The way forward with our heritage

Opinion

Monday, November 12, 2007

This week the Heritage Lottery Fund hosts a conference on exploring identity. Its Northern Ireland manager Paul Mullan says we need to embrace our past

The draft Programme for Government published by the Northern Ireland Executive last month has on its cover an image of young people sitting on one of the cannons on Derry's walls. That picture links future and past in a confident and positive way.

Indeed anyone who has visited Derry in recent times will know that the City is going through a renaissance with heritage placed firmly at the heart of its regeneration strategy.

However, we are still faced with conflicting identities throughout Northern Ireland battling it out for dominance and ownership, with Orange halls and churches often under attack, seen as representing the other.

There is a view that given how destructive our past has been that we should forget it, decommission it, and see it as unfit for purpose in our brave new world. This is of course ridiculous.

Indeed the philosopher Santayana wisely said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There are places we simply never want to go to again. So the question becomes one of how to connect with the past in a meaningful way?

At the Heritage Lottery Fund we have been funding heritage projects in Northern Ireland over the last 14 years. We have seen how heritage has the power to connect people with who they are and where they have come from. This is often called sense of place, and is a concept fundamental to our sense of identity and can be seen, for example, in the evocative power of place names.

But sense of place is also about how we feel about the spaces around us. Some places are very special and need careful management to ensure that they remain special. With the redevelopment of Belfast's docklands there is a danger that our connection with the city's shipyard roots and the industrial creativity of the 19th Century could be lost. To do so would be to lose all connection with previous generations who built this city. That is, unless we can play that heritage carefully and sensitively into whatever replaces it: merely calling part of it Titanic Quarter will never be enough.

The question is how can we shape our future using our past in an imaginative way? Belfast City Council is currently looking at re-branding the city. This is important given that a successful city needs to compete economically against other cities on this island, within the UK, and abroad. But Belfast's future economic success will need to rely on more than a brand. Our heritage can provide the city with distinctiveness and authenticity, characteristics too often lacking in modern cities. That heritage is found in our buildings, culture, and people, and which is now starting to drive a vibrant tourism economy.

We at the Heritage Lottery Fund are committed to providing support which will assist in a renewed approach to exploring, documenting, promoting and experiencing our heritage. We are listening to the questions and concerns that communities have about their past and we wish to assist organisations in addressing their heritage in a proactive yet sensitive way.

To explore some of these and other issues we are holding a conference this week - Digging Deeper: Sharing our Past, Sharing our Future. At the heart of the conference is the issue of identity and how we see the past.

Many of the notions of what makes us nationalist or unionist, republican or loyalist are highly simplistic and often false. With a definition of heritage as "whatever matters to people about their past and what they want to hand on", we want to look at how we can encourage communities to explore their often complex and difficult heritage in ways which will enable them to understand themselves better and open a window that will allow others to look in.