The Titanic Quarter development has the potential to be one of the most exciting and innovative things to happen in Belfast, more accurately in Northern Ireland, in many generations. Out of the ashes of our once thriving heavy industry sector should emerge a vibrant, modern and cosmopolitan living space with large-scale business and innovative technological development, to rival anything which has been achieved by similar projects elsewhere in the world. The venture is Europe's largest waterfront development.
It is no small undertaking and just as Laganside Corporation worked to transform a derelict and neglected part of our capital city into the thriving waterfront zone that it is today, I believe Titanic Quarter can achieve similar successes. I support this project and I want to see it bringing the maximum possible benefits, especially to the east of the city, to Belfast and all of Northern Ireland. Titanic Quarter (the company responsible for delivering the project) confidently states that it “will transform a 185-acre site on the banks of Belfast's river Lagan into a new maritime quarter with a mile of water frontage and a range of investment opportunities including: over 5,000 apartments, 180,000 sq. m. of business, education, office and research and development floor space together with hotels, restaurants, cafes, bars and other leisure uses.
Titanic Quarter in many ways has the potential to symbolise a new Belfast and a new Northern Ireland – confident, forward-looking and modern, but it is important that long-standing and well-established communities are not left behind in the rush to modernity. If one were an outsider examining East Belfast you could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that all was well economically and socially speaking. Recent figures published by the House of Commons Library show that as a whole the constituency has relatively low unemployment – the current figure stands at 4.3% of the workforce claiming unemployment benefit. What these figures do not show however is that unemployment and deprivation are heavily concentrated in the inner east of the constituency – the very area on Titanic Quarter’s doorstep.
Figures published by NISRA demonstrate the depth of the problem. The area around Newtownards Road/Dee Street (Island ward) has an unemployment rate of 6.3%, 40% of whom are long term unemployed. It is in the top 10% of wards in Northern Ireland on the multiple deprivation indices. The Mountpottinger/Albertbridge Roads (Ballymacarrrett Ward) is the ninth most deprived area of Northern Ireland with an unemployment rate of 9.3%, of which nearly 50% are long-term unemployed. Avoniel and Lord St district (The Mount Ward) is the fourteenth most deprived in Northern Ireland, with unemployment at 9.2%, of which 45% are long term unemployed.
If the project is to mean anything at all to the people living in these communities it is important that it is seen to be helping to alleviate these intertwined problems of unemployment and deprivation. All too often we have seen as part of the so-called gentrification process, shiny new apartment blocks going up, built by companies and workmen with no connections to the local community, which are effectively segregated from the neighbourhoods in which they appear and occupied by people with no stake in the local community – this cannot be the case in East Belfast. To allow such a situation to develop will lead to disillusionment and anger amongst the well-established communities of the inner east.
There are therefore major issues at stake which Titanic Quarter can in a direct fashion address. Unemployment and tackling social deprivation are the most pressing and I think these should also be considered in the context of an on-going national debate on the issue of immigration. As we have already said Titanic Quarter is an enormous undertaking and it will, I have no doubt act as a magnet drawing people from outside Northern Ireland to work here, as similar projects elsewhere in Europe have.
Immigration is welcome to many employers because it holds down pay levels, especially for the unskilled. It can also be a source of cheap skilled labour with no training costs. From a purely business point of view it makes sense to import cheap labour, but in a societal context, what will it mean? It will mean that we will have people coming to Northern Ireland who require accommodation, social housing and private landlord accommodation will come under pressure, whose children (if they bring them with them) require access to education, who need health-care provision and other public services. We cannot, nor should we ever seek to, deny them these life necessities.
In the context of the type of socially-deprived areas of Belfast that I have described it has the potential to develop into a powder-keg situation; new people from outside the community reaping benefit from large-scale re-development, by virtue of the fact that they accept lower wages than local people who have lived in the area for years is a recipe for mutual distrust and communal division. It need not be this way. I want to ensure the fullest possible success of Titanic Quarter and that will not be measured merely in economic outputs – important as they undoubtedly are – there is also an important social element of the project which must be addressed.
I know of responsible developers who offer training and apprenticeships to young people from socially-deprived areas as their way of contributing something back to the community they are operating in – there is no reason why the same thing cannot happen with Titanic Quarter. There is clearly a demand for work in inner east Belfast – Titanic Quarter can help to address that problem also, through recruiting locally and ensuring that the community can see the visible benefits of the project.
