Belfast

After a lovely ferry ride through the rain, I reached Belfast, Northern Ireland. I disembarked, hopped on a bus, and was taken to the city center bus depot. I got out, found some internet to get my map set, then wandered in the light North Irish rain as I tried to find my hostel. It was about a 20-minute walk slightly uphill, but I eventually found it. My initial impressions of Belfast were totally not what I was expecting. 

I arrived, checked in, and was shown my room. When I made lunch from someone’s leftovers, I met a lovely young lady named Brittany. She was of Russian extraction but grew up in Canada after her family emigrated shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed. She was born after and although she spoke Russian at home, she had no memories of her home country. After lunch, I set out to do what any many would do in my situation, find some authentic Irish Whiskey. I would soon come to find why that ‘e’ was so important. 

I found a nice little bar, the Jeggy Nettle, that reminded me of home and ordered a shot and a pint of lager. I looked around and knew that the people around me were regulars and I am sure they figured I was just some guy new to town. I enjoyed my drinks then got up to leave.

I found a little supermarket and got some wine and cheese, walked back to the hostel, and made myself a little charcuterie dinner. I met my other hostel mates who seemed like very cool young people. I write ‘young people’ because I was 10 to 15 years older than most of them. Which they did not seem to mind. I said my goodnights and headed to bed, a nice little three-bunk room. 

I got up the next day and enjoyed the hostel-supplied breakfast and chatted with my hostel mates. I ruffled the feathers of a young lady from Palo Alto that did not agree with my assessment of California in that it was a land of sunny climate and shady people. She took a lot of umbrage to that, but I said it was my experience living in Los Angeles. She conceded the point. After breakfast, I headed out for a walking tour. 

The tour was pretty good, in that it showed a lot of the sites of the city. For those of you that do not know the political history of Ireland, please allow me give you a crash course. Ireland was invaded by the English or rather Anglo-Normans in 1169, 103 years after England itself was conquered by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. When Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church in 1534, the English generally became Protestants while the Irish stayed Catholic. This created a lot of strife as the native Protestants got better land, better jobs, and generally had much better lives than the Irish Catholics. Things continued like this for centuries. While there was always a push for Irish independence from Brittain and was only exacerbated by the great Irish potato famine of 1842-1852, it really got underway in the early 20th Century. With World War I over, in 1919, Irish Republicans began fighting the British. This war lasted until 1921 with the British granting a majority of Ireland their independence. Except for six northeastern counties that had a Protestant majority and were English descendants. Thus, Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom.

Now, on the tour, there were a few places that really piqued my interest. The first was the Crown Bar. As the story goes, a husband and wife wanted to open a bar together, as one does in an area where drink is popular. They debated night and day as what to name it. To make matters harder, they were a mixed couple, the wife was Protestant Unionist while the husband was Catholic Separatist. They finally reached a compromise. The wife could choose the name while the husband could do the signage. To honor her English heritage and in deference to the royal family, the wife decided to name it the Crown Bar. The husband, ever full of Irish ingenuity, made a big mosaic crown at the entry of the bar so that every patron had a chance to walk or in some cases stomp on the very symbol of their oppressors.

Another interesting place was located right across the street from the Crown Bar known as the Europa Hotel. I did not realize it, but it was the building over the bus depot when I got to the city. The reason why the Europa Hotel was on the tour was this. If you recall from my explanation above, in 1921, Northern Ireland was left to be part of Brittain while the rest of Ireland became a Republic. A lot of the local Irish Catholics did not like that and wanted to be independent of the United Kingdom. In the 1960’s the independence fervor with accompanying violence started. This period was called the Troubles and lasted until 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. Three decades of conflict was an important news story, so a lot of journalists would stay at the Europa Hotel. To get more bang for their buck (pun intended) occasionally the Irish Republican Army (IRA) would call the hotel and say there was a bomb and that they had 30 minutes to clear the building. After 30 minutes, a device would detonate and blow out the windows of the hotel. This happened every few months, so the hotel simply stopped replacing the plate glass after a while.  

