My first trip to Ireland I saw a lot of west Belfast (a mostly working-class and nationalist area known to be a republican stronghold), but there were still significant parts of it I hadn't seen. So I went off in that direction, didn't see anything extra special. On the way in however, I stopped by the Sinn Fein Bookstore and when they asked if I'd like to sign the guest book, I identified myself with the Anti-Racism Commission. I'm not sure if Duanne meant for me to be a rep outside of the conference, but I thought this couldn't do any harm and would get the name DSA out there a bit.
Some miscellaneous notes on my time in Belfast:
1) Many people compared the 12-month loyalist blockade of a Catholic primary school in north Belfast with the opposition to integration of the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1956. In nationalist areas there were many posters and one large mural making this connection.
2) In a nationalist part of west Belfast I saw a mural in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
3) English Nazis in Belfast
My first day in Belfast I heard that there were Nazi skinheads from England visiting loyalist paramilitaries in north Belfast. On 2/26 the day I left for Dublin I read an article that there was going to be a protest by nationalists and the Anti-Nazi League against the presence of the Nazis. The paper I read it in was a weekly and said "tomorrow" and I forgot to see what day the paper came out. When I called the paper I was told "tomorrow" had come and gone- in fact, if it was Sunday, I might have been within blocks of the protest when it happened. Had it indeed been scheduled for 2/27, I intended to discuss via email this with Duanne and ask if he would like me to attend as a rep of the Anti-Racism Commission.
4) Palestinian flags in west Belfast
About a week before I got there the Palestinian Ambassador to Ireland, who is in Fatah, visited the Falls Rd. area of west Belfast (like most of that quarter of the city, a SF stronghold). In Republican areas like this there are frequently Irish flags flown from the lamp-posts, but when I was there several were also flying the Palestinian flag, and I saw posters for an event organized by SF Youth where the Ambassador spoke.
5) In the city center there were MANY posters for events organized by the Socialist Workers Party, but if they ran candidates in the city they probably wouldn't get more than 1%.
6) On the Falls Rd. I saw a brand new "Garden of Remembrance" to the "D Company" of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA. It was one of the most moving things I saw.
7) In another part of west Belfast called Clonard I found another such memorial, which was for both the IRA Volunteers from that area and also the civilians from that area who had been killed. Clonard was the main area burned down in the loyalist anti-Catholic pogrom of August 1969, and near the memorial was an amazing mural remembering this as well a picture of the IRA's first martyr of the period, a 16-year old boy killed trying to defend the area during that pogrom.
2/26 Belfast-Dublin
The reason I went back to Dublin for a night instead of going straight to Derry which was my original plan, is that when in Dublin earlier I had seen posters for an event at Trinity College Dublin featuring Gerry Adams, and I thought it would be a good idea to see how the President of SF is received by a bunch of college students. Unfortunately it was almost a total waste. When I got there I was part of around 100 people who couldn't get in because the room was full. This was his third college event in Dublin that day, and unless SFY are idiots, I'll assume they got a room that could hold something like 500 people for each event. And I imagine a total of several hundred were turned away at TCD, it was about 100 of us who stood around for about 1/2 an hour hoping to get in anyway.
2/27 Dublin-Derry
I took the bus to Derry. This went through the NI county of Tyrone, a very rural area that has had almost no violence since 1997 with the notable exception of the Omagh bomb in 1998. The thing is, although the British Army has been withdrawn entirely from Derry and almost all of Belfast, they still patrol, albeit at a reduced level (except for S. Armgh) the rest of the country. So, in an area that's been incredibly quiet and is majority nationalist, it was disappointing to see a patrol of BA soldiers on the roadside.
Shortly after I got to Derry my right knee started to hurt, which pretty much consumed most of the rest of my day.
2/28 Derry
Despite a bad knee I was able to do some walking, and tried to see some areas of Derry I hadn't seen on my last trip. Apparently many of the areas I hadn't seen are the more middle-class areas because that's mostly what I saw.
I did stop by the Pat Finucane Centre (For Social Change and Human Rights), a leftist, semi-republican group which works on a lot of human rights issues and also does a lot of work facilitating dialogue between working-class loyalist and nationalist communities. Unfortunately the person there I had spoken with on my first trip was busy, but I talked with a woman who was working there while her husband was working on the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. She was an African-American from NY and had heard of DSA, although she didn't comment beyond that and I didn't ask, so I don't know if she likes us or not.
Miscellaneous/general observations from the North.
1) The police barracks are still incredibly fortified as if they were under siege, and surveillance masts with cameras and listening devices still exist in nationalist areas.
2) Although I hardly saw any police in Derry, in nationalist west Belfast I frequently saw their landrovers (same as the military ones with a different color) patrolling in pairs which does not to me seem like normal policing. I saw a few normal police cars in the city center of Belfast, but not in the nationalist areas.
3) The North has always had a non-European population of something like 5%, but it didn't seem to me that it has increased much from 3 years earlier, unlike in Dublin where it skyrocketed.
Continued...