Today we encounter Titanic almost on a daily basis, but the sadness of the ship’s lost souls essentially belongs to the past. However, it’s not the distant past where archeologists feel safe.  For many, especially here in Belfast, Titanic is not quite history, but rather is in limbo or a time warp between the present and the past.  The debates and controversy generated by the recovery and display of Titanic artefacts and personal effects recovered from the seabed are a reflection of changing attitudes to the Titanic dead.
  In a retrospective way, the tragedy of the Belfast-built Titanic can be seen as mirroring that of the city itself.  But today, despite many unresolved problems, there is a spirit of hope abroad.  New visions for the future include the reclamation of a proud Titanic past with the promotion of Belfast as a rising tourist destination in the international Titanic pilgrimage industry.
  As a world-wide brand fusing profit, pleasure and memorialisation, Titanic is now being celebrated in her homeland as an important signifier and agent of economic, social and cultural regeneration.  No longer in denial, past and present achievements are being linked together and with unerring commercial sensibility their hoped-for success is being projected into the future.
  Clearly in this part of the world, the emblematic Titanic is the carrier of a whole complex of messages and meanings in the past and in the present.  Here the ship’s metaphorical status is multi-dimensional and allows for the existence of many different kinds of Titanic- from the real to the reconstructed, from the remembered to the the imaginary and from substance to pastiche.  Yet the core symbolism of Titanic’s disaster remains and is not difficult to decode.  Essentially the cataclysmic sinking of Titanic is a paradigm for the inevitable failure of flaunted technology, the fragility of human ambition, the shipwreck of dreams and the transience of life.
  A transfigured Titanic has returned to Belfast and is now refitting ‘at home’ in the city.  She can be encountered across the town, from Titanic Quarter to the Tourist Board and from Titanic exhibitions to Titanic tours.  But some of the passengers and crew for this new Titanic heritage voyage have noticed the absence of a captain on the bridge and even more scary- there’s no-one conducting the band!