Postcards from the Edge -The Oldie - June 2020
Mary Kenny loved her fully immersive experience in Ulster
It may be hard to believe, but the world’s leading tourist attraction is in… Belfast.
At least, that is the claim made by the impressive Titanic Quarter complex in Ulster’s city, site of the once-great dockyards of Harland and Wolff, where the Titanic was proudly built before her fatal voyage in April 1912.
I visited during the spring, and it was indeed an immersive experience, exploring every aspect of the tragic liner and those who confidently sailed in her. And there are so many souvenirs to buy in the vast Titanic gift shops! Everything from Titanic gin to Titanic crockery to Titanic T-shirts and nearly every conceivable gadget in between.
Actually, I welcome all this merchandising because it’s a sign of a positive sea-change in the afterlife of the legendary ship. For more than 90 years following the Titanic’s sinking, Belfast was ashamed of the doomed fate that befell its star liner. John Wilson Foster, Ulster’s leading academic in cultural studies, points out, in his book Titanic: Culture and Calamity, that the loss of the Titanic was, until the 1990s, almost a symbol of Northern Ireland’s failures.
The Titanic disaster coincided with the introduction of Home Rule for Ireland. Protestant Evangelists called the disaster a punishment from God, while Ulster Catholics regarded the ship as a symbol of sectarian bigotry - Harland and Wolff had an almost exclusively Protestant and Unionist workforce.
For a long time afterwards, there was an ‘embarrassed silence’ over the Titanic tragedy. Shipyards went into a sad decline. In 1912, half of the world’s ships had been built in British shipyards and Belfast was a leading light. Last summer, the shrunken giant Harland and Wolff went into administration before it was bought for £6m by London energy film InfraStrata.
A wry, slightly bitter Belfast joke accompanied the Titanic narrative: ‘It was all right when it left here!’
But from the establishment of the Ulster Titanic Historical Society in 1992, a rescue mission of the Titanic’s honour and engineering reputation was launched. Awareness was helped by the 1997 James Cameron movie (and by marine archaeologists’ having found the wreck ). And perhaps it was also helped by the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland.
For something very healing occurred over the reconstruction of Belfast’s Titanic Quarter. Instead of being a ‘Protestant’ shipyard, it was embraced across the community. John Wilson Foster, who has written three Titanic books and lectured extensively on Titanic culture, says that this is one of the most outstanding achievements of Titanic tourism. The story is owned by everyone because, now, ‘We are all passengers on the Titanic.’
The Titanic Quarter surely deserves its accolade as a world tourist attraction, as a symbol of the transformation of a great tragedy to a rich, and inclusive, heritage; the tourism of redemption, we might say.