Anybody who was shocked at the decision by Aer Lingus to shift resources from Shannon to Belfast is either being disingenuous or simply hasn't been paying attention. To a lot of things . . . the Ryanair bid, the peace process, EU policy, globalisation and the internet.

With a smiling Martin McGuinness mugging for investment announcement photocalls next to Ian Paisley, Belfast is reasserting itself as the second city of a 32-county Irish economy. Like water finding its own level, now that artificial barriers are coming down, business is flowing back in and . . . quicker than expected . . . moving to reintegrate Belfast with the rest of the island of Ireland and the world.

The sad, predictable reaction of Shannon's local vested interests demonstrates why this outcome was inevitable.

Partition of the island's economy bought time to offer the world something that would compete with Belfast. Time's up. Now the natural order reemerges.

You can have some sympathy for the people who worked so hard over the years to build up Shannon into a hub . . . for transport, for manufacturing.

Efforts to make Limerick a more liveable city, its college grown into a university.

But as we now see, in the end the efforts weren't enough. The reaction to the "threat" of an open skies deal between Europe and the US was demands to protect the Shannon stopover.

The reaction to this Aer Lingus decision is much the same: an outpouring of victimhood, blame someone else for this "disgraceful" move by a publicly-listed company. No introspection to ask, why is the world turning away from us? Just an entitlement mentality that says, the world owes me an explanation.

At its closed-door meetings on Friday led by Shannon Development, the question that should have been debated is: what is it that the Shannon region offers the world? Right now the answer is a world-class airport bringing you to. . . a sprawl of rusting warehouses and a traffic-choked road to Limerick.

Aer Lingus's decision isn't the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. Hope and history are rhyming for Belfast.

Despair and destiny are in harmony at Shannon.

Why does one place succeed while another fails?

Transport access helps, as does access to resources. But ultimately it comes down to enough people seeing clearly how the world is changing and staying ahead of the curve.

Take Chicago.

How did that place go from a field of wild garlic by Lake Michigan to the central metropolis of the North American continent in just 50 years? Another midwestern city, St Louis, had a head start and better access to the Mississippi River for transport. But Chicago became the hub.

In his 1991 book Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, author William Cronon argued that the city's development from frontier settlement to home of the first skyscrapers was as much part of the boundless self-belief and collective opportunism of its leading citizens as its natural advantages. They realised that having great access to the rest of the world wasn't an end in itself. Railroads let it become the centre of the meat-packing industry, then a grain emporium, then a lumber market. Chicago never deluded itself into thinking it could stand still and wait for the world to come to it.

It's been clear for more than a decade that the ability to move information on the internet is at least as important as moving goods by air. If Shannon's burghers really understood how to grow the region's economy, they would have focused on the key infrastructure of this century, not the last one. Instead of obsessing over Shannon Airport, they should have been building a Shannon Dataport, securing a fat pipe connecting it directly to the world's information networks. Where those pipes end, 21st century business follows.

But even here, they may already be too little, too late.

As we reported last month, Hibernia Atlantic . . . the same company that owns the undersea internet cable connecting Dublin to the world . . .

is close to announcing where it will put the next fat pipe connecting the island of Ireland to the world. In Belfast.