Fortnight Publications Ltd.

On the WaterfrontAuthor(s): Michael QuinnSource: Fortnight, No. 345 (Dec., 1995), pp. 26-27Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25558678 .

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Plastic people's palace

Michael Quinn

There is still a year and more to go until it officially opens its doors for business, but the hard-sell has already begun in earnest for the most controversial - not least because, at a cost of ?30 million-plus, it is also the most expensive - building to be erected in Belfast since, arguably, the City Hall itself.

As the Public Relations apparatchniks of the City Council and the Laganside Development Corpora tion gird their loins for a sustained publicity on slaught over the next twelve months, the flak, already fierce and ferocious, has begun to break around them. Battle-lines have been drawn up, strategic offensives mounted and targets identified. And the cause of all this fuss and fury? The "prestigious" (but clumsily named) Waterfront Hall Conference & Concert Centre currently nearing completion less than five

minutes walk away from the very heart of the city on the River Lagan bankside.

The Waterfront Hall is more than just a striking new landmark on the city's skyline. Instead it has become a rallying post for two powerful adversarial cliques in one of the most bitterly fought political battles in the city's long and troubled history. In deed, the arguments about the worth, the viability and the future of the complex seem as definitive a part of the story as the very bricks and mortar of the building itself. At the hub of them is a debate that is usually (if often deceptively) articulated in terms of' capital costs and funding commitments that goes straight to the very heart of the kind of' identity the city of Belfiast and the region as a whole, caught now between the Troubles and the 21 st Century, wants to

dlevelop f`or itself' and, perhaps more crucially, to project to the rest of' the world in the f'uture.

The idea of a large-scale, prestige Conference

Hall-cum-Concert venue in Belfast dates back nearly two decades to when Belfast and Beirut were bleed ing into each other in the confused public percep tion of the time. Something, the then City Fathers recognised, had to be done to show the world at large that Belfast wasn't only bombs, bullets and balaclavas. By the time the momentum of the discus sion had begun to accelerate, the Seventies had become the Eighties and in the apparently opportu nity-filled services-led market economy of Mrs Thatch er's unscrupulous dystopia, the precarious business boom precipitated a demand for middle-manage

ment talking shops: conference centres. Suddenly Belfast had found its new status symbol. The idea looked set to become an immediate reality that

would have been specific, pragmatic and purpose ful, as Philip Hammond, the Arts Council of North ern Ireland's Performing Arts Director, observes with hindsight.

"When the idea of a conference centre was first thought of all those years ago, it was probably abso lutely dead on and had we built it then the city would have been way ahead of the pack. But with the Troubles and the 20-year wait for people to develop the confidence to build something of that size and to access the necessary funding, the focus on what exact function a new hall should have had begun to blur."

Others ascribe less innocent explanations than mere missed opportunities to the causal effects of the current conundrum surrounding the Water front Hall's precise identity and purpose. DUP Councillor Sammy Wilson, who argued fiercely against the building of the hall and has forcefully continued to oppose the development of the

26 FORTNIGHT DECEMBER 1995

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- SOCIETY *

Laganside site throughout his fourteen year tenure on the City Council is much more blunt in his assessment of why the project came perilously close to crippling itself and the city's finances.

"It really was one of those cases where the main driving force behind the Hall was a very small elite who saw it in a very narrow way and had their own agenda, " he argues. "Ifyou read some of the debates from that time there was a strong element of people feeling they had to 'put Belfast on the map.' The idea was that a conference centre would attract outside audiences into the city despite the Trou bles."

Wilson's reading of the situation deepens at a sometimes alarming rate into what some might chose to describe as a conspiracy theory, suspecting more than happenstance coincidence in the dual mem bership of so many members of the City Council and the Laganside board.

"The problem we're left with now is a Hall that was built not on the basis ofwhat made good commercial sense, but on the basis of all the pressures that arose from conflicting political sources - the influential arts lobby, the Laganside lobby, and of course, Richard Needham, the then Minister, who saw it as another project he could leave behind and say 'Look, I helped to instigate that.' That's a bad way to make any decision."

