To my surprise, we were actually in Belfast shortly before the Orangemen march. That’s the time when a group of Unionists (Protestants who want to stay in the UK) do their traditional march celebrating the a victory of William of Orange in Ireland. As a side note, Orange was his color because he was from Holland, he was the Norman that conquered the UK. This march goes through a Catholic neighborhood and thus tends to direct clashes. The controversy over the march, and the larger marching season, is a symptom of sectarian conflict and not a root cause, but it does make for good news stories.
The tour, done in the back of a black taxi that Belfast is known for, got into the deeper issues. Here’s wikipedia’s full summary of the Troubles. A short version is that Catholics were a minority in Northern Ireland and often discriminated against. The British army was actually sent in to protect them around 1970 but ended up throwing oil on the fire at Bloody Sunday in (London)Derry when protesters were shot. Civilians were killed by partisans and security forces had happened prior to that point, but that was when the bombing campaign got going. In Belfast the center of the conflict was in two polarized neighborhoods in the West part of the city that were immediately adjacent to one another. The tour went through both of them, pictures on the Loyalist side first.
The square at the start is a march staging area. It’s surrounded by murals, some historical, some focusing on paramilitary (including terrorist) leaders, and a few that are harder to characterize.
Next stop was the “Peace wall” between the two communities. There were multiple gates with no checkpoints, though they would be closed in the evening. Similarly getting around the wall wouldn’t be hard at all. Instead, it serves to force anyone seeking to cause trouble to go through a few chokepoints, throw things over the wall at the caged backyards on the far side, or travel outside of their strongholds before or after an attack. While the Good Friday peace accord has been in place for around a decade now, our driver, Tom, didn’t think the wall would be going away anytime soon. I think he’s probably right. Walls do a good job of providing protection but they also calcify lines of division. You can’t attack as easily but nor can you intermingle.
The ones that came later on the Catholic side were more recognizable as appeals for legitimacy or agitation regarding other conflicts. The most interesting one for me was the mural of Bobby Sands, who was an IRA leader that the leadership managed to get himself elected as an MP while he was in prison. He subsequently died on hunger strike as part of an attempt to get IRA prisoners treated as political prisoners/P.O.W.s. Apparently he’s still a contested symbol between those in the IRA that compromised and breakaway hardliners, but I think the mural we saw was firmly in the mainline camp. On the Catholic side there we’d also seen a remembrance garden listing the IRA and civilian dead from the Troubles. Though there were certainly dead on the Unionist side, we didn’t see any of such shrines, so I’m not sure how they’d be different.
On the whole, the Black Taxi tour was well worth doing at 25 pounds for two people. As an added bonus we got dropped off over at Queen’s university setting up our dinner and walk for the evening.
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