war and peace

Belfast still bears the scars of the past. I vaguely knew this, but didn't realize how deep they run or how many people see it as an active ongoing conflict.

We got an exclusive black cab tour of West Belfast. Actually I'm not sure what was "black cab" about it...it was in an unmarked gray van and the driver only took cash. Sounds kinda shady in retrospect, but it was highly recommended by the tour group.

The driver, Eamonn, said there's not a street in Belfast that hasn't known some tragedy. As he said this, he was driving down a street known as the Murder Mile. The city is divided into Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods, often separated by barricades and "peace walls." We visited one of each neighborhood. In the Protestant neighborhood, there was a wall painted in honor of Stevie "Top Gun" McKeag, commander of a unionist paramilitary group. His UYM medal indicated he'd been recruited as a kid into the youth wing of the organization. He died at the age of 30, in 2000, two years after the Good Friday Agreement.

A few houses over was an innocuous-looking memorial with the words REMEMBER/RESPECT/RESOLUTION. Neutral enough, but a nearby plaque indicates it replaced a mural of Oliver Cromwell ("Lord Protector Defender of the Protestant Faith") and his troops attacking a prone figure, presumably a Catholic. Cromwell is quoted on the mural as saying "There will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed." Too inflammatory even for a Protestant neighborhood in Belfast... except not really, since it's reproduced in full on the plaque.

The Catholic neighborhoods we passed were surrounded by high walls and gates that can be closed remotely in case of threats. Not just relics; they are actively in use as needed. Eamonn said they might go five or six months without use, but then be shut ten times in a month when there's a flare-up of violence. For instance, Brexit caused issues because Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland are required to have an open border. Instead, the Eire Sea Wall was erected between Northern Ireland and Britain (a legal wall for goods and people passing through, not a physical wall). Unionists of the North who identify fully as British were upset, and there were violent protests that drove Catholic neighborhoods into lockdown.

We visited the Catholic neighborhood of Clonard, where there is a shrine "dedicated to the people of the Greater Clonard who have resisted and still resist the occupation of our country by Britain." There's a plaque bearing the names of people from the neighborhood killed by British forces and unionist murder squads, including both IRA members and civilians, some as young as five or six. The neighborhood is surrounded by high walls/fences, but also, the back yards of the townhouses are shielded by chain-link cages.

We asked Eamonn, do the people mind tourists like us coming through? It feels weird coming to an ordinary working-class neighborhood, full of people just living their lives, and here we are on a tour taking photos of someone's backyard or the wall of their house. Eamonn pretty much said the monuments are made to be seen. The people know what they're doing by putting up these shrines, and if they didn't want tourists around they have ways of making that known too.

Eamonn says the walls are still very much necessary, but he believes Ireland will be united again someday. Give it 30 years, he says. By the terms of the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, if the people of the North vote to join the rest of Ireland, it is binding; both Britain and Ireland have pledged to honor the vote. No referendum has been held yet, and it's commonly acknowledged that Irish nationalists don't yet have the votes to win. But there's also apparently a mechanic where if a referendum is held, they will be held thereafter every seven years. (I was not super clear on this point.) Eamonn says they will lose the first vote, but the results will show them which areas they need to focus on, and the next vote will enable them to refine it further, and so on until the vote is won. A note of optimism at the end of a grim tour, though Eamonn acknowledges other people swear it will never happen.

From there, we went to Hillsborough Castle. Another castle?? said the peanut gallery (I'm peanut gallery). Dave explained it's not really a castle, it's a rich manor with gardens. Another rich manor with gardens??

This was actually the biggest tonal whiplash of all time, because it turns out Hillsborough "Castle" is a royal palace for the British monarchy. Like, whenever the British royals want to pop over to Northern Ireland, they have a palace here to stay in. The gift shop is full of merch for the British Crown. It's surreal. The tour guide spoke effusively about how the English nobleman who used to own the castle could look out from a nearby hill and was lord of all he surveyed. He didn't like the village being right alongside his manor, so he moved the village. Haha rich people! So quirky, right?

That was our last stop on the tour. Dave drove us back to Dublin where we began, back to the same hotel. "Now, as they say in Ireland, get off my bus," he said. o7

===

Pictured: Graffiti on the Berlin Wall of West Belfast