Not everyone in Belfast knows even Belfast's history. The young woman in a shop said, about the Titanic movie, "Is that the one with Leonard di Caprio in it?" All the same, the success of the film may well play a part in the peace process. People are more generous when they feel valued.
There's no doubt that the great ship the workers of east Belfast once served has come back now to cast a bit of glory on their past, as unexpectedly as Riverdance did on Gaelic League dancing.
There's even an economic spin-off: there's a company in the North now selling authentic Titanic souvenirs - linen napkins from the same firm that made the ones for the Titanic and so on - to upmarket American shops. It all makes a change from wondering where - on what street, exactly - the last person to get shot got shot.
You have to have some pride in yourself. You have to believe your identity is not altogether unrespected. This is as true of the shadowy, derelict figures whose world is the Belfast streets, as it is of the shipbuilders' descendants.
I was reading a study of homelessness and mental health in Belfast; the care of the homeless being an area in which Northern Ireland has at least as much cause to be proud of itself as shipbuilding. A lot of the homeless, particularly the single homeless, have mental health problems. Usually, it is not-homeless, not-mentally-ill people who interview them, but in this case a former homeless person did some of the interviews. And what emerged was that even the most impaired of persons wanted to live "in their own place".
I used to admire, from a distance, the reckless men swigging fortified wine in Belfast's alleyways. I watched one of them one day slumped with his bottle but defiantly singing a rebel song. "They're the only fearless people around," I thought then. Now I see that from their own point of view they're the same as anyone, and that they want, like anyone, a home of their own.
Very, very few people wish to think about homelessness (which is why I began with the Titanic - I'd rather write about President Clinton myself). But the subject forces itself on me. On the way to the Irish Times office in Dublin the other day, in a doorway off Tara Street, I saw a man lying asleep, or in a coma. He was the same as anyone sleeping rough, except his head was face down in vomit: and it had been raining, and the blanket which covered him was sopping wet. I can't accept that we - you and I - think this is OK. I can't see how a competent and prosperous country can't reach out to the relatively small number of people who have no own place.
I'm starting off in a rented house in Belfast, and because none of my own things are in it, and I didn't choose anything about it, and I don't know where the plugs are or how to work the heating, and I don't know the neighbours, I feel uneasy and vulnerable. I remember that rawness from when I was young, standing in some new, strange bedsit. I never wanted to go back to that. But think of the man in the doorway. Which of us has what you might call a problem?
I went to see Sister Stanislaus. What's the new thinking on homelessness? I asked her. What are the EU policies on it? How does it happen that with all our goodwill and all our money the problem is visibly getting worse and worse? There is no EU thinking on housing, she told me. The problem will continue to get worse until there is intervention in the underlying situations - the ones that lead to people being out of home - before the homelessness happens. No initiative is going to make much difference, she believes, until "there's a proper system of local government," by which I take it she means communal and holistic roles for the social services.
"Of course, they're far, far ahead of us in the North," she said. And so I have been finding out. In spite of everything - such as, the second most common cause of homelessness in Northern Ireland is intimidation, and this is usually "religious" and increases, for example, during Drumcree - the North is admirable in the housing area.
For one thing, the politicians have almost no power left over housing. For another, progressive legislation, only now being modified under Blair, means that the Housing Executive has a statutory duty to rehouse anyone involuntarily made homeless and does rehouse, in permanent accommodation, within 24 hours, about four of every 10 people who look for it.
There is also an extensive and efficient voluntary sector, which is "significantly better resourced" than in the South, to quote Tim Watt, the director of the NI Council for the Homeless. There is a network of hostels and other types of living-place, so comparatively attractive that after the ceasefires a lot of Southern and Scottish and English nomads made their way to Northern Ireland.
One 40-place hostel in Belfast is serviced by 20 full-time staff, which includes three social workers, eight residential workers, one resettlement officer and one recreational officer. To those so desperate to sneer at everything about Northern Ireland that they'd call these makeweight, bureaucratic, jobs, let me say (a) that these are the jobs of value in the post-technological future, and (b) that we in the Republic would be very much the better for having such jobs. But we haven't begun to recover from the days when the religious orders carried the burden of the caring institutions, on a pittance from the State.
The homeless condition is no extra-sectarian state. Hostels used to be placed on neutral ground, but the neutral provided so many flashpoints that now they're placed slap-bang in the middle of one community or another.
Paramilitaries sometimes instruct hostels to put such-and-such a person out. (And they do, of course.) There are also people so afraid of one area or another that they will sleep rough rather than accept rehousing there. All these things would be highly unusual in the South.
Yet tonight one society will have done all it can for its out-of-home people, and the other society, that of the Republic of Ireland, will not. It is true that in Belfast maybe 30 or 35 homeless who have fallen through every net will sleep among the bushes of the City Cemetery or behind hoardings in the darkened business streets of the city centre.
In Dublin, however, people will be turned away from crammed hostels, and families will have nowhere at all to go. As in the Famine workhouses, men will be sent one way; women and children another.
There are more ways of dying on the street than being shot on the street. Dublin could teach Belfast how to do it.