August 15-20, 2023 - Northern Ireland

We decided a bit last minute to spend a few days in Belfast on the way to Scotland – even this short time in Belfast made a lasting impression. 

Before we arrived (and I hate to say this, but) the place “Belfast” conjured up images of religion, bombs, and bullet-marked buildings; it’s hard for a place to shake that image for people like me, who read a bit about The Troubles and absorbed TV news reports, but had never traveled there.   This visit definitely changed those images; the reality of the separation between Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods became more concrete and the place’s beauty and the openness and friendliness of the people have stayed with me since our visit.

From the beginning:

We took the train from Cork to Belfast – The walk from the train station to apartment was a good 40 minute walk; good news from this walk: I have discovered the maximum mileage I can cover with my backpack and that was it!  We got a great, skinny, three-story attached townhome that was quite comfortable (it’s been really nice when we get three bedrooms so Katie isn’t in the living room on the couch).    

We had never quite figured out the busses in Ireland, so this first day, we walked the 40 minutes back to the downtown, we took in the City centre, found some parks to play in, visited some great public spaces (one place was a former, grand bank which the nice docent told me, “the City Council has turned into a space for all” – it had a toddler play area, a free book reading area, a café, public bathrooms, and co-working seating, it made me think of some of the impressive banks in San Francisco that I’ve walked in since the pandemic that were deserted), and we visited the bustling tourist office, where one of the many staff members told me how to ride the bus as a family. You just get on, say you want a family ticket, and pay 10 pounds for the day with your credit card, ha, so easy!

Enjoying some trip downtime! 

Walking back to town.

More trip downtime; and yes, Luke picked all 52 up. 

Second day was our eye-opening bike tour.  Our guide was great in so many ways – To start, the bikes were not quite short enough for Alex and Luke, so he ran us around the corner to a bike repair shop and they let us borrow smaller bikes on his word that we’d return them, that gave the downtown a small town feel, like, all the folks operating small businesses know each other.

We set off in our group, we Americans, some Brits, and our Irish guide (or British Irish? Northern Irish?? Not sure how he would describe himself).  We:

-         learned a bit in the downtown – the City Hall was completed in the late 1800s after Queen Victoria awarded Belfast ‘city’ status (I am not totally sure of the significance of this, but we are watching the BBC show Victoria and so of course we notice how much Victoria there is in the UK, so many Victoria statues and streets and buildings from her long reign). Right after, Durban, South Africa also built its City Hall; the builder admired Belfast’s so much that Durban’s is nearly an exact replica of Belfast’s. (I was the only one who raised my hand on the tour when asked whether anyone had visited Durban, Scott has too of course, but he did not raise his hand, so modest 😊. 

-         we visited Belfast’s Big Fish (aka Pat the Fish), a giant fish covered in ceramic tiles with images from the City’s history, installed in 1999. It contains a time capsule of materials from the year and visitors have kissed it for good luck (only one kiss from our tour group!); it’s installation took place a year after the Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles.

    -     helped Alex after a little spill - He let his wheel rub the sidewalk while riding in the road and         ended up with a bloody knee - The restaurateur just next to his accident, quickly offered us a bandaid, so nice.. She gave him one of those great kitchen bandaids that no blood can get through.. He was hurt and a bit embarrassed and soldiered on.  

Ready to roll.... 

Enjoying that nice-looking City Hall. 

City Hall again. 

That Belfast Big Fish.. Nope, we are not kissing it for luck.. 

Showing off the bandaid (on the bus after the bike tour). 

 

       We stopped for a while in the Belfast shipyard – it was a fascinating stop. The reactivation of a former shipyard has so many lessons for my old job at the Port – Belfast’s Port built ships dating back to the late 1700s, and then the shipbuilding company Harland & Wolff grew to dominate the ocean liner industry around 1860. The company built commercial and military vessels during both world wars, was repeatedly targeted by during the wars, and employed tens of thousands of people.  It fell on financial hard times in the 1960s and the government stepped in for many decades; the last ship was built in 2003. Today, it is a diverse Port with some trade (home heating oil, aggregates, grain, roll on roll off operations), cruise (141 ships last year, Andre!), ferries, and tourist attractions.  Of interest:

o   The shipyard famously built the Titanic (and, as our guide said, so many other ships that DID NOT sink!).  In recognition of that connection, the city transformed maybe 20 acres of the Port into a major museum and attraction, it is grandly built to replicate the Titanic’s hull and the length of the ship is laid out along a promenade-space with lights built out to illuminate the large area the ship sat upon while under construction and before being set out to sea. 

