Wound Spotting 3 - Ireland

Granda was knees, Munich was heads, Torbay was pregnancy (not a wound I know, depending on your views on babies)

Ireland has been arms, or more importantly the lower parts of arms, the number of people sporting casts and slings with either their wrists or lower arms damaged is quite alarming.

Of course, they could have an excuse.

The Irish do go in for particularly violent sports - Rugby and the worst Hurling

Though I don't think the couple of elderly ladies I saw with slings have been participating, but I could be wrong on that front!

Aboard the Enterprise

The Enterprise, is not a star-ship seeking out new life and exploring new galaxies (or whatever the opening lines are)

It is, in real life, the rail service from Dublin to Belfast.

During the darkest days of the troubles it was seen as a beacon of hope, that communities could work together, Iarnród Éireann and Northern Ireland Railways working across the border where politicians may not have done.

However, in it’s past it served another function.

My parents spent a couple of years living and working in Ireland in the 1960s, and Irish they knew called it the Pill Express.

The train’s main purpose (at least from a northbound point of view) was to pop across the border and pick up those items you couldn’t get in the Republic, namely contraceptives and Marks and Spencer’s undies (Though I don’t think the latter were actually banned, just not available – You had to have Dunn’s St Bernard range)

Today M&S have branches all over the Republic, and last night I had the horrific experience of watching an Irish health board contraceptives advert on the Irish channel 3

I was a bit wrong about the tourists

Back in November I posted about my visit to the Giants Causeway and how nice it was that it wasn’t spoilt by lots of tourists and tourist gimmicks.

Having now been through the place to change busses whilst going along the coast road in the height of summer I would like to withdraw those comments.

The place was absolutely heaving with tourists, coaches everywhere, car parks overflowing and screaming kids everywhere (lets fact it a geological marvel isn’t the world’s greatest family attraction!)

To be fair there still isn’t any Disynification or Visitors experience, but that may have more to do with the space constraints of getting people through (the gift shop).

Still, it’s left me with a valuable piece of advice.

If you want to see the Giants Causeway, go off season.

The winners in Peace

Derry was the cradle of the 1960’s Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland. The Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday helped to bring an attention to the city for all the wrong reasons.

Derry itself fell away from the limelight in the later years of the troubles with much of the focus moving to Belfast, and the recent blip in the peace process with three murders in November and rioting in early July have focused on the Northern part of Belfast.

Meanwhile in Derry they have been quietly picking up the pieces, rebuilding the city, and community relations and dismantling some of the more obvious signs of the troubles.

Namely the massive police/army stations in the centre of the city, with their high walls, watchtowers and banks of cameras trained on the Catholic Bogside and the Loyalist Fountain areas.

And whilst this is all good, there has been one unexpected winner, because what do you do with a space that has previously housed an army barracks or a fortified police station...

...You turn them into car parks of course, to help pull in the money!

So, in peace, the real winners are the car park owners (though I don’t recall that ever being mentioned in either a great speech or a movie)

What do you call it?

Even in posing the question there are egg shells to be walked on so I’ll offer the same question in two versions, bearing in mind that with each question it gives its own, different answer.

What do you call the second city of Northern Ireland?
Or
What do you call the fourth largest city in Ireland?

In the first instance the likely response would be Londonderry, in the second Derry, but again it would depend on who you spoke to (though I wouldn’t suggest posing the second question in areas where there are a propensity for union flags and red, white and blue lamp posts and kerb stones).

Doire was the original name of the town, which over time was anglicised into Derry. It was only with the creation of a new city on the opposite bank of the Foyle to Doire in the early 1600’s that the name issue was created.

The city was built to be filled by "British tenants" from England and Scotland, planted in the country to try and prevent further uprisings from the native Irish against British rule (leap forward 400 years and have we really progressed that much further!)

As the building of the city was funded by the livery companies of London they wanted to put their mark on it, so they bolted their city name onto the front end of the anglicised version to create Londonderry.

Today there are a variety of options that you can choose from for the name.

There is of course the one that the Loyalist community, and the UK government, would like you to use – Londonderry.

Then there is the version that the nationalist community and, to be honest, most people outside of the British Isles would use – Derry

You could cheat, like the railway company does on some of its literature and call it L’Derry (making it sound like a French town, I think possibly a seaside resort)

Or there is the “Politically Correct” Derry/Londonderry, and the alternative it’s spawned of “Stroke City” avoiding the whole need to mention either of the words but focus on the punctuation.

However, as I queued up for my ticket this morning I was feeling lazy so I couldn’t be bothered with the extra two syllables and just asked for a single to Derry.

When I got here it looked like I chose correctly. The local authority is “City of Derry”, all the bins, bus stops and town signs say Derry and none of the tours on offer call it anything other than that.

