Marie-Thérèse McGivern

The following is a verbatim transcript of Marie-Thérèse's presentation to the conference. Introduction
What we've learnt today is that the more empirical work we do, and the better our statistical foundations, the better decisions we can make for Belfast. Last year's conference success was built on two pillars, the excellent work of the researchers (and that's been carried on from last year) and the eager participation of the delegates.

Over the last year we have been overwhelmed by the response of all sectors to the work we've started. The public sector have been great partners in the work and the community and voluntary sector have also worked relentlessly with us this year, but I would also like to add a special mention of the vitality of the private sector in their involvement with us in the following year. I do believe (and I think all the research indicates this) that the private sector is one of the crucial keys to the successful development of this city and the region and therefore I welcome that participation and hope that it will continue.

The core of the State of the City idea was to bring together the key brains and energies of the city, and to (at least on an annual basis) find a collective way for us to create a new future for the city. Peter Drucker said the only way to foretell the future is to actually create it, and it is the energies in this room which can together create the future for Belfast.

Background the State of the City
I want to explain the background to this part of the conference and do a quick recoup on how we got here and where we hope to go today. The 'To Do' list is the core of today's conference and it emerged from last year's work which created an 18 point priority list for the city. Since the initiation of the 'To Do', a series of sub-actions have been added as a result of your responses over the last year.

The conference report provides a detailed listing of the actions although it should be reminded that the actions themselves didn't grow out of the aether; they emerged from the work which we commissioned in the previous year. That work included research by Professor Michael Parkinson who gave us a very challenging brief for the issues which need to be tackled in the city. These issues related to population, to the question around our productivity and our over dependence on the public sector, issues related to employment, our skills problem with very high skills at one end and very low skills at the other, our continuing concentrations of poverty and deprivation in the city, our need to become more connected, our need for better R & D and innovation and also the difficulties which we had with governance.

On the master planning side, questions on the attractiveness of the city gave us answers related to population, but also on the enhancement of the city; the need for a more dynamic city centre; the need to connect to dynamic neighbourhoods; the need to look for new industries and the land to develop them; the need to realise the environmental assets which we have; and the need to simplify governance in the city.

Governance
Dr Peter Tyler then added his view on how well we are governed and his view was that we weren't terribly well governed at all, that effectively 'it was no way to run a railway'. We have strategy overload, partnership overload, no commonly agreed framework for the development of the city, silent mentality and effectively no real champion or champions for the city. So the eighteen critical priorities for the city cover all those issues raised. We now have aims and objectives around population, deprivation, urban design and its quality, the nature of the city centre, public transportation and arterial routes, entrepreneurship, R & D, our neighbourhoods and the question of Belfast as a regional driver.

The creation of the To Do list
During the interim period, having started with the 'To Do' list, we then asked last year's delegates to examine their own plans and pass these on to us. We have taken those plans and tried to these plans into the 18 point framework and have taken a sample of some 50 organisations; there may be some of you in the room whose organisation hasn't been looked at but we'll add that to our list. There are currently 87 strategies (it was 55 strategies last year). We have examined these strategies (and again we apologise in advance if your strategy is missing because we suspect there are more than 87 currently operating in the city) and in total we found roughly 382 significant linkages between your own organisations' priorities and the priorities on the 'To Do' list. So we've actually got a reasonable fit in terms of those 18 priority areas because they are pretty much hitting a lot of the work which we are doing individually as organisations. What tends to be missing in the Belfast story is the joining up factor of bringing those altogether.

Now what we have achieved to date is a situation where over 40 organisations have now endorsed the 'To Do' list in Belfast. We recognise in the Council that this is a major step forward; what we need for the city to succeed is a shared agenda and this could begin to be the basis of that shared agenda in the city. Over the last year the Council has sought that endorsement with you and we have achieved this to date. Today what we want to do is seek further clarification on this 'To Do' list and ask, 'Does the list in front of you now capture the needs of Belfast at this time and do they still form a common platform for action in the city?' We need now to take into consideration the research from Graham and Neil and interrogate further the list and see whether we need to add anything else.

There has been a very enthusiastic response to the concept of the 'To Do' list which to a certain extent has surprised us, but we're very happy that it has happened. We have received endorsement from a very large and wide-ranging group of organisations in the city and we hope that this can grow each year as we move forward. This is the first time in my experience in working in Belfast, and I've been working here for many, many years, that I have ever seen an endorsement of one single thing by so many different organisations. The Council started this as a process, we did not have the answers, but what we were prepared to do was ask the questions. We wanted and sought collaboration and alliances for change and this indicates that something is changing in this city, that the tide, while not being held back, is at least beginning to turn slightly. We talked about imagining a new destination last year and I think that the power of imagination is perhaps one of Belfast's strongest tools in the way forward.

We reviewed 55 strategies and this year we have even more, so we are seeing the huge energy required for all of those and how that huge energy could literally be awesome if we work together around a common cause with a common focus. Despite the good news, I think the results of the work we've done this year show that we still have a long way to go. There is much duplication continuing and gaps where there is less work being done in particular areas than there should be. Confusion therefore still remains and certainly complexity is very, very large. We know it doesn't have to be this way, we do have choices; other cities have coped with bigger issues and bigger problems and moved forward. If we believe we can make a difference then I believe we can. Last year we challenged the Belfast blame culture, we agreed that no one of us in this room is responsible for this design, but we can do something about it, so we're not going to blame other people or each other for it. But we do need to collectively realise that the answer and solution is in this room, so we also challenged complacency. We agreed that we were part of the solution and we need to find the courage and choose to move forward.

Lastly, we challenged the Belfast mindset and we agreed last year that hope isn't a strategy. We agreed (with Einstein) that the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. And so this year we need to turn and move ourselves forward and ask how we can make the list work for Belfast. We have together done hugely important work, if each of us individually examined what our organisation has done, it has been a massive contribution to the changes in Belfast.

Making the list work
But we now need to move with the commitment which the State of the City unleashed last year and ask, "How do we deliver the vision, how do we start to move that 'To Do' list into a very pertinent and dynamic document for the way forward?" That is the fundamental question and the crux of the questions we're asking today. We know these are the prerequisites for the successful city, they are prerequisites for revolutionary times and leadership in our view remains perhaps the key to unlocking the potential which we have in the city. There are fundamental principles around leadership and one of the issues which I'd like you to look at today, is the fact that many of our correspondents as we moved through the year made the point to us, that the 18 point list has no issue particularly related to leadership in the city. It may well therefore be something that you wish to consider later in the day as to whether we should add a 19th or even a 20th point which talks about the need and issues required around leadership.

In summary then, what I'm asking you to do today is to come together and commit to taking this process further. We want you to commit further to Belfast and through Belfast to the whole region of Northern Ireland. So I look forward today to the unleashing of the collective genius, power and magic which is in this room all harnessed for the greater good of Belfast.

Marie Therese McGivernMarie-Thérèse McGivern
Marie-Thérèse McGivern is Director of Development for Belfast City Council, heading up a department created in 1999 to combine economic development, arts and tourism activities of the Council with the physical development and management of the Council's estates (including the Gasworks and the industrial estates at Duncrue and Balmoral.)

She had previously worked for the Northern Ireland Civil Service as a secondee to the urban regeneration initiative known as 'Making Belfast Work', working as a team leader in West Belfast. She set up and headed the Central Policy, Planning and Research Unit for the initiative.