Belfast

This city, like Dublin, is built on a river. But unlike Dublin, Belfast has only recently recognized the possibilities of the riverfront, and the city has slowly begun to rescue theirs from dereliction. Otherwise the city radiates out from City Hall, a huge building with streets leading from it like crazy spokes.  Smack in front is a Soviet-size statue of a stout Queen Victoria, complete with crown and scepter, in case anyone needed reminding that this was Northern Ireland, UK territory. The main shopping thoroughfare is being revived, which means that walking is precarious as you weave your way amid boulder-sized blockers and over wooden bridges that straddle the digging. On the whole, the charm of the city, which in any event doesn’t have the quaint presence of Dublin, is not readily apparent.

            Well past the center of town, beyond the shopping district, the better-known pubs, the lush grounds and leaded-glass windows of Queens University on one end and the hotels and multi-story car parks on the other, are the working class areas of Belfast; it is in these neighborhoods where you find the murals. The fact of the murals, as well as their subject matter, is a complex story, nearly as complicated as the 30-year story of the Troubles themselves, and the Troubles in turn are an outgrowth of the very history of Ireland, a Celtic knot of a tale that entangles class and religion in a boundless and possibly irresolvable space.

The first murals were painted in 1908 by the unionists (the mostly Protestant groups who want Ireland to stay part of the UK) when the availability of commercial paints made painting easier and more permanent than sewing the flags used to represent political positions. The nationalists (Catholic groups who want Ireland to end the partition and become one country) didn’t begin painting murals until 1981, when the first murals were painted to commemorate hunger strikes by republican political prisoners. Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker, and the first to die, is recognized world-wide as a symbol of the republican cause. Today the murals are painted and repainted. On the unionist side the murals tend to be more professionally done and are most often militaristic in their subject matter. Murals on the nationalist side are typically painted by amateurs, including many released prisoners. They also often focus on armed struggle, but many of them commemorate heroes both within Ireland and outside it, like Nelson Mandela and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

            These sectarian tensions, between Catholic and Protestant, have and have-not, help to explain why the Irish are so aware of the Israeli-Palestinian struggles. On my first day in Belfast, while searching for my hotel, I found myself at a protest in front of City Hall, the protesters guarded by a phalanx of police at the front and the placid outsized demeanor of Queen Victoria at the rear. The protest was small and fervent. The Rachel Corrie, the Irish ship carrying humanitarian supplies to Gaza, had just been blockaded and boarded by the Israeli army; all of its passengers, including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Maireád Corrigan-Maguire, were being detained and prepared for deportation back to Ireland.  Five days earlier nine peace activists on another humanitarian ship had been killed by Israeli soldiers. The radio and newspapers here had been carrying nearly incessant coverage of the ship, partly no doubt because Ireland rarely finds itself in the international news for reasons other than economic ones, but also because this is a people for whom sectarian divides have a particular resonance.

            The next day I understood much better about this when, on a bus tour of the murals, we passed one of the security walls. This 16-foot high wall of concrete, wood and wire completely separates the Protestant neighborhood from the Catholic one. Higher than the Berlin Wall and evidently strongly similar to the walls the Israelis continue to build around Gaza and the West Bank, the security wall-- euphemistically called a Peace Line-- has remained even though the Troubles ostensibly ended years before. Our tour guide, Bill Rolston, told us that the wall was there because the people on both sides of it asked that it be kept. The height is to prevent Molotov cocktails from being tossed over it. On the Protestant side the wall follows the curves of the road in front of it; on the Catholic side the wall is right up against the last row of houses in the neighborhood. To pass between the two areas we drove through a narrow checkpoint, now moribund, but during the Troubles there would have been a guard in the small booth and the solid steel gates would have been closed. Today, well over 90% of the children in Belfast go to school with children of their same religion, and 98% of the public housing estates—working-class neighborhoods—are aligned with the religious background of the inhabitants.

            That night I took a cab to dinner at the house of two friends who live near Queens, far removed from these neighborhoods. The cab driver told me that his attitude was, They should just leave it alone now; thirty years was long enough. At dinner, I found out that neither of my friends had ever seen the murals and had no desire to do so. Their concern (not surprisingly, since Bruce is an economic historian) was that the economic well being, such as it is, of Northern Ireland would collapse if the country were unified, and that Belfast’s prominence would dissipate under the greater significance of Dublin.

            After Anthony dropped me back at my hotel (I rode in the van with their massive dog Samson, a black Newfoundland the size of the bear cub Nora and I saw in the wild a week earlier—but that’s another story), I wasn’t quite ready for bed, so I went into the hotel bar for a glass of wine. On a Sunday night the bar was not crowded. There were the usual clutch of young guys watching sport on the telly, a table full of men going easier on their pints of Guinness than they must have done the night before, a couple or two hovering intimately at small round tables contemplating their next move.  And there was one group of young women, twelve of them in all, in a raucous group at the other end of the room. Over their dress-up clothes they were all wearing white plastic leis, short flamingo-pink hula skirts and a Miss-America-type over the shoulder wide pink ribbon that said, Hen Party. This, too, is Ireland.