The Troubles in Belfast

We had just one day in Belfast. Half was taken with a walking tour, and some hours with the Titantic Experience. In truth the walking tour was the experience. 

Perhaps the best guided tour of anything, and a wonderfully fair, unbiased and moving three hours. 

It began in the rain, and it was a dark story, very dark indeed. This will not go in the blog, but I have tried to remember much of the detail. The overall theme was action - reaction - retaliation - revenge.

Our guide works from a script, but as a child of the troubles he was able to add his own experiences in a way that never intruded in the bigger story he had to tell. The company was Dead Centre Tours, named because for nearly 25 years Belfast was known as the Dead Centre, because the city was locked down between 6pm and 6am. 

In his efforts to be neutral in terms of explaining why the conflict took place over such a long time, it was hard to know whether he was born Catholic or Protestant. I guessed at one point he was Catholic, but after the tour he said he was born "a little Protestant, another Ulster man for the cause".

He told the story of the English in Ireland since 1100-something. He described how the planted settlers came to see themselves as needing defence from the natives. Over hundreds of years every action taken by rulers led to reactions by others which inevitable worsened the tensions between the Irish and the English and Scots.

We had nine stops in the Belfast centre, each the site of an atrocity that Steve clearly indicated where not unusual. Each stop was an opportunity to put one faction's point of view across, and as these changed over time. Two of the images he showed us that have not left me: two mums holding their children's hands walking to school. Just metres away was a  balaclava-clad gunman crouching behind a short wall; and the fresh faces in their British Army uniforms of three men who died after being befriended by an IRA rogue - two were brothers aged 19 and 17. 

There were a lot of groups and splinter groups to try to keep straight. The full humanity of each side was described. It got as bad as it could get. And then Bobby Sands was elected to the British Parliament in a by-election, while in jail. He later died there on a hunger strike. We have seen this by-election impact before. 

The centuries long war took a turn towards peace when people could express their wishes through the ballot  box. The English government realised that the IRA had a mandate of the people. But our guide felt that it was the intervention of USA president Bill Clinton to bring/force all parties to meet and negotiate. ?George Mitchell negotiated some good concessions for the IRA and good concessions for Rev Ian Paisely.

He felt some unexpected things happened to hasten peace. Punk rock brought Catholics and Protestants together to come to know each other; acid punk brought MDMA which apparently gives everyone who took it oxytocin rushes of friendliness; the internet in the 1990s opened lines of communication beyond the tight circles each side had existed in for generations; and people started to travel overseas.

And then there was Brexit, which the majority of Northern Irish voted against, but were forced to accept. The ties with organised religions are gone, and some of the ties to the British are also very weak. Our guide predicts that in the future Northern Ireland will vote to reunite with the Republic, although there is no time frame. An organic process is taking place, where economy more than religion is impacting on people’s view of the future.