The three day Northern

Hello,

Well we just did the Paddywagon three day Northern Ireland tour and it was so action packed it's hard to know where to begin. The tour was the idea of our friend Jess who came with us. The tour started in Dublin so we caught the bus from Galway to Dublin on Thursday night and stayed with friends of Jess on Thursday with the tour starting Friday morning.



Looking a bit tired and wired in the back of our Belfast taxi tour cab.

The tour had a really good balance of very sober historic experiences as well as plenty of time to unwind from the busy days. The main thing I think we got from the tour was a better understanding of "the troubles" that is the conflict in Northern Ireland in the last 40 years mostly ending with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. You'll be pleased to know I've no intentions of giving you a history lesson but the history is fascinating and I really recommend coming and seeing the north if you're over here.

There were lots of little stops on the tour that broke up the days like seeing the preserved head of Saint Anthony Plunkett and visiting monastery sites. One cool site was the place where Saint Patrick lit a fire on a hilltop (which was illegal) so he would be dragged in front of the king of Ireland in order to preach to him. The king decided not to convert himself but gave Patrick the right to convert his people, Patrick used the shamrock to explain the holy trinity and thus it became the symbol of Ireland.



Climbing ruins, my new favourite passtime.



The site of Saint Patrick's fire, above: me climbing in the ruins of the monastery built on the sight.

Stories like the one above were all explained by our tour guide Joe. Joe would be about 45 or 50 and has recently had a stroke. Paddywagon bought Joe a special automatic bus so he could keep working, he's been with Paddywagon for 10 years and his experience really showed around the subjects that required much diplomacy.

Crossing the border into the north is painless, there are no checks and no stamps in passports. You do go onto the Brittish pound from the Euro and all the speed signs go from km to miles. All the irish language disappears from place name signs; there is no such thing as cultural sensitivity in the north.

So our first main stop was Belfast, we stopped for lunch on the Friday and even managed some shopping (new shoes!). As we drove into Belfast Joe taught us how to tell a catholic area from a protestant one. Catholic areas fly the tri-colour Irish Republic flag (green for Ireland, white for peace, orange for the protestant community) and Protestant areas fly the union jack, the king george with the red hand of Ulster and the Scottish flag. At first this appeared to be a natural showing of pride in history and political view but it soon became obvious that it was more of a warning system. Where one flag flew the other knew not to tread, simple yet threatening. Not all of Belfast is divided and the central city is neutral, but where a flag flies the area is serious about which side they're on. The northern police force is 96% protestant so they are not called to the catholic areas, instead the IRA act as an enforcement group for the catholic community. Within staunch areas the divide is clear and complete, you cannot live in these areas without taking the side of your neighbourhood. The divide begins early with segregated schooling from age 4 and continues for life.

In Belfast we took a black taxi tour, we needed to do this because there are some places in Belfast where you just can't drive a big green bus. The taxi tours are famous and very very good, they take you to see the murals in the trouble spots. In the protestant area you are guided by a protestant cabbie and in the catholic area the opposite. The murals differ in tone from the protestant to the catholic. The protestant murals are much more fight, fight, fight and the catholic are much more remembrance and resistance. This makes the Protestants appear the aggressors but war is never that simple. It was unsettling to walk past peoples homes with murals on the side promoting the crushing of the catholic church however.



This mural is in the protestant housing area, it's about how in the Good Friday Agreement all political prisoners had to be set free by 2000. This means that many people who did really awful things are now back on the streets, however they will be detained without trial if they are involved in anything ever again. Note the unionist flags on the houses in the row.



This is the Mona Lisa mural, wherever you go in the estate the gun appears to be trained on you. It's a simple but very creepy visual trick.



This guy is also protestant and actually died in a motorcycle accident. He's remembered here because he was a top gun, presumably a sniper.



Dividing the two neighbourhoods in Belfast is the Peace wall, 42 feet of peace to be exact. This massive wall is graffitied along one side. Every night at 6pm the gates close and they re-open at 6am the next day, except on weekends when they remain closed until Monday morning. One gate is always open but it is watched very closely for any signs of trouble. Generally there is no trouble but the feeling is that without the wall things could escalate very quickly.



Bobby Sands famous freedom fighter, hunger striker and member of parliament. This is a catholic mural, note the birds breaking the chains of oppression, the phoenix rising from the ashes. The quote to the right says "our revenge will be the laughter of our children". It's much easier to like the catholic murals.



Panoramic of catholic murals, many are murals of support for other countries or peoples living with foreign rule or at civil war. Like Palestine below.



The Belfast hostel was full so we stayed in a little coastal town called Ballintoy. Ballintoy is a divided community that live in peace, while the two communities know which side they are on they see no need to fight about it. