Robin Wilson (Belfast, Democratic Dialogue): First Belfast makes it into the Lonely Planet guide as a must-see destination. Now Der Spiegel reflects its best face, suggesting the Titanic Quarter regeneration project symbolises the city leaving its troubled past behind.
The trouble, however, with these touristic and journalistic impressions is that they simplify a more complex story. They mix up the civic and the political, the economic and the social.
Belfast really has changed over the last quarter of a century or so, and much for the better. In the wake of the prison hunger strikes of the early 80s, a sense emerged among Belfast's most entrepreneurial citizens that there was no point waiting for Northern Ireland's conservative political elite and its paramilitary underworld to bring the city kicking and screaming into the 20th century in time for it to close. With the car bomb banished by the 70s peace movement, new restaurants and bars proliferated as the city started to live again at night.
‘Sweet are the uses of adversity', Shakespeare had it, and that civic entrepreneurialism, perhaps best embodied in the Waterfront Hall, modelled on the Berlin Philharmonic, which opened ten years ago, gives the city its atmosphere and edge. The peace demonstrations of 1993 had been followed by paramilitary ceasefires a year later and today tourists - not just the ‘revolutionary tourists' who come to gawk at the murals celebrating violence - are arriving in unprecedented numbers.
But this is only one side of 21st-century Belfast. The Union flag still flies over City Hall, a standing affirmation of embattled unionism rather than the civic pride of the Tricolour flying from the mairie. And the other Belfast, the Belfast that can only be changed by social and political action, stubbornly remains.
West Belfast is still a byword for the statistics of impoverishment. North and west Belfast are criss-crossed by ever more ‘peace walls' entrenching communal division. Social exclusion and sectarianism make for a vicious circle repelling capital, and mobile labour goes elsewhere - to places like Titanic Quarter in the east of the city. Spiralling house prices since the IRA belatedly announced it had ended its ‘campaign' have handed a ‘peace dividend' to the middle class at the expense of a growing housing crisis for those on low incomes.
It's an appealing melodrama, and Der Spiegel captures it: former industrial district with biggest shipyard in world now to be regenerated as Belfast looks to its post-industrial future. But the Titanic was built by a Protestant aristocracy of labour - will that renascence be shared among all the citizens of the city? If not, though the horizon looks clear, Belfast's long voyage to normality could still be imperilled by hidden icebergs.
