Mary Burgess replies to Dennis Kennedy's argument that Belfast is not worthy of being named European City of Culture in 2008

There is a lot more to the cultural history of Belfast than theTitanic and the rubber tyre. The old idea - actually a bit of a decoy - that Belfast's artists have been its inventors and engineers, that it has never produced its share of poets, playwrights and musicians, has held sway for decades, but it has little basis in fact.

The city should see its bid to become European City of Culture in 2008 as, in part, an opportunity to reacquaint itself with some of its own "cultural disappeared". These are the Belfast-based writers and artists who did such important and innovative work for the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890s and the first two decades of the 20th century. Who are they? Why have they been forgotten, when it seems that every last Dublin revivalist, however minor a figure, has a Collected Works and a mention in a Literary Pub Tour?

A reading of much of the published criticism of the past 25 years leaves one with a sense that a Northern dimension to Irish culture sprang fully formed into existence in 1968, and that the Butler Education Act was the most significant event in the cultural history of the North. Of course the first did not, and the second was not. The most important event in the North - at least in the 20th century - was the 1920 Better Government of Ireland Act, that not only ushered in new state divisions in Ireland, but also began an accompanying (and disastrous) cultual partitionism. One of the results of this long process has been the disappearance of many Northern cultural figures from the literary history of Ireland.

The fact is that many of the most important and innovative names in the Irish Revival hailed from "the philistine province": George Sigerson, AE, Joseph Campbell, Eoin Mac Neill, Alice Milligan, Ethna Carbery, Rutherford Mayne, Gerald McNamara, Frances Bigger and James Cousins. Alice Milligan, an early and important influence on Yeats, was the first Irish playwright of the Revival to write on a purely Gaelic theme; Maude Gonne was so impressed by the Belfast newspaper, The Shan Van Vocht that she immediately set up her own version, L'Irlande Libre. Read some of Joseph Campbell's poems of the 1900s today, and you'll hear the ghosts of a lyric by John Montague or Seamus Heaney. Speak to an old woman in Belfast about the productions of Gerald MacNamara's forgotten masterpiece Thompson in Tir n'an Og that she saw numerous times in her youth - the play was so often performed to delighted Belfast audiences and remembering it will raise a smile of recognition and nostalgia for a time when going to the theatre was something that ordinary people did.

Long before the Troubles provoked the extraordinary literary efflorescence which emerged in the North in the 1960s, Belfast's turn-of-the-century writers were engaging with issues - sectarianism, labour unrest, urban violence - that their Southern counterparts had the luxury of ignoring. Most importantly, perhaps, these writers were vehemently anti-sectarian. In Belfast, the cultural realm has historically been one of the few areas in which the old hatreds and historical certainties have been jettisoned, in which new configurations might happen - and this remains so today.

Dennis Kennedy is quite mistaken to suggest that the European City of Culture programme is geared towards the promotion of "high culture" alone, and that it is really only appropriate for those cities with a proven heritage in ballet, opera, classical music, theatre. Ireland's third city, Cork, was successful in its bid not long ago, and it certainly has a less distinguished cultural history than Belfast. What is required here is not begrudgery, however, but imagination, and a concept of culture which is capacious and inclusive. The purpose of the nomination for European City of Culture is not merely to support and extend a city's existing cultural infrastructure, but also (as in the case of Prague in 2000) to unearth "the hidden and sensed dimensions of a city". A further key development in the City of Culture philosophy, for the new "Europe of the Regions", is the idea that the chosen city is also expected to represent its locale - and with its long history of regional awareness, Belfast is a perfect choice.

THIS city's traumatic history is now giving way to an era in which its long-ignored cultural past can once again be a part of Belfast's life and future. Poetry makes nothing happen, indeed, but it can break old moulds. And Belfast's writers have been trying to do so for well over a century. There is wisdom in the words of some of these forgotten artists. A writer who could give King Billy the following lines in his play No Surrender - performed in Belfast in 1929 - should not only be re-published, but should be seen again in the theatre:

King William: Citizens and Citizenesses of the six counties. Three hundred years ago, I invented "civil and religious liberty". Today I ask you if you know what it means? Do you practice it? Do you respect - do you even tolerate each other's religious beliefs?

Mary Burgess is lecturer in modern Irish literature, at Keough Institute for Irish Studies, at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana