Spoken with a raw Belfast accent, “terrorism” and “tourism” sound like the same word. Handy, as the city seems to have swapped one for the other in recent years. And it’s possible to experience a spot of both simultaneously, as I found a couple of weekends ago.
After watching (in my case, guiltily) a boisterous crowd of SportRelief runners bounding through the smartened-up city centre,we got into a taxi by City Hall, and asked to be taken to Divis Tower, on the Falls Road. The driver didn’t move at first; then he turned round and stared at us. “Where did ye say?”
I checked my notebook, and repeated it. I asked: “Do you know the place?”
“Do I know the place? I lived there with me gran for me forst ten years. But what do youse want with it?” He was incredulous, and faintly aggressive, I thought, though that impression may have been exaggerated by his unkempt appearance. His swarthy complexion and raucous feather-cut made him look like a yucca plant.
“We’re meeting someone there. Someone who’s going to show us around.”
Again, incredulity. “Show you round? Who’s going to show you round there? Someone y’know?”
“Er, no. Some ex-Republican prisoner”.
He blinked a couple of times, half opened his mouth, then shut it again. For a moment or two he said nothing. He turned to face the front, then immediately turned back towards us, as if trying to decide his next best move.
Rather unexpectedly, he peered down at my feet and said: “Well…. well at least y’ve got y’runners on. You may need them…… are you sure about this…?”
M and I glanced at each and chuckled slightly nervously, but we weren’t going to pass this up. I’d been looking forward to it for too long.
I’m running out of places in these islands to visit for the first time; Northern Ireland was one of the few I’d not got round to. Flew into ‘George Best Airport’ on Friday evening. Even brought my running stuff with me, though the heat and humidity of the city, and the imagined smell of the Guinness, made the prospects of a jog remote. On my way to the Hilton, I said to the taxi driver: “I saw Best play a few times when I was a kid”. A guaranteed ice-breaker, surely? Well no, the ice remained intact, along with the driver’s silence. I later learned that not everyone there thinks much of the man. Best may have been a great footballer but he was also “a drunk, a wifebeater and a Protestant”, as someone said to me later, when explaining the antipathy of some.
The second taxi driver — the yucca — was evidently a Catholic. Anyone brought up in Divis Flats on the Falls Road couldn’t be anything else. My hunch was probably right — that his scare tactics were intended to generate business for him rather than act as a genuine warning to us. Belfast cabbies are in the vanguard of terrorism tourism. It can’t be called ‘big business’ exactly but there is evidently a growing interest in seeing those places that filled British news bulletins for 30 years or so. On the Catholic side, the Falls Road and Springfield Roads. Beyond the ‘Peace Line’, the Shankill and Crumlin Roads.
Whoever suggested calling it the Peace Line had a sense of humour, or was clinically Panglossian. It’s a barbed-wire-topped fence, designed to keep the two communities apart. At 40 feet high, it prevents most hand-propelled missiles from reaching the other side. It was one of the first things we saw as we stood outside the 1960s block of flats on the Falls Road, waiting for our guide to appear. We felt rather conspicuous, it has to be said, and were glad when he finally turned up.
The walk was arranged through Coiste which offers “Tour guides from the political ex-prisoner community [who will] take tourists on an in-depth journey of their community. Experience Republican and Loyalist viewpoints in the form of authentic tours delivered by those people who are shaping their communities.”
As you can see, they like the word “community”, and it has to be said that our three hour walk around the Catholic West Belfast illustrated the meaning of the word in a way I’d not seen before. This is a traditional working class community, the like of which has been all but expunged from England now. In the narrow
terraced streets, kids played in the middle of the road; people constantly waved and called out to David, our guide, and to each other as they passed; neighbours stood in their doorways and chatted. People actually know each other here, in a way I’d not experienced since I lived in a small cul-de-sac in suburban Manchester, around 25 years ago.
The community thing partly explains The Troubles. The curse of inherited religious allegiance is bad enough, but combined with such neighbourly intimacy, rationality goes out the window.
David, however, was a class apart, and a class above, most of the people we came across. Meeting this earnest, articulate young guy, professional politico, was a depressing experience. The 3 hour walk around the area reminded me what a moral minestrone the Troubles were, yet here was a bloke enviably insulated from the inconvenience of self-doubt. His mother’s knee, as it were, was the only teacher he ever needed. All else was liberal BBC fluff, or bigoted cant from the other side of the flaming barricades.
To be fair to our guide, it was never marketed as anything but a Republican-skewed presentation. I suppose it would be excessively naive to hope for an even-handed tour in this most polarised of cities, and if I was to have a weighted history, my own personal culture would have chosen the Republican tour. I’m a nailed-on atheist, but my immediate ancestry is Irish Catholic. For the record, I think the moral case for a united, independent Irish state barely needs stating. It’s the 21st century; imperialism is passé and even if you could argue that it brought benefits in the distant past (think India), those days are surely long gone.
For me, this is the tragedy of modern Irish Republicanism. Think about the era in which the Troubles ignited. 1969. The Cold War. Did we think that within 12 years or so, the USA and the Soviet Union would be becoming so fraternal? 1969. Did we predict that less than 20 years later, we’d be watching giggling students hacking holes through the Berlin Wall while soldiers stood by? Think of South African apartheid in 1969. Did we think that within 11 years, Nelson Mandela would be released from prison, and that a couple of years later he’d be president of a united and optimistic nation?
Intractable disputes and ancient enmities were resolved during this era. If even apartheid and communism could be relinquished by their beneficiaries, then who’s to say that the spirit of perestroika couldn’t have floated across the Irish Sea? Irish Nationalism might well have triumphed, if only….
If only. Perhaps the two most futile words in the language. If only some bright spark hadn’t had the idea of bombing pubs and shopping centres in England, the story may have had a different ending. But this cataclysmic tactic was adopted, and all hope of a united Ireland was defenestrated. It actually became almost impossible to have a rational discussion about the ‘Irish Question’. You’d have had more success selling the benefits of paedophilia than a British withdrawal from Ulster.
The Troubles was a multi-headed monster. Popular analysis likes to simplify the problem, however, so it becomes Catholics v Protestants; Irish v English; army and police v civilians.
And then there were all those TLAs: IRA, RUC, UVF, UDA…
Plus the others: B Specials, Sinn Fein, INLA, the Civil Rights Movement, the Orangemen, Nationalists, Unionists, Republicans, Loyalists.
Crikey.
With all these different club ties flapping around and getting tangled up with each other, how the devil could you be sure you were killing the right bloke?
Back to the present: the information avalanche began where we stood and first met our guide, beneath the bleak, elderly modernism of the Divis Tower. Above our heads, on the side of this peeling apartment block, we were shown the plaque to mark the occasion in 1969 when two kids were shot dead “in their beds” by the army. The top two floors of the block had been the West Belfast HQ of British Military Intelligence. You could understand why. It was a tremendous vantage point. Everywhere we walked in and around the Falls Road, the top of Divis Tower was clearly visible. And if we could see them, then they could see us.
From there, we wandered up the Falls Road past the first lot of wall paintings. David was educated enough to call them murals though most other people we met referred to them as “muriels”, seemingly without irony. A great tribute to the enduring power of the malapropistic Hilda Ogden, I thought.
The murals on both sides of the peace line, or “interface”, are famous. I can understand why they are regarded as a spectacle, but the truth is that they are crude in both realisation and message. I knew I was being invited to admire them, but if I’m truthful, they embarrassed me.
It was like a flashback to Soviet Russia with its giant paintings of Stalin. What’s it all about? Propaganda of course, but unsubtle and uncompromising and intellectually shrivelling.
Why do they do this?
On this side of the fence, the paintings are clearly influenced by the sort of bible art that Catholic kids get used to, and which I found awfully demoralising when I was growing up. Essentially, here we have Bobby Sands depicted as Jesus Christ no less, radiating beneficence; his handsome, David Ginola-like face decorated with that distant, innocent, loving smile you see on the frontispiece of My First Bible. It was Catechism all over again. (Miss Sits In Her Chair Every Time At Catechism — my first mnemonic.)
On this theme, it struck me again and again through the walk, and through the weekend as I thought about it some more, how childlike many of the players seem and therefore — it has to be said — how very childish the dispute, and the level of debate, sometimes seems to be: They started it. It’s not our fault.
We stopped outside a house with a plaque commemorating the deaths of four men who blew themselves up while constructing a bomb. Our guide murmured something reverential, while M and I looked at each other, thinking the same thing. You could hardly imagine a neater piece of poetic justice than this really. It was hard to avoid the image of four blokes with roll-ups hanging out of their mouths, fiddling about with a bunch of bare wires. “I wonder what would happen if we connected this one to that one…..”
Then it was up the hill to the notorious Milltown Cemetery, where we were given a matter-of-fact tour of the path where Michael Stone shot and killed three mourners at the funeral of the would-be Gibraltar bombers. For some extraordinary footage of this incident, click here.
We were invited to gaze upon the plots of the hunger strikers, including Bobby Sands, and other Republican luminaries like Mairead Farrell and Dan McCann. In a pretty bizarre chain of events, at the funeral of the people killed by Stone, a week or so later, two British soldiers were dragged from their car and shot. It was a disastrous episode for all sides, and encapsulated the futility of the entire 30 years of the Troubles, in which well over 3000 people died violent deaths for no very obvious reason.
It was a relief to get back to the city, where a trip to the famous Crown Liquor Saloon seemed in order. The plan was a quick pint of Guinness but we got chatting to an American airline pilot, who persuaded me to stay for another couple while he urged me to explain “why you all hate Americans”. I delivered my standard speech on the subject — a nation of great writers, musicians, artists, film-makers, academics and sportspeople, let down by dreadful politicians and too much salt on their freedom fries.
Next day we got into our hire car and drove north, though we couldn’t resist the chance to wander round the Shankill Road for a while first. This is the patch on the other side of the peace line. If anything, it seemed even bleaker and more disadvantaged than the Catholic side. The red, white and blue kerb stones and the union jack bunting stretched across the road should have brightened the place up, but it actually made it look impossibly seedy and pathetic.
The flags were a different colour from the Falls Road but the atmosphere was strangely similar. We had the same glorification of the sacrifice of the volunteers in the defence of their community. The language, the emotions, the murals, the sanctimoniousness, the non-negotiable certainty of the justice of their cause. Two impermeable sides of the same coin.
The northern coastline of the province is spectacular. We followed it around to a spot I’ve always wanted to visit — the Giants Causeway. It was another place that posed more questions than answers (where’s Nigel when you need him?) but at least the puzzles posed here provoked wonder and delight rather than frustration.
I could say more about this but I’ll get exasperated emails from Tasmania if I don’t mention running soon.
Running.
I didn’t do much of it in Northern Ireland. None. But I did take my trainers just in case I…. Just in case I found the time. Sadly, we had a full schedule, and a lope along the revivified River Lagan never materialised. It’s not a total lie. This was a business trip too, and I had to fit in a couple of meetings.
A useless excuse of course. When people complain about not having time to run (or to read), I drag them across the cheese grater of my opinion. You can always make time to run, just like you make time to eat or wash or sleep.
I was in Ireland again last weekend. The only barricades I saw this time were those keeping the sheep and goats from sliding down Croagh Patrick. The views from the top of this (literally) legendary mountain are something that everyone should see before they die. To the south, Galway and Connemara. To the north, Clew Bay, Achill Island, and most of County Mayo including, somewhere in the distance, the small whitewashed cottage that my mother grew up in.
I wrote about this climb two years ago. This year’s experience was quite different. In 2004 I was on my own; this time I was with Jake, my 10 year old nephew. In 2004 it was sunny and clear; this time we had to plunge through mist and drizzle and self doubt.
There’s no real path to the top, just a scattering of rocks lower down, and loose shale and boulders in the murderously steep last third to the 2,600 foot summit. The rain dripped down our necks, and made the ascent as slippery as the snakes reputed to have been cast from the peak by Saint Patrick.
I wanted to climb the hill again, and I wanted the chance to climb it with my nephew. He’s the same age I was in 1967, when I had a holiday here. I didn’t climb The Reek (as the mountain is known locally) but I well remember gazing at it from below at that age. It’s an impressive sight for anyone, and aged 10, it could have been Mount Everest for all I knew. I thought of this when I asked his mum, my sister, if she minded me taking him up there.
I’d been a bit nervous about asking her if I could take him along, but after 3 weeks of school holidays, she responded like a man in the desert might when offered a large glass of iced water.
I’m not a parent, and I don’t have that easy parental perception that most mums and dads seem to acquire; but I suspected that Jake wasn’t sure where his greatest pleasure lay when presented with the invitation: bravado or tantrum. So he wavered between them for 48 hours or so. One minute his eyes shone with excitement, the next with tears.
Result? We got up, and we got back. It was tough but it was grand. The weather deprived us of views from the very top, but there was plenty to see before we reached the band of cloud. Jake’s ambivalence continued all the way to the peak. I’d reassured him that if he felt genuinely worried or scared at any point, we’d turn back. Several times, he announced that he was “thinking of asking about turning back”, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit defeat. So he never did.
When I was his age, here in County Mayo, I stood on the side of another hill and watched the runners in a 10 mile race go by. Despite some research, I’ve not been able to discover what the race was, but I clearly recall the strained looks on those sweaty red faces, and the robotic movements of those limbs in the penultimate mile. I won’t say that this was the inspiration for my mid-life running, but I can honestly say that those images have stayed with me, and I’ve always
been mindful of the impression those struggling runners made on me. Accordingly, I’ve always been aware of the impression that I may be making on young kids that I totter past in races, despite my penchant for self-ridicule. Jake has gone a step beyond this, and actually done it. I hope he understands what an amazing achievement it was for him to climb that mountain, but much more, I hope the memory stays with him and drives him forward through the rest of his life.
Running. I’ve got to start back again properly, but I’m finding it tough. Three weeks or so ago I thought I was getting back on track, but I’m pretty hopeless when M is away from home, and I can’t find enough incentive to take the healthy road. Perhaps more significant has been the heat. We’ve had the hottest July since Shakespeare’s First Folio was top of the bestseller’s list at Ye Olde Waterftone’f.
Each evening I’ve got home from work, wiped the sweat from my brow and asked myself the question: what should I do? Go for a 5 mile run? Or reach towards the fridge and find myself a bottle of ice cold beer?
I must get back soon or I’ll have to ask some tough questions about this website and about my plan for South Africa next April.
