A "Bilbao Guggenheim" in the city is a perfectly realisable ambition, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
FORMER HEAD of the IDA Padraic White is spearheading a drive to establish a new Belfast tourist attraction, modelled "on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in Spain".
The planned centre, located on top of Black Mountain, overlooking nationalist west Belfast and the loyalist Shankill, is part of a hugely ambitious project Mr White has for the city.
The chairman of the West Belfast and Greater Shankill Enterprise Council said that investment money was available, despite the economic downturn.
Referring to millions of dollars of US pension funds waiting to be tapped, he said: "Even if times are bad you need to devise a plan for the future so that when the economy recovers in two years or so we are ready to roll."
He told The Irish Times of his plans in the offices of the Enterprise Council, just off the Springfield Road, a hundred yards or so from where loyalists and nationalists have their annual Whiterock Parade quarrel.
The offices are at a site that was once earmarked for a university campus that was to span nationalist and loyalist west Belfast. The project was, ultimately, never developed.
While he acknowledged that his own modern offices could be viewed as a symbol of failure, he said: "This is no pipe dream."
It should be remembered, he says, that when the financial services centre was first mooted for Dublin docklands in the 1980s, people were equally sceptical about the chances of it succeeding, such was the chronic state of the economy.
The Black Mountain "Bilbao Guggenheim" is only the beginning of what he insisted were perfectly realisable ambitions, even in the face of a global economic crash.
White heads a group of entrepreneurs whose goal is to transform nationalist west Belfast and the loyalist Shankill from a depressed under-resourced area into a thriving mini-metropolis.
Included in their plans are:
The Black Mountain Destination Centre, comprising a state-of-the-art iconic tourist amenity overlooking the city;
A huge enterprise hub flowing from the slopes of the mountain into the Shankill and west Belfast;
The renewal of Andersonstown into a thriving urban village;
The development of a Falls Road Gaeltacht as a unique social, cultural and tourist resource;
Similar cultural and community developments in the Shankill;
The expansion of the Fernhill House project in the Shankill to include a four or five-star hotel and conference centre.
Seven years ago during the days of the first Northern Executive, Ulster Unionist minister Reg Empey invited White to head the west Belfast taskforce, and in one guise or another he has been involved in the area ever since, principally from philanthropic motives. "I love coming here because of the vitality of the people. This is a labour of love."
He says almost 50 per cent of the 56,000 people of working age in the area are unemployed or receiving incapacity benefit, despite what he describes as a hunger for work in west Belfast and the Shankill.
White unveiled the west Belfast/Shankill regeneration masterplan plan called "Think Transformation" in late November, a day after the Northern Executive said it would back with £40 million (€41 million) the £100 million Titanic Quarter economic and tourist project in east Belfast.
Some others might have exploited this disparity to play the old negative Green Card: to complain that nationalist west Belfast was disadvantaged, while unionist east Belfast was disproportionately supported. But, typically, White's focus was on the positive. "Support for Titanic Quarter has actually given great heart to those of us who are developing new concepts and regeneration ideas. It shows the Executive is capable of actually making decisions and that's vital, because one of the inherited problems in Northern Ireland after 30 years of direct rule is that there was a great reluctance to make decisions."
White says the negative view of the district must be dislodged. He refers to how last year, before devolution, direct rule ministers - in proposing a £150 million rapid transit system for Belfast - managed to exclude west Belfast from plans, halting the perceived project at the Royal Victoria Hospital, the gateway to west Belfast. "This typified how west Belfast was excluded from official thinking," he says. But he says that when the Northern Executive was formed he and others were able to persuade Sinn Féin Minister Conor Murphy to include west Belfast in the proposals.
In coming months White and his Enterprise Council will press on with stage two of their project. This will include proposals for the Executive to create incentives such as business rates relief, a benign planning regime and supports to bring investment into west Belfast and the Shankill.