Finally, another thing I learned on the tour was that the great ship Titanic was built in Belfast. I could not escape this God damned ship. There was a museum and a memorial. What is interesting about the memorial is there is a collection of names of those that perished in the icy depths of the North Atlantic. One of the names listed as having died was a man by the name Joseph Dawson. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character was named Jack Dawson. Apparently, this was a big coincidence as the writers of the film had thought they made that name up.  

We also saw the jeweler that made all the jewelry for a small local production called Game of Thrones, as well as the location of a huge 2004 bank heist. The tour ended at City Hall, so I went in to warm myself a little. There was a little museum that had famous people from Northern Ireland which was interesting. I took a seat on a bench and watched people go by for a little. 

On my way home, I noticed a rather peculiar billboard on the side of a bus with the website https://www.endingtheharm.com/. I was soon to discover a pretty sobering fact. While I thought that the Troubles were solely by the Irish Republican Army against the British Military, there was another group that was involved. These were the Unionist paramilitaries. While the British Army was supposed to protect their citizens, a lot of those citizens decided to protect themselves. Men would form groups to protect their neighborhoods and families from possible IRA attacks, which happened often. However, when the “war” was over in 1998 and since the paramilitaries were never official, they were never officially decommissioned. These men that grew up on violence decided to use their trade to become ensconced with the criminal underworld of drugs and loan sharking. The website I clicked on took me to a scripted yet too real video showing the inner workings of these organizations. The video featured a mother taking her son to an appointment with the paramilitaries as he screwed up something for them in some way. This apparently was a common practice for if he ran, they would hurt his family. The mother fighting back tears dropped off her son in an abandoned parking lot for what was going to be a six-pack. A six-pack in paramilitary parlance is when an assailant fires six bullets into the most important joints of a victim, usually ankles, knees, and elbows, shoulders or wrists. Apparently, this was still a huge problem.

I headed back to the hostel after getting a wee dram of Prot Whiskey at the Crown Bar and made myself a huge lunch of pasta, bacon, and instant noodles. It was pretty good. I then took a nap and headed to find the Golden Mile, a long stretch of pubs and restaurants. I was unsuccessful. I headed back to the hostel with some wine and drank while I talked with a few of the other guests. They invited me out of karaoke, but I couldn’t as I had a very early day the next day.

After a night’s rest, I got up, had brekkie and with my trusty little Thai knockoff backpack, I headed out to the pickup point for my tour at a local hotel. I found my guide and hopped on a small shuttle bus with 16 other people. 

Our first stop was the Dark Hedges. Harkening back to that small local production called Game of Thrones, they filmed a lot of the show in and around Northern Ireland. The Dark Hedge was a forest of twisting trees that looked almost too fanciful to be real. But they were! Other tour groups were there and the guides even brought along props so that people could dress up as their favorite characters from the show. I thought it was a little overkill, but in this Social Media Age in which we live, anything for likes, right?

Our next stop was the famous Bushmills Distillery. Going back to what I mentioned before, most things on the Emerald Isle were divided into things for the Protestants and things for the Catholics. I got this lesson in spades when I went to an Irish Pub while I was living in Madrid. I walked in, put my belly up to the bar, and asked the jovial bartender for a pint of Guinness. If you remember those old cowboy movies when the hustle and bustle of a saloon stops when a stranger says something that the rest of the patrons don’t like, that was me. The jovial bartender seemed to have grown a few feet, looking like a ginger Hulk, as he got in my face and said in a thick brogue, “We ain’t got, Guinness. We Got Beamish.” Looking around the bar and seeing only ads for Beamish (a Protestant Stout) and Bushmills (a Protestant Whiskey,) I quickly amended my request.

We arrived at the distillery where I immediately headed to the bar to have myself a small tasting.  The barmaid was very nice and inquisitive about how I liked the different whiskeys. One of the things I learned from our guide was the reason there were different spellings for this delectable spirit. In order to differentiate themselves from the whisky from Scotland, the distillers of Ireland decided to add an extra ‘e’ to their Irish Whiskey. After getting a little lubricated, I hopped back on the bus, and we headed to our last stop, the Giant’s Causeway.

