Tuesday 24 May 2016

Monday, 1st day in Belfast

…but unfortunately only until 4.45am. I don’t care if it’s light, that’s still the middle of the night!

Once it was actual morning we went for a walk into the central city area of Belfast. It’s set up quite well for tourists, with plenty of signposts to attractions. We had a look inside the City Hall building, which is a spectacular confection of marble.

In the afternoon we went in an old London taxi for a “Black Taxi tour” of Belfast’s murals and historic sites relating to the Troubles. Our driver first took us to the Shankill Road area, Protestant heartland. As well as murals depicting UFF heroes on the gable ends of rows of houses, and para-military flags flying from some of the houses, we saw the beginnings of construction of an enormous bonfire which will be lit in July to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne. In the middle of a grassy area surrounded by houses on 3 sides, there’s a pile of household rubbish, and beside it stacks and stacks of timber pallets which will be used to build up the outside layer in a conical shape to several storeys high. In preparation for the bonfire the surrounding houses will get boarded up, and on the night the fire service will be on hand to keep the houses watered to make sure they’re safe.

Then we went and looked at the wall – actually one of many walls – built by the British Army in 1969 to keep the sides apart. The wall wasn’t really new, but formalised barriers that the residents had already put in place. There are four(?) gates, which are still closed and locked every night. The longest wall is 2 or 3 miles long – and extremely high, say a 4 metre wall, plus another 3 metres of wire mesh fence on top. And then we went on to the other side, to the memorial “garden” (mostly bricks) in the Falls Rd, which commemorates and names all the IRA volunteers and civilians who were killed by the British Army and UFF. This road was attacked one Sunday in 1972(?), and a whole row of houses just inside the wall was burnt down, with many families left homeless. One of the most amazing (and heartbreaking) things was to see a row of terrace houses, backing on to the wall, which have their back yards enclosed in steel mesh to protect them from anything catapulted over the wall. It must be like living in your own personal prison.

Although there has been a cease-fire in place for 18 years, it seems the peace is still really very fragile. The gun laws are very strict here (need a licence for an air pistol), but our driver reckoned he’d be able to get his hands on a semi-auto rifle e.g. AK47 pretty easily, just by saying the word to the right people. I asked how the residents – families of people who’ve been killed – feel about tourists coming and gawping at their homes and murals, and apparently they are happy for it, they want their stories to be told.

A big deal though is that the tour drivers have to be very careful to give a balanced perspective on the Troubles. Our guy made the point that if they are discovered to say anything partisan they’ll be run out of the area – quite possibly at gunpoint, based on an example he related. He asked whether I thought he had given a balanced view, and I said yes, admirably so – but I picked that he was Catholic. I was so wrong… as he then told us his father had been shot by the IRA, his brother was blown up, and he’d also lost several friends. I think it’s remarkable that with that degree of personal involvement he could display such neutrality; he seemed genuinely to view it that “rightness” of the cause is all dependent on one’s perspective. He said the change for him, over time, is that he no longer blames anyone simply because they’re Catholic, but sees people as individuals; and he has seen from talking to people on the other side that their grief is just as raw and real as his own.


Late in the afternoon Chris the producer came to the hotel for a drink, and to give us an idea of what will be happening for the 2 days of filming… Tomorrow we’ll be going up the Coast Rd (on the Antrim Coast Road!) to see it for the first time, and we’ll meet a local historian and also David Orr, whose 2007 Presidential address to the Institution of Civil Engineers focused on William Bald as an unsung hero. And on Wednesday, unbelievably, we are going by boat to the island of Islay to meet Margaret Storrie, a geographer who researched and wrote significant papers on William in the 1960s – I feel quite emotional at the thought of meeting her!

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