Initially, when planning the Irish trip, I thought that I would go to Ireland via Wales and return home via Northern Ireland and Scotland which would form an interesting "state of the union" week. I didn't do this though - the connections from Northern Ireland to Scotland are not quite as smooth as they used to be in terms of the ferry and so I thought against it - but that did not alter my desire to go to one of the more interesting parts of the UK
[1] - and the only one with a land border. And it seemed only sensible to cross that land border by train as there was a (relatively) famous train between the two capitals. I did not just want to go to Belfast though – ideally I wanted to also go to the
Giant’s Causeway as the northern coast was also recommended to me.
An early start is not
always a pleasant one. The coach tour day-trip from Dublin to Belfast AND the Giant’s Causeway and then back again was barely more expensive than the return ticket on the train and it seemed a nice, packed timetable (as you can
see here):
I won’t lie, the bit that appealed most was the “political tour” but it was merely an option. For I could also go and visit a museum dedicated to a
ship that didn’t even finish one cruise as it was so shoddily made in Belfast. Pride of the city.
The drawback with tours, as with so much of life itself, is other people. Other people can be so annoying – getting in the way, being loud, enjoying themselves. I don’t go on holiday to see other people having fun.
The benefit of tours, as with so much of life itself, is other people. Knowledge can be infectious, and good tour guides can really make things come along nicely.
One of the things that I often like about train travel is the window seat and watching scenery going by – this is kind of the same on coaches but not quite as good. It was still interesting to see the Irish scenery and roads but, fortunately, we had a tour guide too – and he regaled us with tales of his youth and made a stab at presenting the thorny history of Ireland and Great Britain. He tried hard to explain that it was not a religious divide at all but it just happened to be along religious lines
[2]. And with religious reasoning. The questions that came from the tour group, which was fairly cosmopolitan but with more than a smattering of Americans (I would say that they were greatest in volume) generally tried to use the correct terminology and usually succeeded but it all seems so illogical seen through 21st century eyes that it became much easier to use P's & C's
[3]. It was said with sufficient humour and explanation but a little line of
“Sorry for any English here, but you really will be the bad guys in this story!”
was jokily true. He did also mention that when it came to their post-crash time of need, the UK did show themselves to be friends indeed – and that they don’t forget that either.
In terms of difficulty, crossing the border was as
uneventful as taking the 50 bus from Maastricht to Aachen, with no checks or border control. I was a little confused by this actually as neither is part of the Schengen zone and it meant that I had not shown my passport at all on the trip.
Driving into Belfast felt like a steady urbanisation of the roadside rather than a strict delineation, and we went to the Titanic Quarter where the new museum was based. Here, we were split into those that wanted to go to the Titanic museum and those that wanted to have the political taxi tour – and it seemed a pretty obvious split visually from how the tourists split. The taxis were black cabs and so were nice and spacious enough for a group of 5 – I was with two pairs of tourists from the United States.
I didn't really know much about Belfast and, as a child, the troubles affected me in London mainly through the actions of the “gentleman bombers
[4]” of the IRA. I knew that Belfast was “
troubled” at the time, I knew that even recently there had been
car bombs in Northern Ireland (surprisingly, this was not mainstream news – terrorist bombs, detonated or not, would normally be newsworthy, I had thought) but I was not really aware of the makeup of the city or the day-to-day effects of the dispute. The Good Friday agreement was almost two decades ago so I was not expecting a scarred city, as such, but a heritage of the troubles and a historical view of it.
First we were driven to some of the wall murals, which reminded me a little of Berlin, painted near the divide – in fact I was kind of surprised to learn that the city was still divided. We were on the Republican side (not Catholic, Republican) on the Falls Road which had quite a history of its own.
Just beyond the murals we were driven to, there was a large open gate on the road and the pavement. Beyond that gate was another gate – a double gate to keep it safe with a little
DMZ between them – and then Shankhill Road on the Loyalist (not Protestant, Loyalist) side. This, I thought, was pretty interesting - a nice little relic of the recent past. What was sort of revelatory to me was to find out how recent a past it was – last night and they were also due to be closed later that day as they are every day. This was not a relic of the past – it was present day. I genuinely did not know this happened, the gates are closed and this portion of the city is divided along the Orwellian sounding “
Peace Line”. It isn't completely divided as you can go around the gates but it is
still seen as necessary to keep the gates shut in the evenings. Our taxi driver was pretty engaging on the topic and he explained that people on either side of the line did mix in other parts of the city and at work but not here. The same people that are divided here would be mixed elsewhere – although that sounded a little too positive for my liking with the fact of it being that the gates were still needed – and from about 5 in the afternoon. The murals were also not pure, preserved in aspic, tourism – they were fresh (including some anti-Tory ones too) and they would continue to be provocative as the equivalents would be on the other side. There were many referencing
Bobby Sands, for instance. This did not seem a healthy situation at all and I had heard a few years ago that Belfast had the most discriminatory population of Europe though I cannot remember where that was, but I think the euphemism is that it is
socially conservative.
