I flew from London City Airport by the Old West India Docks, to Belfast City (George Best) Airport by the old Harland and Wolff shipyards last Tuesday. Both are pocket-size near their city centres and stress-free for an old geezer recovering from a stroke and just a few months younger than Ireland’s re-elected President.
I watched the debate that night and he was the only candidate fit for the Presidency or any elected Office. I could have strangled Liadh Ni Riada as she patronized him as if he were a dim-witted child, or in his second childhood and mauled him. “Mise Eire -Mor mo Nair!”
Anyhow, when you’ve just flown over the sea the last thing you want to think about is perishing there, but one of the first things you are confronted with is a sign directing you to the TITANIC QUARTER. Dear God, is this an example of Irish Wit or British Irony? Not since Brian Faulkner mooted celebration of 50 years of partition to bring tourists swamping the place in 1971 has there been such a joke in bad taste. In Maggie May’s Belfast Cafe they serve TITANIC BURGERS. Guaranteed to go down a treat.
THE TITANIC was the brainchild of JOSEPH BRUCE ISMAY, Chairman of the WHITE STAR LINE. Strange though it may seem neither are household names. While women and children, disproportionately steerage passengers from below the salt, sank in the salt water to Davy Jones’s Locker in April 1912, JOSEPH BRUCE ISMAY got away safe in a lifeboat.
He survived for a further 25 years. His Obituary in THE TIMES, copied verbatim in the (usually excellent) Dictionary of National Biography, has no mention of the White Star Line nor THE TITANIC
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