Debate contribution: Tribeca, Belfast: Development

Debate contribution by Miss Deirdre Hargey on 30 September 2025.

MLA

Miss Deirdre Hargey

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

30 September 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Adjournment

Heading

Tribeca, Belfast: Development

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5143462

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I probably will not mention it either. I welcome the debate and thank Phillip for securing it. I had it in my notes that we debated the topic last year. I was here talking about it. When we look at the city centre, we see it as one city centre that impacts on all the communities, but, whilst the Tribeca site is, to be fair, probably the largest in the city that is lying in dereliction, other derelict parts of the city centre border various communities. In South Belfast, areas such as Ormeau Avenue and Cromac Street have large swathes of land just like those in the Tribeca scheme that have been lying derelict for decades. We need to look at those. Obviously, we have had the impact of conflict. That is one of the reasons why our city centres and cores do not have people living in them in the way that other cities do. We also have a legacy of defensive planning that segregated communities and severed them from the city and from one another. I see that when I look at maps of Belfast. Before the 1960s, Belfast worked on a grid system, but from the 1960s and 1970s, it started to become segregated and communities were severed from the city centre and from one another. I live in the Market, and we are segregated from Donegall Pass, which is segregated from Sandy Row. That continues around the city centre.

Belfast city centre is unique in that it is surrounded by inner-city working-class communities that have been there for generations, staying there through even the worst days and contributing to building our city with its unique aspects. Whatever development happens on the site and on other derelict sites, we need to make sure that it happens alongside those communities, so that they are at the heart of the engagement and consultation, and that we build up greater community and public ownership of land and assets. Matthew O'Toole mentioned the Laganside Corporation. Looking at it broadly, good things were done on the regeneration of the river — new footways and all of that — but Laganside did not engage with communities. It actually cut off communities. In one of the Laganside reports, a red line was drawn around all the communities. The multimillion-pound investment did not touch the working-class communities that needed it the most: Laganside drew a red line around them. There is one regeneration project in South Belfast, which is the reopening of the old traditional tunnels. A report by Laganside said that the tunnels were bricked up in the '90s to stop people from the Market community from coming over and breaking into cars. Whatever the way forward is, we have to make sure that communities are at the heart and that there is no class severance or segregation. That is what we saw happen in New York. Tribeca in New York was gentrified. Low-income and working-class families were pushed out of the Tribeca area, and we need to make sure that whatever scheme takes place here integrates the communities. The developer here tried to do the same thing: it tried to put the social housing in Academy Street, away from the overall development, and to have only higher-end housing options at the centre. We need to make sure that we do not segregate on the basis of social class, or have any other type of segregation. We need to make sure that we build places that are inclusive of all our communities. Developer-led regeneration on its own is not working. It has clearly failed here. We need a people-centred and people-focused approach to regeneration. It is not just down to the Communities Minister to do that; the Economy Minister, the Finance Minister, the Infrastructure Minister, the AERA Minister and others need to be involved. I would much prefer that there was a Minister-led approach to taking this forward. That could be a few Ministers taking the lead, but I would like to see some form of ministerial group being established. We did that in the city a number of years ago in the case of the Holylands intervention, and I think that something similar could be done in this case. We need to include the communities, the arts groups, the cultural groups, the universities and, obviously, the businesses in the area, because we need to make sure that the local economy, people and communities benefit. This is a huge opportunity for that to happen. We have the business improvement districts, but there is a democratic deficit to those, which I ask the Minister to look at. No communities are involved in those BIDs, yet huge swathes of public money go into them. Communities that live in and around those BIDs, and which are part of the BIDs, are not part of the decision-making processes. I ask the Minister to work in partnership with others when taking the scheme forward.

825 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:17 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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