o   Fantastic Sound Yard art installation – Oh I wish I took a video (as youtube is failing me to find a good one!), this installation requires visitors to run in a circle and that motion activates the piece to make this clanging sound that replicates the sounds of the shipyard, it was so memorable to experience all of us running around in circles and hearing that deafening clanging. 

o   The shipyard had financial difficulties due to competition and changing demands for smaller vessels; and the government essentially subsidized and took over the financial burden in the late 1960s. The sectarian conflict of the Troubles also generally made productivity more difficult.  Like so much of what I can glean from reading about this period, it is complicated to say whether one group or one action caused this or that negative effect.  For example, the yard almost exclusively employed Protestant residents and sometimes Catholic employees reported intimidation to force them to quit, then presumably Catholic-aligned groups would harass the yard; other times, the Protestant-led union would force strikes and work stoppages when they perceived the UK-government was compromising too much with Irish-nationalist groups as part of peace agreements, to punish London’s government.  Sectarian troubles had some effect on shipbuilding, but like so many other shipyards without these conflicts, maybe it would have closed no matter what.  Whatever the role of the conflict, we walked around the former shipyard and many walls are covered with art murals (I may have mentioned murals are big in Ireland and in Northern Ireland) – they depict hardened-looking men with heavy machinery and piercing gazes.  Makes me think that many of the people who used to work in the yards are still residents of the locale and some may feel very bitter that the Troubles played some role in the loss of their workplace and employment.

That sort of graveness aside, the visitor experience of the “Maritime Mile” was an extremely enjoyable place to stroll & bike on beautiful promenades and scenery with points of interest along the water. 

Awesome Sound Yard installation at the Belfast Port. 

Katie, with the Titanic museum way in the background, part of the enjoyable Maritime mile. 

Alex and Daddy, working tour in the background. 

In front of the ginormous Titanic museum at the Belfast Port.

Enjoying the Belfast architecture. 

Belfast umbrella alley - I thought it was decked out for Pride, but learned later that it is just a decorated, colorful alley to brighten a rainy day. Or Pride umbrellas. Whichever!  

Our bike ride concluded with the most solemn and raw parts of the city – we rode just a few minutes west of downtown, where the largely Protestant neighborhoods (UK flags adorn these neighborhoods that abut ones that are almost exclusively Catholic.  We stopped at a corner with a public display that was graphic, with plain-language wooden signs, stating that the UK-government (led at the time by Tony Blair) let murderers go free and even enter government; it had pictures of bodies on the street after bombings and fresh-faced school photos of children who were killed.  We all walked around the display, while our guide soberly pointed out some of the stories and shared his memories of the 1980s and 1990s, how common bombs were, how his family had no reason to travel to the west side of the City.  One of his mates strolls by, points to some of the pictures and says playfully, something like, ‘boy, you’re paying this guy to really show you a good time on vacation, right?’. 

We continue on a few more minutes to one of the city’s many Peace Walls – The government constructed these walls starting in the 1920s but mostly since the 1960s to halt/tamp down sectarian violence – they are high concrete + high metal gates on key streets, separating one block from another.  They have gates that you can pass through during the day but that close at night to make going from the Prot side to the Cath side more difficult. Our guide noted that surveys of residents on both sides show overwhelming support to keep the walls in place and the gates closed at night.   On the side we walk to, the +1 kilometer long wall is decorated by murals – graffiti, Mandela, solidarity with Palestinians, and Bobby Sands (an IRA member who died from a hunger strike protest in prison) – decorate the wall, but is still a giant 30-foot wall.  The British folks on our tour frankly ask the guide questions (which I appreciated as I would have felt like an interloper) – “we heard after Brexit that people in Northern Ireland can get Irish citizenship to keep their EU passport, is that right” [guide says N. Ireland residents can choose to have either British or Republic of Ireland passports, in 2022 for the first time, the number applying for Irish passports surpassed those seeking UK passports] – “do you think people want to vote to leave UK and join Ireland?’ [guide says, I don’t get to decide, but my view is that kind of vote will be ugly and divide people all over again, so just keeping things as they are seems best]. 

