Word: belfasters
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...made history. After years of boycotting British ballots, Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone), the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, picked up a seat. The winner, Gerry Adams, campaigned unashamedly in support of the "armed struggle" against British rule. He ended up polling 16,000 votes in his west Belfast district, 6,000 more than the constituency's highly esteemed Member of Parliament, Gerard Fitt, a Catholic. Adams has no intention of taking his newly won seat at Westminster: his party does not recognize Parliament...
...wrestled with the European Community over British contributions to the B.C. treasury and succeeded in winning sizable rebates. She lambasted the Soviet Union with cold war invective. She coldly withstood the threats of Irish Republican Army hunger strikers, even when ten of them died of starvation in 1981 at Belfast's Maze prison. She pursued an austere, rigidly monetarist economic line, and when members of her Cabinet protested about the pain it was causing many Britons, she forced out a number of these "wets," her term for the irresolute. Says former Labor Prime Minister Sir Harold Wilson, 67, who retired...
...winning acceptance of Titanic as a badge of honor for all of Belfast faces an all-too-familiar hurdle. Few symbols are regarded as neutral in a city where neighborhoods, education and even sports are still segregated along Catholic-Protestant lines. Many Catholics see Belfast shipbuilding as an exclusively Protestant industry, in which discrimination was endemic. In one notorious incident back in July 1920, a Protestant mob drove Catholic employees out of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, beating them with sticks. Fifty years later, as Northern Ireland's Troubles were dawning, only 400 of the shipyard's 10,000 employees...
...perceived airbrushing of the less heroic elements of the Titanic story that has left some locals unconvinced. For them, the Titanic Quarter is as much a developers' dream as a civic endeavor. "The Titanic is of such importance to the city and to Western culture," says Belfast-born Bill Neill, Professor of Spatial Planning at Aberdeen University, "but this vapid project represents a whitewashed history. [The developers] are inventing a past that never existed...
...have to say more than just 'the Troubles are over,'" contends Titanic Foundation Chairman Brian Ambrose. "The Titanic is a worldwide brand with a unique link to Belfast. We're not going to scale this project down." But before the project sets sail, it has some tricky financial waters to navigate. The Signature Project's bid for just under $50m in funding from the U.K. National Lottery was beaten out by rival contenders last October. If the project is to be completed by the 2011 deadline - the centenary of the Titanic's launch - those missing millions, just under a third...