Titanic commemorations ‘coarsening Belfast’

A Belfast-born academic has accused his native city of “coarsening” the legacy of the Titanic as part of a “commercial drive to promote and to attract tourists to the city”.

William Neill said “the city has lived with the shame of the sinking for many years” but questioned whether its “mythic legacy should have been tied so closely to financial gain”.

The urban planning expert said the decision to hold an MTV music extravaganza on the slipway where the ship was built “begs some questions of taste, respect and dignity, no matter what the promotional hype”.

The Titanic Belfast Signature Project, opened just days ago, has been described by some of the world’s media as a “disaster tourism theme park”, he said.

Mr Neill, who lectures at the University of Aberdeen, described Belfast as “unique in terms of the significance of the Titanic” but said “the question must be raised as to whether that memory has been treated with enough respect”.

He said it was uncomfortable to hear marketing people discuss the “Titanic brand” as the second most powerful brand in the world after Coca-Cola.

“The myths that have grown from the Titanic story still have a great resonance but we need to consider carefully how the memory of the Titanic should be represented.”

This year marks the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic when it hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic.

Commemorations have taken place worldwide since the beginning of the year and are likely to reach a zenith in the run-up to the anniversary on April 15.

Mr Neill is to give a paper on the subject at a conference in Berlin next week. He said the conference sought to lift the discussion and broaden debate about how cities should deal with important heritage involving tragedy, death, and commemoration, a field sometimes referred to as “dark tourism”.

“I will be talking about heritage as something that is socially constructed — certain poems, songs, or hymns take on a greater importance in our culture than others and the same applies to what gets built and what gets conserved in the changing physical landscape of a city.

“In Belfast much has been made of the centenary and new buildings constructed, but at the same time the magnificent Drawing Offices where Titanic was designed have been allowed to languish in a state of decay overshadowed by the new Titanic experience visitor attraction.

“I am dismayed to see how my own home city has branded a Titanic Quarter where tacky souvenirs are plentiful but where one of the most important physical legacies of the Titanic story, the womb of the ship of imagination, has been sidelined and neglected.”

Gillen Joyce, the owner of the newly opened Titanic Experience visitor centre in Cobh, Co Cork, said he and his wife Sonia have “always been mindful of those who perished in the disaster”.

“The view we take is that we are keeping their memory alive. We are not trying to be Disneyland here. We have the families of people who were on the ship come visit and they all loved what we are doing here, they love looking up the biographies of their late family,” he said.