On that point, there are few who would disagree with Wilson, but such lines of defence as there are about the worth of the Waterfront Hall begin to fragment when the issue of its awkwardly worn dual ity as both conference hall and concert venue is raised. Whatever the original rationale behind broad ening the capabilities of the building to facilitate a formal performance element within it was, it now doesn't seem to be as explicit let alone as coherent as it really ought to be. For those who oppose the project, the absence of such considered evaluation is just so much more provocation.

The actual capacity of the hall, at 2,250, is held by some to be too large to accommodate performances on an intimate scale. Philip Hammond firmly dis misses such complaints, arguing that, "The issue is not the size of the auditorium, it's the size of the audience that's important, and one has to say that in other areas - Cardiff and Glasgow, for example - where these conference centre/music halls have been built, a new audience has been attracted to them."

In a very real sense, the characteristics of the audience constituency is precisely the arena in which the tug-of-war for the future of the Waterfront Hall is going to be fought. The crucial question now is not 'Why is it there?', but 'Who is it for?' Sammy Wilson

claims that there aren't new audiences waiting to be conjured up by it and that the existing audience already fails to support the level of activity of outfits like the Ulster Orchestra and Opera Northern Ire land.

"Opera Northern Ireland is not commercially vi able. Neither are most of the Ulster Orchestra's concerts. They already have two fairly good venues - the Grand Opera House and the Ulster Hall - and they sometimes find it hard to fill those."

While Wilson is right in implying that the consulta tive document drawn up by the Belfast-based firm of

Robinson & Mcllwaine did make for sobering read ing in places - more so now with the benefit of hindsight- his dismissive claims about the box-office performance of the province's only professional orchestra and opera company, don't really bear close scrutiny, as Opera Northern Ireland's Randall Shannon points out.

"I'm not sure where Sammy gets his information about the company. On average, our audiences for our performances at the Grand Opera House are 95 per-cent of the theatre's capacity. For this year's production of [Janacek's] The Cunning Little Vixen, we even exceeded our audience target figures for that too and they were far larger than English Na tional Opera set themselves when they first mounted the piece in London."

Lucy Chapman, the Ulster Orchestra's Concert & Events Manager, is also somewhat nonplussed by the Pottinger Councillor's opinion of the ensemble.

"We do over 100 performances a year. Not only do we give a comprehensive season of concerts in the Ulster Hall, butwe also give fifteen regional concerts a year - often more - and we have a very sophisticated education programme which goes throughout the

whole province. I think that makes us a very viable resource to the community."

In other areas of the arts in the city, one well respected arts worker, the playwright Martin Lynch,

might well have been expected to be in absolute opposition to the fact of the Waterfront Hall, in his role as a part-time development worker for the

Community Arts Forum. Yet Lynch presents a char acteristically pragmatic response to the new hall's existence.

"My personal opinion is that I think whatever prestige the city can get will be great for everybody so I'm notgoing to start kicking the hall now. There are some people in Community Arts who, when they argue for more money, say 'The Ulster Orchestra could do with less money; take it from them and give it to us.' The CAF has never advocated that. We

wouldn't want to take a penny away from anybody. We just want the pool widened and more money made available so that Community Arts can become a major arts function within the city. The new

Waterfront Hall is a fait accompli; it could be a great success, we'll just have to wait and see."

Philip Hammond is even more openly optimistic about it, saying 'We can't look back. We can't stand still. We have to look forward. The new Hall could well open up that whole new side of Belfast which, God knows, needs something. I'm full of optimism about it."

In his own corner, Sammy Wilson continues to fight, using arguments about capital funding, revenue fund ing, deficit funding, box-office income, apparent social and political bias in the very concept of the Hall and calling for SDLP, Alliance Party and even UUP heads to roll when, as he argues, it finally becomes impossible to staunch the haemorrhaging of money from the city coffers and better used elsewhere than in a project

which began as Belfast's Great White Hope and which he genuinely fears is about to become it's Great White Elephant.

DECEMBER 1995 FORTNIGHT 27

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