionally a time of reflection and the heavy snow adds to the overall feeling of the film.”
Thijs said the film received a very positive reaction when shown in the Felons.
“There was one scene when Robert is sitting on a chair at home reflecting on his past and this person came up to me after the screening and said, ‘I was that man sitting on that chair and I recognise that feeling. I am stuck in that chair and it’s good to see that I am not alone’.
“That’s what I wanted to achieve in this film and I am grateful to Robert for sharing his story.”
Speaking about his involvement in the film, Robert said he saw it as a opportunity “to explain to a wider audience how our politics and our community developed from the conflict”.
“They started following the tours and then they would ask the guides questions about the tour group and how it came about,” said Robert.
“Then that in turn led to questions about our own pasts as part of the republican movement and that’s how I got involved. I spoke about what happened to us as a community after the likes of the Falls curfew, internment and other incidents and how it changed people – people either buried their heads in the sand or, in our case, they stood up and fought back. My generation of people became very politicised by those incidents, incidents like losing my grandfather [Phillip Garry] in the McGurk’s Bar bombing in 1971.”
Robert said he’s pleased with how the film turned out.
“It was very intimate in terms of my family life as they ended up following me for 26 days,” he said. “I think it’s an excellent attempt to tell a complex story of 30 years of conflict through one man.”
Belfast Telegraph
Thursday, 29 December 2011
**Photos onsite
The largest collection of artefacts salvaged from the Titanic is to be put up for auction next year – the 100th anniversary of the world’s most famous shipwreck.
More than 5,500 items, including fine china, ship fittings and portions of hull that were recovered from the ocean liner, have an estimated value of £122 million and will be sold as a single lot.
The Titanic treasures were amassed during seven trips to the wreck, which rests about two-and-a-half miles below the ocean surface in the North Atlantic.
The auction is scheduled for April 1 by Guernsey’s, a New York City auction house – but the results of the auction will not be announced until April 15, the date the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg a century ago.
The auction is subject to approval by a federal judge in Virginia whose jurisdiction has given oversight to legal issues governing the salvage of the Titanic for years.
Titanic’s sinking claimed the lives of more than 1,500 of the 2,228 passengers and crew.
An international team led by oceanographer Robert Ballard located the wreckage in 1985, about 400 miles off Newfoundland, Canada.
US district judge Rebecca Beach Smith, who has overseen the case from her Norfolk courtroom in Virginia, has ruled that official salvage company RMS Titanic has title to the artefacts and is entitled to full compensation for them.
Judge Smith, a maritime jurist who has called the Titanic an “international treasure,” has approved covenants and conditions that the company previously worked out with the federal US government, including a prohibition against selling the collection piecemeal.
The conditions also require RMS to make the artefacts available “to present and future generations for public display and exhibition, historical review, scientific and scholarly research, and educational purposes”.
Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions, parent company of RMS Titanic, has been displaying the Titanic artefacts in exhibitions around the world. The items include personal belongings of passengers, such as perfume from a manufacturer who was travelling to New York to sell his samples.
Premier acknowledged any future owner of the Titanic treasures must abide by the covenants and conditions.
RMS recovered artefacts from the shipwreck in expeditions in 1987, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2004.
Last year, RMS Titanic collaborated with some of the world’s leading experts in the most technologically advanced expedition to the Titanic, undertaking the first comprehensive mapping survey of the vessel with 3D imagery from bow to stern.
Some of the never-before-seen images were shown in Judge Smith’s courtroom. The most striking images involved the 3D tour of the Titanic’s stern, which lies 2,000 feet from the bow.
A camera in a remote-controlled submersible vehicle skimmed over the stern, seemingly transporting viewers through scenes of jagged rusty iron sprouting from the deck, a length of chain, the captain’s bathtub, and wooden elements that scientists previously believed had disappeared in the harsh, deep ocean environment.
The cameras did not probe the interior of the wreck, but the expedition fully mapped the three miles by five miles wreck site, documenting the entire debris field for the first time.
The new images will ultimately be assembled for public viewing, scientists said, and to help oceanographers and archaeologists explain the ship’s violent descent to the ocean bottom. It is also intended to provide answers on the state of the wreck, which scientists say is showing increasing signs of deterioration.
Titanic film director James Cameron has also led teams to the wreck to record the bow and the stern.
The Titanic exhibit is among several operated by Premier Exhibitions, which bills itself as “a major provider of museum-quality touring exhibitions”.
Its offerings have included sports memorabilia, a travelling Star Trek homage, and Bodies, an anatomy exhibition featuring preserved human corpses.
Herald.ie
Monday December 26 2011
Experts hope that their creation of a 40-metre high piece of public art made from more than 2,000 steel tubes and more than 800 joints will inspire the next generation of engineers and help cement peace in Ireland.
Designers liken building RISE – a new sculpture erected in Belfast – to “trying something really big in Meccano”.
It is hoped that RISE, a 40-metre high piece of public art, will inspire the next generation of engineers and help cement peace in Ireland
The structure – two concentric spheres, one inside the other, which “hover” above the new Broadway interchange in Belfast – was commissioned by Belfast City Council and conceived as a “symbol of unity and welcome”.
RISE, which cost nearly £500,000, was designed and created by artist Wolfgang Buttress and specialists from London-based engineering firm Price & Myers.
