Another true story

My life changed the day I walked into an office in the Titanic Quarter. The man I was there to meet was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and didn’t look anything like a prophet. We sat with our coffees on a balcony overlooking the docks. The cranes looked different up this close, a pair of sleeping giants. I answered the man’s questions. I told him about our losses and how my father still finds it difficult to come into the city and why I left as soon as I could. The man nodded and smiled and asked whether I knew that John Dunlop had invented the pneumatic tyre in a street not a million miles away from here or that one of the men who split the atom went to school on Malone Road or that modern emergency medicine owes everything to a cardiac consultant that worked out of the Royal Victoria. Which is not to say, he said, that the story you tell yourself isn’t true. It is, he said, and oughtn’t be forgotten. But it’s not the only one.

The Titanic Quarter – home among other things to Belfast’s Innovation District – is named after the Titanic, which sank this week 112 years ago. Along with much else, the Quarter and its celebration of Belfast’s innovative past and potential is critical to the need for developing different narratives to that of a city (once) torn apart by sectarianism. 

Image credit: Masthead K. Mitch Hodge, teaser Stock Adobe