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Myself alone in Northern Ireland |
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I had set myself the task of finally visiting Northern Ireland, and journeyed from Cork through the dull green Irish Midlands, before inevitably missing my northbound connection in Dublin. I took the chance to take a local train to Drogheda. Co Meath, had a cursory look around |
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the town and came face to face with a saint. As you do. St Oliver Plunkett's leathery head keeps a silent vigil in St Peter's Church, a victim of one of the innumnerable crimes our English forebears committed against the Irish. I would like to say that I felt a saintly presence but St Oliver looked rather like Sir Alec Douglas Home. Before he died, that is. |
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The preserved head of St Oliver Plunkett, primate of Ireland, and hung drawn and quartered by the English on trumped-up charges |
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It is hard to arrive in a place like Northern Ireland without any preconceptions. As the train entered the UK, at some unremarkeable and unremarked point in the countryside, the green seemed ever more verdant, but the orange influence reared its head, once I left the train in Belfast as I heard a protestant pipes and drum band beat out its territory, with the sound echoing against the surrounding neighbourhood. It didn't escape my notice that they were |
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A Protestant pipes and drums band. The only thing louder in Northern Ireland than Ian Paisley. |
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marching on the spot, and didn't appear to have anywhere to go.
The centre of Belfast looks and feels much like any northern British City, and there does seem to be an indefinable confidence
about the place, even though the political process appears to |
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The Crown Liquor Saloon. Truly a National Trust Property I could spend all day in |
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have lurched into one of its regular periods of hiatus. The stolid staue of Queen Victoria outside, and the Union Flag atop City Hall, however remind us all where exactly we are. I suppose you can quite easily accuse me of being a fly-by-night tourist, and I will happily |
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A memorial to the Queen Moter in the Protestant Shankhill Road. Click the image to discover the likeness of the old dear, Gawd bless 'er! |
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A memorial to members of the IRA on the Falls Road.
I felt like a foreigner in both areas, divided by a "Peace Wall". |
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plead guilty to that charge, but I hope that my memories of Belfast are not forever coloued by my visits to the Shankhill and the Falls. I felt the Shankhill was much the more surreal, festooned with red, white and blue as the tail end of the marching season was upon us, but the sense of blind loyalism was unsettling. It really did make you think that a poitically united Irish state would be unworkable....which is precisely the view that such displays are supposed to engender. Enough about politics....................... |
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......on the other hand, perhaps not. In Derry/Londonderry/Stroke City the casual visitor cannot fail to notice the divide rent by the two traditions.
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Spending a few minutes on the Bogside estate, with its murals and memorials to the H-Block and Bloody Sunday dead can give you the feeling that the divide is the only thing that keeps people awake....which is of course arrant nonsense.
The centre of the city is really reather attractive, and has benefitted from some sympathetic reconstruction, and I would thoroughly reccomend a visit to the Tower Museum where the attendant took one look at this 35 year-old wreck of a man and said "that will be be one student admission" when I tried to pay the full asking price for a ticket. I am quite sure that this would never happen anywhere else on the planet.
After walking, rather less than triumphantly around the famous town walls, a protestant in less than name only, I joined the citizenry walking around the galleries of a new shopping centre there. Maybe we should all just keep shopping until we can't remember what state we're in.
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Northern Ireland Tourist Board
Belfast City Council
City of Derry Council
Giants Causeway Official Guide
Ulster Unionist Party
Social Democratic and Labour Party
Sinn Fein
Democratic Unionist Party
Alliance Party of Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland Women's Coalition
Belfast Telegraph on-line
BBC Radio Ulster
Unofficial Van Morrison website
St Oliver Plunkett from Louth online |
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Click here for my homepage |
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Some Useful links |
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Click here for August |
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