So the question perhaps is not what should you call it, but what to the locals call it and call it that.

Though you then have to consider the make up of the city...

Answering my own question

When I arrived in Belfast I wanted to come with no pre-conceptions. I wanted Belfast to speak for itself without the baggage attached to it from the subconscious of having seen it feature so much on TV news during my childhood.

I asked the question is Belfast now fully open for business?

I don’t think its a question that just two days can answer, but at the same time I’ve been able to get a taste of where the answer may lie.

Yes, the shops are gleaming, the cityscape stunning and the future rosy. But at the same time the gleaming shops are the same ones which line the street of every town in Britain. M&S, Carphone Warehouse, Next, Orange, Debenhams. I had hoped that Belfast would buck the trend of other cities in the UK and not be an identikit city. Sadly if you were to read out the names of the shops on the main street it would be impossible to tell if you were in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester, Liverpool or Belfast.

In places there is that hint that there is more under the surface. There are no Irish theme bars, just Irish bars. Some of the shops don’t have branches in London, but they do in Dublin and Cork, and in the streets lots of the cars bear number plates from Ireland.

But, perhaps the most depressing thing from my visit was discovering that despite the end to violence and the peace process being over a decade old, the physical divisions between the two communities still exits. The 20 foot high peace walls topped with barbed wire to keep the two communities separate, the gates that sever the link between the communities at night.

In the end rather than answering one question I now have several

• Is Belfast open for retail? Yes




• Is Belfast open for tourism? Yes




• Is Belfast open to community cohesion? Try again in five years time

Perhaps best not to compare

Over the last few months I have visited two places which have been torn apart by ethnic tensions and fault lines between religions.

In one, now peace has returned, the two communities have started to work together to repair the damage of war and turmoil. They have used the cooperation to build up their tourism industry and return their community to peaceful cohabitation.

In the other the communities are still separated by walls and peace lines, the old animosities exist. Whilst the politicians work together the communities are still not together and integrated.

One is a former war zone, the other is part of my own country.

Bosnia was torn to pieces with ethnic Serbs, Croats and Muslims fighting each other, committing atrocities that brought back memories of the worst of World War II. In Mostar the Croats blew up the bridge that linked the Croat and Muslim community in an attempt at ethnic cleansing.
Today, the bridge is restored and the communities are now only rivals when it comes to building the largest religious building.

In Northern Ireland, the peace lines still exist, the police stations are still heavily fortified and the suburbs of Belfast and the towns along the coast are still referred to as Nationalist or Loyalist.

The most shocking sight is that of the gate in the peace wall half way along Townsend Street, closed each evening to separate the Communities of the Falls Road (Nationalist) and Shankill Road (Unionist).

Given all the talk of peace and reconciliation within Northern Ireland it is slightly scary, and sad, to see that the two communities are still so separated.

The fleck of silver

There is a saying that in every cloud there is a silver lining. The cloud that has surrounded Northern Ireland for the last 40 years or so has been so dark that it is hard to imagine that there could have been anything good to have come out of it.

But with tourists scared away by the threat of violence the over development and “Disneyfication” of the areas natural sights has never taken place.

Anywhere else in Europe something like the Giants Causeway would have a “visitors experience” there would be a stonking entrance fee and you would only be allowed to see the rocks from a distance through fear that all those tourists feet would damage the site.

With the tourism industry in Northern Ireland only now starting to get into full swing they have been able to see how people have made mistakes elsewhere and avoid the worst of them. Added to that there are still not the number of tourists that an area as naturally stunning as the North Antrim coast should expect to get.

It’s still free to walk right up to, and onto, the Giants Causeway, certainly the most spectacular natural feature in the British Isles, probably in the whole of Europe.

It’s perhaps the most beautiful silver lining, it’s just a shame that the cloud is there in the first place.

The dividend of peace

I didn’t want to come to Belfast with any pre-conceptions. For so many years in my childhood the streets of Belfast had featured on the evening news, for all the wrong reasons.

For the last couple of years, with the only fights being verbal and between politicians, Belfast so rarely features on the national TV that you would almost think the place didn’t exist any longer.

Where as in the past the blue lights of an RUC police car would have light up the streets of the city centre, as the army went to defuse a bomb. Today, the streets are lit by the blinking lights from all the cranes which are renovating and rejuvenating the city centre.

With the gleaming shopping centres, stylish waterfront, and imposing city hall, is Belfast now fully open for business?

A tenuous link

So from Venice a city that’s sinking, it’s onto the next destination, the birth place of the ship involved in the most infamous sinking.

From the Piazza San Marco to the cranes of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, the next stop is Belfast.

For all the years of my childhood, and into my adulthood, a byword for violence. Today Belfast is a resurgent city, and, having only ever travelled in the Republic, it will be interesting to see how different, and how similar the city is.