Called the Giant’s Causway due to the legend of an Irish Giant Finn MacCool building a bridge to cross the Irish Sea to fight the Scottish giant Benandonner, it is a collection of 40,000 interlocking basalt columns from a volcanic eruption 50-60 million years ago that look man (or giant) made. We arrived with the mass of other tourists and parked. We were given an hour and thirty minutes to have a look around. I shot out of the van and walked down the large hill to the sea. There were a lot of tourists and it was windy and cold. But it was still otherworldly and beautiful. 

Thoroughly tired but happy, we headed back to Belfast. I went to the hostel where I made dinner, gave a spare beer to a gentleman that spotted me one on the previous day, and played games with my hostel mates. I ended up meeting and befriending a recent arrival to the hostel, a young lady from Canada named Hayley. She had lived for some of her childhood in the United States, so we had a lot to talk about. As we were talking, I let slip that I had worked in the movie business in Hollywood and in New Orleans. Without missing a beat, all the Gen Z’ers whipped out their devices, asked me my full name, and went to IMDB to look me up. Everyone in the room of about 15. It was surreal. After a few more drinks, I headed to bed.

The next day I had another tour set up of which I was really excited. Hayley decided to join me. We headed out and met our first guide “Chips” at the Divis Tower right in the center of a former Irish Republican Army hotbed. Looking around, it reminded me of the housing projects near where I grew up; rowhomes close together, all one color, all drab and beaten down. Although Chips spit when he talked, he had a lot of interesting things to say, being a former IRA member himself. He walked us around his neighborhood, sharing a lot of information about what he had seen, what he had done, and the history of the movement. I had a lot of questions which he answered if a little forcefully. When I asked where did the IRA get their arms, he replied that a lot of them were supplied from Irish Americans. I asked if the Soviet Union, often an agent provocateur of the era, supplied arms as well. Chips said no, but it was a thought by the British and they kept a close eye on ships as they did not want Northern Ireland to become their Cuba. I asked what the people in the Independent Irish Republic down South did to help the situation. His reply, “Fuck all.” I asked about their bomb-making. He said that when they started, most were not too good. However, by the end, the IRA was the best bombmaker in the world.

We continued walking and he showed us a few of the murals that were painted in the area to foment a desire for independence. The big one he was sure to show us was that of Bobby Sands. Robert Gerard Sands was born in 1954 and grew up during the height of the Troubles. His family had faced persecution for being Catholic since he was born, so the plight of his people was nothing foreign to him. He joined the Provisional IRA in 1972 and was quickly arrested that same year because a house he was staying in was searched and four firearms were found. He was released from prison in 1976. He went right back to planning and orchestrating Provisional IRA activity. A year later, he and a few of his comrades were sentenced to 14 years in prison after another bombing where their getaway car was searched by police and they found another gun. In 1980, he was transferred to the Maze, a maximum-security prison. As these men saw themselves as political prisoners, they did not think the rank and file rules of prison life applied to them.  They did not wear prison uniforms but used blankets instead. They were also being treated inhumanely by the guards as beatings and psychological torture were regular. In protest of this, they started using the contents of their chamber pots to make their cells filthy. In 1981, hunger strikes began being led by Sands. During this time, he was elected to Parliament as the youngest MP (Member of Parliament) in history but after 66 days, he starved to death. The fantastic and beautiful film Hunger highlights a lot of these elements, with the Irish-German Michael Fassbender portraying Sands. 

Our tour continued and got a lot more personal. Chips took us to where his brother was buried. He pointed to his brother’s name, listed as a volunteer, the title given to every member of the IRA. He said that when he was working, someone probably let slip that he was a former member of the IRA. He had given up that life to raise a family. As he was getting home from work, two men pulled up in a car, got out, and one shot him in the head leaving his body for his family to find; leaving his wife without a husband and his daughter without a father. Chips said that this is what turned him from being on the fence about the movement to joining it full force. He became a bomb courier. He knew that what he did hurt, maimed, and killed people. But he was blinded by his rage and his pain. It was on one of these runs when he was caught by police and sent to prison for a large portion of his life.

We were walking closer to a gate with a very high fence and Chips handed us off to our Unionist guide. I have not been a soldier, but it seems so fascinating that these two men on opposite sides of the divide thirty years hence that would have killed each other given the chance, shook hands and joked. People are funny.

