The travels of Tim and Megan: Belfast, Northern Ireland

Tuesday

I currently have a fair bit of free time on my hands whilst waiting for my new work visa to be approved, so when I discovered that Ryanair had a massive sale, which included flights from London to Belfast for £5 each way, it made sense to spend a few days in the land of the leprechauns. On Tuesday morning I got up at a ridiculous hour and made my way to London Stansted, which seems closer to Scotland than London, for an 8.30am flight to Belfast.

As it happened Colin and Rachael were in Belfast from the Sunday night until the Wednesday, so our travels overlapped by a day and we got to explore the city together on Tuesday. After arriving in an overcast and chilly Belfast and finding my way to my B&B, I set off for the city centre and met Colin and Rachael.

We decided to spend the morning taking a 90-minute political history tour around Belfast in a black taxi. Our driver / tour guide, Pat, was very informative and the tour was excellent. Pat took us just out of the city centre to the suburban area around Shankill Road and stopped to explain the origins of the conflicts in Northern Ireland.

Queen Elizabeth I, knowing that Ireland would side with Catholic Spain, was concerned that England could be invaded more easily by the Spanish if they came in through Ireland. In 1573 she sent the Earl of Essex to Belfast and he easily beat the Catholic chieftains, but failed to build a lasting town. Then in the early 17th century, Belfast was settled by English and Scottish settlers, under a plan by Sir Arthur Chichester. The Act of Union in 1800 dissolved Ireland's parliament and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. When Catholics began buying land in Ulster, Protestants formed vigilante groups to burn out the Catholics in dawn raids. Catholics and Protestants battled for centuries for their slice of an inadequate economic cake.

The Anglo-Welsh War of 1919-21 led to a treaty setting up an Irish Free State. However, Protestant resistance in the north-east promised such bloodshed that the politicians compromised with the Government of Ireland Act 1920. Under this Act, Ireland was partitioned into Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland (the six most-Protestant counties of the province of Ulster) and the Catholic-dominated rest of the country. As the largest city in Ulster, Belfast became the capital of Northern Ireland, and a grand parliament building was constructed at Stormont in 1932. The Governement of Northern Ireland was dominated by upper and middle class unionists (i.e., those who wished to remain part of the United Kingdom), and the needs and wishes of working class Protestants and Catholics of all classes were virtually ignored.

Trouble returned in the 1960s when students marched to demand a fair allocation of public housing and jobs for Catholics. As old animosities flared up, Protestants began setting fire to Catholics' houses in Belfast. The IRA resurrected itself to protect them and Protestant terrorist groups were formed in retaliation.

It took 30 years, the abolition of the local parliament, the imposition of direct rule from Westminster, the creation of a Dublin-London political axis, major population shifts and the loss of more than 3,200 lives before the province voted in 1998 for peace through a power-sharing Assembly. The last 10 years have seen a relatively peaceful period in Belfast's history, however, we were all shocked when Pat told us that there are still massive walls separating Catholic housing from Protestant housing in some suburban areas and gates between these areas that are locked every night to diminish the likelihood of violence on the streets.

We drove to a housing estate in the Protestant area and wandered around looking at the dozens of wall murals that appear on the ends of the rows of houses. Many of them are memorials to people who died in the conflicts, but some still have threatening political undertones. The housing estate and the rest of the Protestant area was covered with hundreds of Union Jack flags of the United Kingdom (far more than you would see in London!), whilst the Catholic areas displayed dozens of Republic of Ireland flags. We struggled to understand how these people can hope to move on, when they still have these wall murals and flags showing their allegiance decorating their neighbourhoods.

We continued the tour away from the Protestant area around Shankill Road over towards the Catholic area. We stopped to sign the "peace wall", the enormous wall separating the two areas. We couldn't believe that a wall was still required, especially not one of that size. There were plenty of messages on the wall from New Zealanders, good to see! The tour continued right into the Catholic area and we stopped at a small memorial garden, to remember those who were killed in the conflicts. We then stopped on Falls Road, another infamous road that witnessed many violent deaths. A mural on Falls Road remembers Bobby Sands and nine other Republican prisoners who died as a result of hunger strikes in 1981. The event provoked major rioting across the city.

After the tour concluded, we grabbed some lunch at BK, and then we walked through the city, taking in some of the sights and attractions of Belfast, such as the beautiful City Hall building, the Prince Albert Memorial clock tower and the Salmon of Knowledge, a 10-metre ceramic skinned salmon commissioned to celebrate the return of salmon to the previously polluted River Lagan. The sculpture's skin is decorated with a mosaic of texts and messages relating to Belfast's history.

A spot of shopping was followed by a well deserved pint of Ireland's finest. If truth be told there were several pints of Guinness consumed by the end of the night. We made our way to Belfast's most famous pub, the Crown Liquor Saloon, where we enjoyed a couple of drinks inside our own closed booth and marvelled at the superb tiling, glasswork and ornamental woodwork dating from the 1880s. Next we made our way two doors along the street to Robinson's Bar, which was fire-bombed in 1991, gutting the interior, but has been rebuilt to its original 1846 design. It is now home to five bars, including the very Irish themed "Fibber Magees". We spent the rest of the evening in Fibber Magees and Robinson's and we managed to catch most of Liverpool's Champions League win on TV, much to the delight of Colin and Rachael. We also had dinner at the bistro bar upstairs above Robinson's, which was really good.

The bars were packed full and some of the patrons were very drunk...on a Tuesday night...only in Ireland! One guy came stumbling up to Colin and I when we were at the bar and slammed his full pint down on the bar in front of us, at which point we were a little concerned, as he was a very large Irishman. But then he held out his hand for us to shake and we imagine he would have said "hello" and introduced himself, but he was so drunk he couldn't actually form any words. Another guy came bursting out of the toilets muttering away to himself about mash potato... At that point we figured we should probably call it a day before we ended up like these guys, so we headed home.

Tim