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The MAC opened in 2012 and is a centre for art, theatre and dance.
The Metropolitan Arts Centre, usually referred to as the MAC, is an arts venue in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter and is home to all kinds of exhibitions, theatre performances, experimental works.
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Interactive science museum aimed at younger children. Booking essential.
Titanic and her sister-ship Olympic were too big to dock in Cherbourg, so in 1911 two tenders were built to transfer passengers, baggage and mail. SS Nomadic was the more luxurious and took first and second-class passengers, while SS Traffic took third class. During World War I they served as auxiliary military vessels then resumed as tenders for Olympic, until 1934 when Cherbourg harbour was enlarged. They saw further military service in World War II, after which the slow, accident-prone Traffic was scrapped. Nomadic was reprieved because bombed-out Cherbourg was again unable to receive large liners, so she tendered to the likes of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth before retiring in 1968. After a spell in Paris as a floating restaurant she looked destined for scrap, but a charitable trust brought her to Belfast for restoration.
For a century this was the "T-word" in Belfast, even more than the Troubles, an unwelcome reminder of a catastrophe reflecting badly on the city. This exhibition, opened in 2012 in a striking modern building, has revitalised a whole city quarter and rescued RMS Titanic as a source of local pride, for its construction and its crew. You progress through the metal-bashing boomtown of Victorian and Edwardian Belfast, through the design, construction by Harland & Wolff, fitting out and test sailings, to events of the first and final voyage. Titanic left Southampton on 10 April 1912, picked up passengers by tender from Cherbourg and Cork, and sailed out into the Atlantic. She left behind a confident Britain that daily expected news of Captain Scott's triumphant return from the South Pole. The museum shows excerpts from films about her sinking, gashed by an iceberg that calved from a Greenland glacier about the same day the ship was launched. One myth that is nixed is the 1997 James Cameron film treatment, where patrician British officers near-as-dammit hold the Irish 3rd-class passengers' heads underwater while the gilded rich are helped to safety and the band plays on. In truth one group had even worse survival than 3rd class, and that was the ship's crew, many of them Irish. The final part of the exhibition has submersible images of the wreck, which lies in two pieces 12,500 ft / 3800 m deep off Newfoundland.
Eileen Hickey Museum
Museum in a former mill depicting the history of Republicanism in Belfast. Eileen Hickey was a Provisional IRA organiser within Armagh prison and amassed a great collection of artifacts and memorabilia relating to her side of the conflict. This is the half-history where 1200 Catholic civilians died in Belfast during the Troubles. You have to cross the city to the Orange Heritage Centre for the half-history where 600 Protestant civilians died - and both are correct.