Our Unionist guide met us right outside the “Peace Wall.” In order to stop incursion into the much smaller Irish Protestant neighborhood, a wall with automatic heavy steel gates was erected. The gates were on automatic timers that would close them at dusk and reopen them at dawn. However, the schedule was never public. If one found themselves outside the gates, there would be no way to get in. While this served as a general fix, people were still able to lob grenades or Molotov cocktails over the wall, so an additional net was added two stories higher than the original wall. It was pretty surreal. Our guide gave anyone who wanted one a Sharpie marker to write a message on the wall, as thousands had done already. As we walked, I asked this guide a lot of questions as per my usual. I needed to get my money’s worth. My first question was about the current paramilitary problem; the one I had seen on the bus billboard. He said that it was an issue on both sides of the wall and that while they were saying they were doing it “for the cause” they were really more interested in moving drugs, extortion, and using the funds to line their pockets. I asked if the arms to the Unionists were supplied by the British government. He said that they most certainly did not, as that would be an immense political problem; giving citizens arms that were little more than vigilantes. He did say that arms were procured from other Commonwealth countries, like South Africa, and even some from Eastern Europe. He continued that Unionists and their paramilitary wing, the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force,) was created as a means of protection as the British Military could not protect everyone all the time but then morphed into something more.

I asked our guide, privately, about his pedigree. He said he was with the UVF from when he was young and was involved in a few operations. He mentioned that he, like Chips, had gone to prison. I asked why. He said I would not like it. I implored. He told me that he was a bomb maker and one day, he got the assignment to take out two targets. He made sure to delineate his line of thinking that he did not view these people as people, but targets. They were going to be sitting at a cafe. He walked up and through an open door, threw in a pipe bomb, killing them both. He was later caught and sent to prison for two murders, and the attempted murders of seven other people that were in the cafe. I know killers, those that had done it in and out of war. The one thing that binds them is a shared form of stoicism about what they had done. 

We ended his tour in a memorial garden for the innocent Unionist victims that were killed in the struggle. Mostly those that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He thanked us profusely for coming to the tour and hearing both stories. He wanted us to have a better understanding of the conflict. More importantly, he wanted us to know that even though many hands were dipped in blood during this conflict (including his own,) there is always a route to peace. I shook his hand, and Hayley and I started our walk back to the hostel. 

On our way back, as we were walking past a bar, this sloppy drunk older man was grabbing at a girl that could not have been more the 15; planting a kiss on her contorted face. Like a guardian angel, Hayley threw up her arms and said loudly, “It is so good to see you!” as she placed them around the obviously confused girl. This broke the grasp of the man and like a dance move spun the girl around and whispered, “Just walk away.” The girl meekly said thank you and sped on her way. The whole interaction took less than 5 seconds. It was impressive to see this moment of sisterhood, rarely viewed by an outsider.

She had a train to catch, but we went and had some beers first at that pub I had visited before. I walked her to the station, passing the St George Market, which I would check out later, and dropped her off. I then went to St George Market. I love flea markets like this, mostly because they are more unique items, and I was not disappointed. My favorite was a balaclava-wearing IRA member neck chain. After the market, I then came back, had dinner, took a shower, and looked to relax. I listened to my book and then just passed out. I didn’t even brush my teeth.

I awoke the next day and retraced my steps from Chip’s tour to find the IRA museum. It was small, but there was a lot of information and a lot of guns. They had photos from Bobby Sands’ time in the Maze, he and his group dressed in blankets, and a few newspaper clippings of him skeletally confined to his bed.

Leaving the museum, I then went over to the Cathedral of St Paul. As I was walking through the row homes, I almost expected to see a tank and British army soldiers rounding the corner. The church was very nice, but it seemed incredibly out of place; this pristine holy building was in the middle of a dark and dreary neighborhood. 

I headed back to the hostel after I scoped out the bus station for my trip the next day. I made some lunch, watched a little Wolf of Wall Street, then tried to take a nap. That didn’t work, so I had an early dinner and headed back downtown to a wonderful Irish Pub called Fibber Magee that my guide pointed out that had nightly live music. After a whiskey and enjoying the music and watching the people dance, I stopped in from a dram at the Crown Bar, and finished off my night, and my time in Belfast back at the Jeggy Nettle where it all started. 

The next day, I was off to Dublin.