Money, it seems, has a tribal memory, too. "Belfast's heading southwards," the man said, "but then that's been true since the 19th century. No one's putting private money into Royal Avenue," writes Fionnuala O'Connor.
He was describing the downside of the gloss people see when they get off the train at Central Station, the pull exerted on the city's development by the increasing affluence of south Belfast. But a recent habit of the Republic's citizens was in his mind as well. The Border Question has a new human face: the astute face of investors with well-founded hopes of profits. A considerable share of Belfast's glitz today is courtesy of cash from Dublin and points south and west.
The growing number of investors from the Republic put their money in a city which must puzzle some, at least initially. Belfast is a mix now of centre-city redevelopment and wasteland, comfortable-to-affluent suburbs and good-looking public housing stock that masks old deprivation. The composite picture may be transient, or the pattern for the next century.
About 10 years back it stopped making sense for veteran reporters to take newcomers around the "worst" parts of the city, to show them the stockpile for violence of poverty and bad housing. "We've just come from Mexico/Thailand/Liverpool/Limerick," the strangers began to say, "we don't recognise this as poverty."
The picture is not all it seems, of course, as many in the neighbouring state know well. Terraces of new redbrick and beautifully tended front gardens do not signify a city of social harmony, much less a population of well-paid secure earners. Protestant districts especially are ageing and increasingly depopulated, Catholic districts overcrowded to bursting point in the north and west: a story for another day, a mismatch of need and provision that plagues town planners and, more sharply and personally, families on waiting lists.
A partial solution occurs to an academic with more worldly knowledge than most, only slightly tongue in cheek: "You could deal with the overspill from Ardoyne and New Lodge straight off if the army would move out of Girdwood, biggest barracks in the city - the only one with a parade ground! But they stay for the symbolism, to soothe unionists."
More than 98 per cent of Belfast's predominantly well-appointed social housing is entirely segregated. As is the rest of the place. Drive an innocent visitor around the more affluent areas and on some tree-lined avenue, depending on their creed of origin, you may have to discourage their wish to move in with a brusque, "No, not for the likes of you."
In more than 80 per cent of the well-planned little courts and squares, as in three-storey houses cleverly designed to echo the style of 19th- and early 20th-century tenements, but now for single families, housing and other allowances for the unemployed and low-paid cover all or part of the rent.
"If you can pay the rent yourself you can afford a mortgage," says one observer, adding with breezy political incorrectness: "West Belfast they're all in their beds, unemployed unto the third generation. Most of the people working in the morning in this city are from Tyrone. That's why you get all those cars parked at roundabouts miles out of Belfast, commuting plumbers sharing the drive."
Southerners raised on a television diet of the North as Troubled land or their parents' warnings to stay away drive into Belfast now and see opportunity instead of dread. On a sunny day, if you're determined not to prejudge the place on its history and willing to be charmed at first sight, it's glitz as far as the eye can see.
The road from Dublin rolls in past apartment blocks beside the motorway with come-on posters: "If you lived here you'd be home by now." Belfast's comparative lack of traffic jams must feed Southern goodwill.
Those who arrive at Central Station meet new apartments inside yards, and some make two trips every day. "On the train to work in Dublin in the morning now, back in the evening, quicker for some than commuting from Lucan," marvels a Northerner still adjusting to the idea of apartment-living in Belfast, let alone apartments-as-investment.
Like many she thinks only a few will be deterred by the recent unpleasantness in the faded loyalist heartland of Sandy Row, where the new block called Whitehall Square brought agitation demanding "Republicans Out". For as long as entire terraces in unpopular Belfast districts cost less than some houses in Dublin, the surge northwards will continue.
"For as long as I can remember," says the worldly academic, "governments poured in public money to pull Belfast northwards. So there's a restaurant or two and a few offices. When the shops shut, still nothing but tumbleweed round St Anne's Cathedral."