I noted with interest the floating of the rumour that an all-Ireland tourist body might be run from Northern Ireland. I don't place much credence in it myself. Northern business people sometimes imply that with their Protestant work ethic they'd show us sombrero-wearing southerners what's what if they ever ran things down here. It certainly would be interesting to see what energetic outsiders would do with a mature semi-state ethos.
But there are some careers for which you need an intimate knowledge of the local culture, and particularly the local political culture. It takes a cunning that is native to gain and keep a place in that middle ground where what can be got from the government meets the profits that can be made on the ground. You need to know where bodies are buried. You need to be in with the big gombeen families.
This can be done: northern entrepreneurs of all kinds have understood the south well enough to make spectacular killings. But could bureaucrats do it? Civil servants? Quangistes?
Above all - would they like the place well enough to chuckle at local specialities like the double- or triple-cross, the well-placed stab in the back, the commitments gone back on in a cloud of verbiage?
We take it for granted, don't we, that our real, Republic of Ireland selves are difficult for the outsider to understand? But we never think of the converse. We never think that we don't know much about the real North.
We never wonder whether one of us would be able to oversee enterprises or advise on developments or administer grants or dispose well of public monies if we got a big tourism job up in Belfast. Everybody I come across in the south has the height of confidence in their own personal opinions about Northern Ireland. But when you inquire, these opinions turn out to be founded on: television current affairs programmes; attitudes imbibed with mother's milk, and the occasional shopping trip north of the Border. Not only do a great many people know almost nothing: they don't want to know. The crucial element of liking is absent. People want to be confirmed in their prejudices. They don't even want to hear that many, many northerners enjoy and cherish their own place, just as southerners do theirs.
Take Belfast. The very word "Belfast" has an iron ring to southern ears. The idea that Belfast could be loveable is never mentioned in the south. The ordinary southerner wouldn't know how to begin to love it. Yet it is loved. I don't think there's another city in Ireland that has been written about with such tenderness. And the thing about writing is that writing is there to be read. The way into sympathy for Belfast, for those who might care to escape the bonds of ignorance and prejudice, is to read about it.
I think it is specially loved because it is looked back at across so wide a chasm. When you read Gerry Adams, say, or Danny Morrison, on Belfast childhoods, the tender evocation of street and field and family and local character is made much more poignant not just by the knowledge of what happened to those places physically, but by our consciousness of what fate had in store for the little boys who became these authors.
"This betraying violent city, irremediably home," John Hewitt called it, when he was separated from it. Almost everybody in Belfast is separated from something - the countryside the people of the city came in from, or some old hamlet that a housing estate now covers. Or an emotion now impossibly distant - a sense of security, perhaps, or unselfconscious neighbourliness. Or pride.
Some of Belfast's people - the shipyard workers, for instance - used to be proud of their city. But Northern Ireland in general and Belfast in particular have had to endure the obloquy of the rest of the world for a long time now. It has not even been able to think of itself as normal.
Normality became as lost as the fields the city was built on. No wonder there is so little ordinary reminiscence.
Titanic Town by Mary Costello is a fairly straightforward memoir, not to mention unique, as far as I know, in being about Belfast girlhoods, not boyhoods. But on the whole, even when the topography of a given part of Belfast has not changed, access to it has so changed that the whole city is a patchwork of no-go areas, which generate fables.
Ciaran Carson wrote a book called The Star Factory about a child's apprehension of the signs and portents around him in the Belfast in which he was a child.
But beware thinking that it is a trip down Memory Lane, where others could follow. I tried to use the book to search out some of the magic Belfast had for its narrator. I followed the curve of the hill down from the Falls to what were once water-meadows and marshes where a little river ran, then across to Musgrave Park, where there was a system of lakes.
There are no marshes now. The river is culverted. And although the park is a changeless municipal park on the British pattern (apart from a fortified barracks) there are even no lakes.
Van Morrison's townscape in Madame George can't be reconstructed from his cantata, but neither can a similar boyhood and youth described - by Gerard Dawe - with great plainness and lucidity. What exactly it is like to be a northerner recedes and recedes if you try to grab it.
There are three recent novels that opened things for me. They're from the opposite of my own perspectives - they're young men's novels. I think it was because of how much I had been liberated, in thinking about Belfast, by Glen Patterson's Fat Lad and Robert McLiam Wilson's Ripley Bogle - that I could contemplate going to live in the city in the first place. God knows, I'd never laughed there or loved there in actual fact. But this year, as I have accumulated my own Belfast experience, one story above all has made me feel for the little city. It is McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street which strains and bursts with an almost ecstatic appreciation of the ways of Belfast living, whether mad or dour, and for its places - pubs, bars, housing estates, leafy roads.
It even ends at the railway halt just where I live.
"Oh world, I think, aren't you pretty?" the hero at last exclaims. If you can't imagine standing on a bridge in Belfast saying something of the same kind, then you're not open to liking Belfast. If you can't like it, you won't be able to understand it. If you don't understand it, you won't be able to do effective work there. If we, from the south, can't work there, what will become of the new north-south alliance? If northerners are willing to study us, but we won't study them, they will indeed end up running tourism and everything else. Won't they? Better start reading now.