Designers said it contained more than 3,000 parts, each made with “perfect accuracy using robotic fabrication machines”, and was built following the creation of a virtual computer model.
The sculpture’s structural engineer, Tim Lucas, said building RISE was like “putting together a big model kit”.
“I used to like Fishertechnik, a German version of Meccano, when I was a kid,” he said. “Designing and building structures like RISE is tremendous fun, if quite daunting on this scale. I’d like to think that RISE might inspire children putting together the latest model kits with their families over Christmas to be the next generation of engineers.
“We are able to build virtual computer models of structures like this before anything real is made. We can simulate the effects of wind and snow on the sculpture to ensure it will stand up, whatever the weather throws at it. Each of the over 3,000 parts were made with perfect accuracy using robotic fabrication machines.”
Belfast Mayor Niall O Donnghaile said: “RISE is a truly magnificent structure – a new icon and a symbol for the new Belfast. It symbolises a rising city – one looking to each new dawn with hope and confidence. It provides a stunning welcome to visitors to Belfast and will be an inspiration to all our citizens for years to come.”
The council said the project had helped sustain 140 jobs.
BBC
17 Dec 2011
**Video onsite
Residents living at an interface in north Belfast are to be asked if they want the opening times of a park gate to be extended.
The Alexandra Park fence or “peace wall” was put up in 1994 to try to stop sectarian fighting.
The gate was opened in September from 09:00 to 15:00 on weekdays.
Following a three-month period, the opening times are now going to be be reviewed with a full consultation.
It is thought to be the only park in western Europe with a three-metre high fence running through the middle.
Gerry O’Reilly is an interface worker based on the mainly nationalist Limestone Road.
“You see people exercising, coming in with children in the prams, people jogging, so it has that sense of a park again,” he said.
“It’s breaking down that whole thing of them and us.
Small steps
“What we’re looking to do is, now it’s five days a week, we’re taking it back to the community for further consultation to see if they want it extended – with the hope that we’ll be open for further days during the week.”
Sam Cochrane works at North Belfast Community Development and is a local resident in the unionist community.
He said he would be gathering the views of Protestants living in the area.
“People want access but they still want the comfort and that wee bit of security,” he said.
“Until we do the survey and ask the people who live around the area if it is time to take it down, we won’t be pushing for it to come down.
“A lot of people on the ground, the younger ones, didn’t even know there was a pond in Alexandra Park, they actually thought it was two parks.”
Mr Cochrane said there had generally been a positive response from the local community.
‘Vision’
“They do want the park opened up and they are getting the benefit of using the whole park in general,” he said.
“The wall coming down – that would be my vision, to see it coming down.”
Mr O’Reilly said they were taking small steps.
“People were bringing up the issue with us again and again about the walls and you have to ask yourself ‘why were the walls put up?’,” he said.
“For me the walls were put up for people to feel safe and secure.
“Do people now feel safe and secure? We have to go to the people to ask is that how they feel.
“If that is how they feel then we need to be dealing with the situation, then that would be progress.”
At present there are 49 “peace walls” in Belfast.
By Lesley-Anne McKeown
Belfast Telegraph
Friday, 16 December 2011
**Now, look at these beautiful signs and read the story. Can you see why ANYONE would be offended and make a big issue out of this like a spoilt child? It was DONATED ffs. How can people be so small-minded and petty — and at CHRISTMAS!
A controversial Irish language Christmas sign is now up outside Belfast City Hall.
The illumination — which reads ‘Nollaig Shona Duit’ (Merry Christmas To You) — was donated by the Culturlann centre in west Belfast and hangs alongside an English language version at the east entrance.
The issue of Christmas lights was raised during a turbulent meeting of Belfast City Council earlier this month.
Hugh Smyth of the PUP had requested that ‘Happy Christmas’ replace the ‘Be Festive’ sign at the east entrance of City Hall.
During the debate, Sinn Fein’s Jim McVeigh suggested that an Irish language sign should also be put up.
After a recorded vote, Alliance, which holds the balance of power, sided with nationalists — meaning the proposal was passed by 28 votes to 21.
The following day, all 21 unionists, who had vehemently opposed the erection of the Irish sign, walked out of another meeting to protest at what they said was a breach of an all-party agreement.
Last night Mr McVeigh said the new sign was a “small gesture” to the Gaelic-speaking community.
By Amanda Poole
Belfast Telegraph
Friday, 9 December 2011
A impressive exhibition of street art opens at the Ulster Museum in Belfast today.
The touring exhibition of urban themed pieces has been organised by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and showcases over 30 street artists including the world-famous Banksy, Miss Tic, and Jamie Hewlett.
The exhibition highlights the diversity, controversy and talent that can be found in street art.
It runs until March, and explores the way street art has moved from the painted wall to printmaking and other distinctive forms.
Kim Mawhinney, head of art at National Museums Northern Ireland, said new and regular visitors to the Ulster Museum will enjoy its latest offering.
“A lot of people have a preconceived idea about street art, which they may see as vandalism, but the art is extremely significant in the way it can be seen as social commentary, as well as influencing printmaking, mainstream graphics and advertising,” she said.
As well as contributions from artists with an international reputation, such as Shepard Fairey, whose work became synonymous with the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, four local street artists have been selected to take part in the Tags not Labels exhibition.
Kate Bellamy, head of international strategy at the Victoria & Albert Museum, said its first time working with the Ulster Museum was an “exciting opportunity” for both parties.
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