Ulster 71 Remembered Next Week

The over-50s are being challenged to 'look back' four decades to a major exhibition that focused on the first years of Stormont power.

Ulster 71 was a festival that aimed to promote Northern Ireland on the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Northern Ireland.

BBC NI will next week run a two-part feature on the prestigious event that took place during the start of NI's infamous Troubles.

Despite the number of street disturbances, bombings and deaths increasing during 1971, the festival - celebrating Northern Ireland's achievements - went ahead.

BBC NI's Newsline will broadcast the features on its main evening news programme at 6.30pm on Monday and Tuesday (27th and 28th) with interviews with those who attended the expo and those behind the concept and who 'made it all happen'.

Reporter Julie McCullough relates how specially-commissioned films that were shown at the main exhibition hall, now the Queen's University Physical Education Centre (PEC), showed the unionist-dominated government promising funding for new jobs, schools, the expansion of Aldergrove Airport and the continued development of the 'new city' of Craigavon.

It was also one of the first opportunities for wholesale 'recycling' as is the more accepted practice in today's construction environment.

As happened at the end of the Festival of Britain in 1951 - on which, in part the Ulster 71 event was based - contractors arrived on site at the conclusion and stripped all that was salvageable and could be recycled for future developments.

As at such public events now, there were fears of disruption at the exhibition site in Botanic Gardens, where a virtual village of tents and domes, containing bars, amusements and a funfair, set on the embankment where Botanic Gardens stretched down to the River Lagan.

But, apart from a few hoax bomb threats and a student protest on the opening day, Ulster 71 largely escaped unscathed from the mounting civil unrest that was engulfing NI.

It was only later, with the introduction of internment on 9 August that attendances were hit.

The lowest daily attendance, 10,000 visitors through the gates, was recorded on 13 August, but the festivities carried on until September.

However, Julie McCullough reports that a third of the population of Northern Ireland actually visited the site, which marked it out as a success, despite NI being plunged into a further 30 years of bloody violence - even as the forward-looking exhibits were being dismantled.

(BMcC)