Getting that sinking feeling

Belfast is kidding itself if it thinks it should qualify as Europe's cultural centre, writes Dennis Kennedy

Belfast is abuzz with culture. The city is bursting at the seams with it, or at least with determination to be the Cultural Capital of Europe for 2008. The Northern Ireland Executive is backing the city's campaign, giving ministerial blessing and £650,000 sterling of public money. Belfast City Council is driving it forward with another £300,000 sterling. A large chunk of cash - £200,000 sterling - from the European Union's Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation has been diverted to it. All three daily newspapers in the North are official backers.

The whiff of more European money and of boundless commercial benefit is in the air, so best foot forward, don't mention the war and let nobody say a bad word about the campaign. Not surprisingly, the backers of the Belfast bid, like most other zealots for causes in Northern Ireland, are little troubled by reality or by any concern for accuracy in their claims. And, as ever, history gets a rough ride.

In a two-page spread proclaiming its backing for the campaign, the Belfast Telegraph unblushingly trumpeted the city's "unsurpassed heritage of artistic, scientific and industrial innovation and sporting excellence". To back this not unchallengeable assertion, it said the city "is famous as the birthplace of the tractor, the tyre and the Titanic". Unfortunately, the first two claims are untrue, and, tasteless as it is to mention it in Belfast just now, the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage.

Despite popular myth in Belfast, Harry Ferguson did not invent the tractor, though he helped revolutionise its use in agriculture by inventing the Belfast plough and the Ferguson unit.

More than 40 years before John Boyd Dunlop, a Belfast-based Ayreshire vet, patented his pneumatic tyre, in 1888, another Scotsman had patented his. Rather more embarrassing for Belfast, Dunlop had to hawk his new product to Dublin to find a backer, nobody in Belfast being ready to risk good money on a daft idea.

And as for the Titanic, it has indeed become the most famous ship in the world, particularly since James Cameron's film (which omitted all mention of Belfast). But the fame of the Titanic rests on the fact that it was proclaimed unsinkable, then plunged to the bottom on its first encounter with an iceberg.

Had it missed the iceberg and survived the Great War, it would be remembered, if at all, as just one of the many great liners of the first half of the 20th century, several of which, of course, were built in Belfast. Instead, it has become an icon of overweening pride preceding a fall, a symbol of 19th-century man's arrogance and sense of invincibility barely two years before the morass of the Great War. (Are the campaign's organisers offering a hostage to fortune in making the illumination of the giant cranes at Harland & Wolff an example of promoting Belfast culture? Will the shipyard still be there in 2008?)

Promoters of the campaign dismiss criticism of Belfast's cultural amenities or activities. The lack of a dedicated public art gallery - it is part of the Ulster Museum - or any opera, ballet or successful theatre company is irrelevant because, they say, culture is far broader than that. It is about the way we live; it is about the redevelopment of the city, about its architecture, about its unique character.

Unfortunately, there are two pitfalls here. The first is that, as many of its citizens and a great many visitors point out, Belfast is fast losing whatever character it had. The physical redevelopment is welcome, but most comment on the new buildings - those surrounding the splendid Waterfront Hall, for example - is rudely adverse. The rash of new apartment blocks along the river has been derided as Legoland. Certainly, good or bad, the new buildings draw no inspiration from the Victorian city, nor do they relate to each other coherently, to suggest a new and distinctive Belfast.

With unfortunate timing, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland last month scuppered what seemed an imaginative idea by refusing the Grand Opera House funding to develop the empty site next to it in the city centre to help compensate for the appallingly cramped lobby accommodation in the opera house itself, and to provide a real focus for the cultural life at the heart of Belfast.

The other pitfall is that the EU programme for a Cultural Capital of Europe prioritises what might be called high culture. The regulations governing the scheme list as a key requirement of each application the submission of "a cultural project of European dimension" that "highlights artistic movements and styles shared by Europeans which it [the applicant city] has inspired or to which it has made a significant contribution".

So far, nobody has suggested what this project might be, nor which artistic movement or style Belfast has given to Europe. The emphasis has been on other aspects of the application, particularly those dealing with the efforts the city plans to make to promote cultural awareness and activity - and, also, on how many benefits would flow to Belfast from winning, how timely it would be for a city emerging from decades of unrest and decline.

Belfast may well win - it is currently the bookmakers' favourite for the UK nomination. Much will depend on the UK government's decision, and politics could play their part. Once nominated by London, it is hard to see how the European institutions, or their panel of experts who make the final decision, could do other than use the rubber stamp.

No doubt Belfast would reap rich rewards in terms of image, and the exercise could do wonders for the cultural life of the city. But the cringe-making nonsense being peddled about the rich and unique cultural life of the city and its "unsurpassed" cultural heritage makes it difficult to cheer on the campaign.

Dennis Kennedy is a historian and lecturer in European studies at Queen's University Belfast

The Belfast Winter School, today and tomorrow, will consider the question of the city's fitness to be European Cultural Capital. Information from 048-90322008, or see www.imaginebelfast2008.com