Irish eyes smiling in Belfast

The spotlit Malmaison restaurant was nearly deserted, its tables adorned with the glitzy favors known as Christmas crackers. My friend Denise immediately snapped her paper champagne bottle. The bang of the explosion rattled the windows like a car bomb.

As confetti fluttered to the floor, the unflappable young maitre d' immediately swooped over.

"Madam," he said, "NEVER do that in Belfast."

Our resulting roar of laughter was the guilty, hand-over-mouth variety. But the twinkling Belfastians laughed right along. Despite the 30 years of troubles they've survived, or perhaps because of them, their wit is subversive, mordant, irrepressible -- and irresistible.

Belfast in the winter is dark. But the mood is light. Jobs and E.U. investment are giving this Lagan River city a face transplant. A waterfront best known for its shipbuilding past is bristling with new cultural attractions. International yuppies have snapped up ?200,000 ($305,000) riverview condos. The armored British transports on Victoria Street have been converted into party limousines, zipping the glitterati on their clubbing rounds.

Some older Belfastians view the turnaround with tart appreciation.

"Oh, the Malmaison," cracked one local of my chic, dim and desperately moody hotel. "I hear they give you antidepressants when you check in." But new hotels are a clue that curious tourists, American and otherwise, are finding this city of 300,000 both trendy and welcoming. Belfast's close-in airport now offers direct flights from the United States, and cruise ships are docking downtown.

Even in West Belfast, there's a calm, morning-after-the-argument feel. The street murals there, propaganda for both Loyalists and Republicans, were my first destination on a mild December day. "The Troubles created curiosity," local actor Ken McIlhone told me. "Tourists want to see it."

The Shankill Road, now an unremarkable shopping street, runs alongside an ugly concrete wall. Before the peace accords were signed in 1998, it attempted to separate warring neighborhoods. Now, fallen into a gray, graffittied crumble reminiscent of Berlin, it's called the Peace Wall, with "Saoirse" (freedom) scribbled alongside Basque separatist symbols, caricatures of President Bush, and other spray-painted art.

Safe? Hugh Rice, a retired Catholic school teacher, assured me the area was -- despite occasional headlines, like those of last September, of what Rice dryly downplayed as "recreational rioting."

"You know the kind," he said dismissively. "'Here comes the ice cream van! Pick up a brick!'"

Trust has been hard to build, and frequently derailed. In December, a member of Sinn Fein, the political party linked to the IRA, admitted he'd spied on the Northern Irish parliament for the British. The resulting outcry proved again that a conflict that took 3,000 lives so recently is impossible to forget. But the natives -- especially the generation in integrated schools and new jobs -- seem willing to forgive.

Apartment, a chic pub opposite the echt-Victorian City Hall, makes both a design and political statement with its decor: glass walls. The forward-looking decor, impossible during The Troubles, appeals to the Euro-spirited young patrons bored with Belfast's Big Bang image.

The surrounding city center, with the exception of the unlucky Europa Hotel, was always considered neutral turf. Now it's building up, with four-star restaurants and three-level clubs. We enjoyed succulent roast chicken at Cayenne, celebrity chef Paul Rankin's Shaftsbury Square bistro, and duck dumplings at Zen, an Asian fusion restaurant with round orange booths that felt like a set from a James Bond movie.

The new waterfront courthouse, a few blocks east, overlooks a lissome 40-foot statue known as the Thanksgiving Beacon. Sea gulls wheel around the young aluminum angel, dubbed "the doll on the ball" by the verse-mad Irish. She's raising a hoop overhead as she guards the new Laganside development. Thirty years ago, she'd have been holding her nose.

Like Pittsburgh, Belfast has rebuilt its decrepit downtown waterfront. But instead of conquering the smoke, Belfast first had to tackle The Smell. The tidal surges of the Lagan exposed acres of muddy river bottom so polluted that the area reeked for hours each day. When the city controlled the river with floodgates, it came up smelling -- well, not like a rose, but like a brisk North Sea breeze. In sight of Waterfront Hall (where native son Van Morrison recently played two deliriously sold-out shows) looms the Odyssey Centre, an ambitious gray-and-red behemoth housing a shopping mall, science museum, cinema multiplex and an arena for the Belfast Giants.

Belfast's deep-seated sectarianism extended to rival football clubs, with predictable free-for-alls after matches. Its newest professional team deliberately changes the subject, the sport and the setting. The ice-hockey Giants play sold-out matches, and the club has attracted a genuine citywide following: a peaceful hat trick.

Ferries still dock in the Weir, but they're losing their role as the only link to the rest of the U.K. Billboards hawk discount airfares of ?5 ($7.63) to Glasgow, just over the horizon; the ferry lines fight back with offers of ?26 ($39.68) car round-trips to the Glasgow IKEA. Two sad old giants survey what used to be thriving shipyards: Samson and Goliath, the cranes that built the Titanic, have nothing to do now but wait for a vaunted ?100 million ($152 million) redevelopment.

I'd like to return in five years, to see if tourist development creates a neighborhood from empty docklands. Projects will take the theme of the Titanic, whose construction here in 1911 is still a source of civic pride -- and the inevitable wry joke.

"Well mate," goes the old saw, "She was all right when she left here."

Belfast's art scene includes several new galleries. Pop concert offerings have become more international -- Bonnie Raitt will tour Belfast in April -- but there are plenty of places to hear "thumping" Irish music. At Fibber McGee's, two blocks from the Ormeau galleries, a band called Brier segued from traditional fiddle tunes to Kenny Rogers.

In Laganside, a local artist has proposed an art event that would tie the city's Titanic past to its peaceful future. She'll tow a giant Arctic iceberg from the North Atlantic, up the Lagan, and into the weir -- past the new buildings, the old cranes, and the young residents who are ready to tweak their history.

Man, that's cold, you might say. To me, it's subversive and funny: quintessentially Belfast.

(Christine O'Toole is a freelance writer from Mt. Lebanon. She is a contributor to "Travelers Tales: Prague and the Czech Republic," published  by Travelers Tales Guides.)