What to make of the Giant’s Park?

This post was written by Guest Blogger David Brunnen.

It’s been a long time in the making.  It will take even longer still.  It is nearly 300 years since Jonathan Swift looked up and saw the rocky profile of the giant that inspired Gulliver’s satirical travels.

A lot of water has flowed in and out of Belfast Lough in all those years.  The City of Belfast has seen good times and bad.  The shores have seen ships and shiploads come and go.  More recently mountains of rubbish have added bulk to the vast acres of Giant’s Park as the city’s citizens and visitors rush past on the motorway skirting the harbour and linking Belfast’s two airports.

But what now should we make of this place?  How should the good burghers of Belfast realize the potential of 340 acres of prime-location, city-connected, waterfront wasteland with a fine view of a rock that looks like a sleeping giant?

More than just a lot of space in an interesting place, we should first consider its natural assets.  Built on generations of rubbish dumping it has already served citizens well.  Its methane and deep heat can power energy generation to give any development a cost advantage.

The sludge of Belfast Lough may perhaps yield valuable minerals, or protect a cross-lough link to the digital hub that is Queens Island.  The site’s slick road access could be supplemented by ferry traffic across the water to Holywood and the ‘Hollywood-be’ of Belfast’s international creative media campus.  And more, there’s the glorious freedom to crack on with making something of it; a site wholly owned by the people of Belfast with no incumbent interests blocking progress.

But what sort of something?  What do we really need?  It is easier to say what is not needed.  We surely don’t need another just-out-of-town retail park, or yet another island of dense housing, or more un-lettable office space, or more transport depots.

Locally, Belfast needs jobs – preferably well-paid jobs – but Northern Ireland needs much more than that.  How could this location serve the health of our wider economy?

Should this site be in part devoted to the urgent transformation of our region’s agriculture – reversing years of decline by sparking new initiatives in the way we use our land?

The average age of Northern Ireland’s farmers is now 64.  The average size of farms is 60 acres – 30% of the minimum level of current viability.  Seven farms in every ten are now run as subsidy-qualifying part-time ventures with the ‘farmers’ main employment elsewhere.  Is NI’s highest performing crop the EU farming subsidy harvest?

But with NI’s world-leading research into new farming methods and higher-value outputs we are well placed to develop a focus for the ‘Restoration Economy’.

Will we see Northern Ireland as a European export leader in alternative energy and low-cost thermally efficient construction techniques?

We are already in this business in a small-scale but fragmented way.  Whether its wind or wave or tidal power we not only have the brains to develop new solutions, we also have the natural resources to shift the island of Ireland away from high-cost power generation towards becoming a giant green battery to serve the digital dependence of the UK and other parts of Europe.  And with NI’s new-found expertise in buildings that match Scandinavian levels of insulation and heat recovery we can further reduce energy waste.

 Could a Giant’s Park commercial Eco-Campus become central to these green endeavours and generate hundreds of new jobs in the process?  

 Will we build links between the media magicians of Queens Island and the production craftsmanship of the northern shore?

Across the Lough the international creative media campus is already generating demand for all manner of crafts and trades.  Why not develop the fabrication workshops at Giant’s Park for water-borne delivery direct to the studios?  Four years ago this reality was a dream script awaiting realization. 

 Will it take us another four years to start exploiting the potential?

Will we exploit the acres of open space – with sports and other tourist facilities?

Acres of space, brilliant access and massive audiences nearby – what more could the region desire for a multi-sport arena destination that would place Belfast on the tourist map and raise our game?

Will we create a new and warmer recreational destination – Belfast-sur-Mer?

Stranger things have happened.  Why no Centre Parc in NI?  Look ahead to a climate-changed world where the health of citizens reflects the health of the economy – where the rain and gloom are (with a little help from inspired architects) banished in a home-grown giant-sized leisure facility reaching out beyond the water’s edge.

The space is vast – vastly bigger than Queen’s Island – with room for many ideas.  Making the most of it requires vision, leadership, long-term perseverance and community engagement at all levels across all aspects of life.  It requires citizens and city elders to stretch their imaginations – to see beyond the obvious and make the best possible.

In this vision-seeking challenge you will not be alone.  Investors from around the world – particularly from Asia and Far East – designers from across Europe, home-grown academics, business people of every persuasion, folk of all colours and creeds, can inject ideas and create giant opportunities for a healthy future for the next generation.

As they say in Sweden, a country that really understands the need for an infrastructure to attract inward investment, “Idéer som överbrygger avstånd föds där de behöves som mest.”

Ideas are born where they are needed most.

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Notes:  This editorial is written by Groupe Intellex as a contribution to debate around possible uses for Giant’s Park Belfast (also known as the Northshore Development) and the development of a prospectus for international investors.

GCSE results, what to do with them next.

As our A-level students celebrate, commiserate and covert their collected points into higher and further education courses, we too should take stock, especially since, as I write, the younger cohort approach their day of dread this Thursday for the GCSE results and will need advice on what to do next. Being guided alone by the results is not necessarily the best thing to do.

Once again for many years running, as pointed out by Joanne Stuart, in her letter to the Belfast Telegraph last week, Northern Ireland has beaten UK averages in the proportion of A and A* in the cohort. But Joanne goes on to show that below the surface, all is not well. In the Sciences, we are beginning to fall below the national curve. The Institute of Physics, for example, made National news last week, reporting the success of the “Brian Cox Effect” with Physics back in the top 10 A-levels for the first time in nearly a decade. So not only are we below the average, we’re actually going the opposite way. Joanne argues,

“The [NI] economic future will not be achieved without the supply of STEM skills and knowledge and that has to start with the attraction of young people into STEM disciplines at school” and so “..businesses must be involved in all aspects of STEM promotion, from partnering with primary schools to develop children’s interest, through supporting careers guidance, facilitating CPD for teachers and developing skills within schools.”

I agree and that begins now, if not before, with this cohort just deciding what to do with their GCSE collection.

The next generation of AS- and A-level students will face a world, in which, practically all issues (and hence all jobs in global growth sectors) depend on the success of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. That’s why it’s front and centre of (nearly) every national and regional economic strategy. We are likely to be no different when it’s published but we haven’t bottomed it out yet. However the only dissent I have heard concern capacity and the need to continue to import STEM talent and that hardly alters the logic.

I think parents, teachers and principals have to look beyond the headline results. I offer myself as a case in point. My worst mark ever and by a long way was in first form Science. Yet it was some of the experiments, now sadly not done at school for reasons of health and safety, in which we transformed red Mercury oxide into a pool of liquid metal Mercury by blowing a Bunsen flame on to a little pile of the red powder on a depression in a block of graphite. I understand the H&S arguments but what a pity for every child not to experience directly the wonderment of the alchemists and the job that must be done for us all by business and industry.

I went on to even up the score between my subjects so that pre O-level, it was very unclear what to do. Mind you my parents, most of my teachers and definitely my principal knew what was good for me. The results supported that but I suspect that, even if they hadn’t, I would have been pushed STEMward. I think we owe it to our kids and to our economy not to let other arguments outweigh the need to get back on track with Science and Maths.