For all its Victorian red plush, the Grand Opera House has been less a local treasure than somewhere to show visitors, the place for a special outing, writes Fionnuala O Connor
Favoured in particular by the comfortably-off elderly, it majors on touring productions built around television faces or 1980s pop singers, occasional opera or ballet. The £9 million extension unveiled last month, through the door from lush Victoriana, is a culture shock to some: 21st-century vista of glass walls and lofty ceiling encased in pastel-coloured Lego-like cubes slotted on to the old building. But already in the new bar spaces, buzzing with live music after shows, people of different generations look cheerful.
The contrast is no greater than with the strikingly youthful revellers on the streets outside - and the concept of peacetime Belfast as upmarket mini-break.
One London weekend supplement recently featured it in a series which has visited the world's most fascinating places. Under the title "48 Hours in Belfast" the writers found "Northern Ireland's capital in buoyant mood" for the annual arts festival, which many locals scarcely notice or dismiss as culture for toffs. In fairness, it is not easy to write up unlikely settings without comparisons that go a little wonky, so St Anne's Cathedral is "Belfast's version of the Sagrada Família". St Anne's most fervent admirers might blush. Even the prefix "Belfast's version" could scarcely prepare the new visitor for a building without a glimmer of Gaudí.
The travel and "lifestyle" writers mean well. Most would have refused to come near the North until the past few years and now want to make amends, even if it means invoking Barcelona in Lower Donegall Street. The slow ebb of violence and frustration of stop-start politics scrubbed Belfast off the map for commissioning editors. Now that same history wins sympathy.
The surprise is that wonky write-ups or not, visitors do blow in from bigger cities in what seem to be growing numbers - though perhaps fewer from Dublin, to judge entirely unscientifically from anecdotal evidence. Try booking a hotel room at weekends and surprisingly often none is available: the breakdown is said to be conferences, business visitors, weekenders. Taxi firms notice more business people by far from "across the water" than from "down South". But then same-island visitors can have their meetings and be home by nightfall. Money smooths the way for the southern investors who buy run-down terraced houses and new apartments, or come up themselves to supervise building or fit-outs. Why would most stick around for the weekend? Compared to Dublin's razzle, Belfast's glitziest spots are still isolated sparkles.
Black-taxi tours of the peace line do well in high summer. There are undoubtedly quirks in 21st-century Belfast to intrigue travellers, oddity value at the very least in the sight of pensioned- off army vehicles hired out now by local entrepreneurs for birthday parties and hen nights, girlish waves from drab, khaki-painted metal. Taster courses in the archaeology and sociology of the Troubles are probably minority enthusiasms, though, perhaps especially among southerners.
The festival just ending provides a crowded fortnight each autumn of performances and events that the northern city's population could not sustain on a more frequent basis: too small, too conservative and, in many cases, too short of cash. Yet when Tom Jones or Bruce Springsteen come to Belfast, fans in remote parts of Scotland or the north of England may well fly in for the night. Dublin is on all the circuits: no need for Dubliners to leave town. In the last analysis, with the Troubles put to bed, in many southern eyes Belfast is capital of a foreign country: every bit as alien and off-putting as Ian Paisley's followers find the Republic. Not that many, perhaps the majority, on both sides of the Border, are likely for the moment to test prejudice against reality.
Time might ingrain some prejudices but also shifts many. Not all that long ago there were campaigns to boycott Kerry butter and Galtee bacon, intimidation of supermarkets, offending packets pushed to the back of shelves or no longer stocked. Today it is a secret hidden in plain view that southern interests own substantial slices of northern-based business, primarily the food trade.
The flow of capital and new realities will take time to soften antipathies and straightforward, understandable nervousness. But fears and prejudices have currents and counter-currents: they can be trumped at least for a night by show business, the glitz that raises hearts. There are people in Belfast - not all of them nationalist or Catholic - who remember the Clancy Brothers in the Ulster Hall in the 1960s, Milo O'Shea, Rosaleen Linehan and Lelia Doolan in a 1950s musical called Glory Be, Jimmy O'Dea and the youthful Maureen Potter playing to full houses in the Opera House. And the subversive truth is that Belfast may be safer by night now than Dublin.