My fellow tourists mainly talked amongst themselves but I did join in sometimes. I was asked how I felt as a Brit hearing all this stuff (inclusive of all the Irish commentary too) as it was all a little anti-English. I responded that what happened in the past was not, as far as I was concerned, a question of nationality per se, it was the oppressed versus the oppressors, and that the poor and dispossessed in England would have far more in common with the Irish
[5]. I also mentioned my memories of bombs in London and bomb scares on a regular basis – it was part of my childhood. The other point which got me a little annoyed was when one of the ladies in the cab was, proudly, telling us all how she used to go to St Patrick’s Day parades in Boston and donate money.
“Oh, we always donated a lot.”
“That money founds its way via bombs to London.”
An awkward silence followed, but, frankly, not awkward or long enough for my liking and it didn’t really cause a response. I don’t think she wanted to be funding terrorism,, and she had been – but the lack of any comment at all suggested that she didn’t really realise it. I did smile as I said it, maybe it wasn't understood.
We drove through the Unionist side too and there was some provocative murals here too – aggrandising some killers. Our driver then took us to the parts of the city without gates but still separated along the “peace line” by peace wall.
Walls for Peace.
These peaceful walls were rather tall and quite imposing bringing their own atmosphere into otherwise normal looking parts of a city. The walls we saw had three parts to them which were an indication of the heightening of tensions and efforts over the years. The original wall was not tall enough at (2m or so) and so it was added to to stop projectile attacks. And the next part was also added for the same reason – not particularly peaceful sounding. At a total height of approx 7.6m, some do still try and chuck things over and you can see quite a bit of detritus at the bottom of the walls.
Some house even had bomb blast protection over their gardens, a little further along from her (I felt uncomfortable taking photos but I think you can see on
google streetview here).
After meeting up back at the Titanic quarter, we made our way to the Giant’s Causeway and the Carrick A Rede Rope Bridge. On the way, we stopped at a castle that is used in Game of Thrones called "
Dun Luce Castle". Game of Thrones seems a significant element of the apparent tourism push in Northern Ireland. I am not sure how I feel about this but a similar thing has been successful for
Lord of The Rings and New Zealand from what I hear. All were stunning places but there is not much I can really add about them – except photos.
1. The terminology around Britain and Ireland is a little confusing and fraught with the risk of massive offence. Was there a deliberate error in even that statement?↩
2. I find it interesting that we are at pains to say that this is not religious – this is not Christian fundamentalism backed up with explosives. It maybe a little simplistic to do this, but it is the same the world over and when it is not Christianity – it will quickly be labelled religious then.↩
3. It also reminds me of some of my old training sessions when learning about investment banking and the way trades worked. The trainers would explain, in detail, about the complexities and the correct words to use and what they meant. As the Q&A rolled around, they would try to avoid all comment about analogies to gambling until enough questions came and it was just the easiest way to answer it – we bet on this and if it pays off, we win big. And, the house always wins. Unless they have really messed up their credit risk calculations in which case they lose. But are reimbursed by the government and everyone else pays for it in a beautiful insurance scheme without premiums for the participants – which is, eerily, kind of similar to the CDS pyramid that collapsed...↩
4. A wonderful turn of phrase from Stewart Lee on the 2005 London Al-Qaeda bombings:
“Who are they, these inhuman bombers that strike at the very heart of our society with no respect for human life, without even the courtesy of a perfunctory warning? It makes you nostalgic, doesn't it, for the good old days of the IRA. ’Cause they gave warnings, didn't they? They were gentleman bombers, the finest terrorists this country’s ever had. We’ll not see their like again. Let’s have a little clap for the IRA . . . ’Cause the IRA, they were decent British terrorists. They didn't want to be British. But they were. And, as such, they couldn't help but embody some fundamentally decent British values”.↩
5. The rich and powerful exploiting difference to divide and cause pain for the poor is hardly something we have moved away from. And, as then, we still kind of enjoy being whipped up to hate people we don’t know about but some rich people have told us to hate.↩