 

Standing in front of the 'peace walls' - You can sort of gauge the height, we are standing across a fairly wide road.

Riding back to the city center, I looked with a closer eye at commercial areas displaying British flags, pictures of the King Charles (not many of those around in London restaurants, but they are on display in Belfast), and at ‘neighborhood meeting halls’ with names like “Defense Association” – The downtown has a lot of beauty, but just beyond it there’s a feeling of a fragile calm.  

We went home that night and watched this Kenneth Branaugh movie called Belfast that is largely based on his childhood living in Belfast in the 1960s. A crazy thing happened in the middle of that movie of a family being forced to choose between staying in Belfast or abandoning it for safety  in the middle of the movie, we heard these loud “Boom! Boom! Boom!” – We stopped the movie and peered out the window, on edge from the movie’s topic – Outside, we say a few police cars, stopping traffic – then we saw people in uniform – kids, young men, old men [pretty much only males] – marching through the street with a band; their uniforms depicting their neighborhood “association”.  This went on for a few hours, in the Belfast rain – Multiple neighborhood associations marching with loud drums through the neighborhood (by this point, we knew we were in a majority ‘Protestant’ neighborhood (though of course, people’s self-identification by religion on the whole is getting less and less strong).  These folks are still part of groups that at one point of another were the neighborhood “watch”/ defense/ offense.

Buildings with King Charles and UK flags flying high.

The parade happening outside our house, strangely while we were watching the movie Belfast.

The whole experience was unforgettable. I learned a lot about the place (basic outlines: Ireland & Britain made peace in 1920s that resulted in partition of the island of Ireland; in mid-1960s, largely Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland began a civil rights movement to change laws that discriminated against Catholics in housing, universities, etc, and that either began as or morphed into action to unify with Ireland; this move by Irish Catholics led to counter-moves by Ulster Protestants & pro-unionists that ended up making people choose sides; violence hardened those choices).  I’ll remember thinking that people who have lived in a place where violence has erupted over a period of decades likely have a very different and intense feeling towards peace than I have ever known.

After a few days in the city, we did a countryside day, getting a rental car to visit the Giants Causeway, a fascinating geologic area which formed 50-60 million years ago when volcanic eruptions pushed basalt upwards to form a horizontal landmass; when the lava cooled, the area contracted sort of like mud drying and cracked into these similar-looking hexagon-shaped columns.  That is a fun explanation – The audio tour has a much more fun legend which gives the place its name, the Giant’s Causeway, formed when a Giant in Ireland is challenged to a fight by the Giant in Scotland and builds a causeway from Ireland to get to Scotland for the fight. However, the Irish Giant, after seeing the size of the Scottish Giant, runs back home; when he is followed, his Giant wife tucks him into a bassinet with a blankey and when the Scottish Giant arrives to start the fight, she tells him her husband is just out hunting and will be back soon, and doesn’t he so admire her child’s handsome face? Upon seeing the size of the giant “baby”, the Scottish Giant hightails it back to Scotland and breaks the causeway from its connection point in Scotland.  Charming and self-deprecating legend!

Standing on the Giant's Causeway, on the hexagon columns.

Luke climbing the columns.

The whole group scaled around these columns..

.. and made it to the end of the Causeway, that sticks out into the Atlantic, sort of pointing at Scotland. 

We also had some light-hearted fun in Belfast.. 

A rare milkshake = happiness.

Boldy misbehaving in front of White Witch.

Didja know C.S. Lewis was from Belfast? 

I am proud/horrified to report that Alex and Luke are still mastering the art of eating spaghetti whist not grossing-out one's fellow diners. 

And just like the Giant, we got ourselves over to Scotland on August 20 (and yes, I realize I am a few weeks behind the current date 😊 – Onward to Scotland!

(Disclaimer: I have written in this post about violence that took 3,500+ lives; I hope the care I took to successfully balanced reporting my own experiences and thoughts without over-simplifying or erroneously describing what are surely intense feelings of identify, self, and community that those who are connected to Northern Ireland share.)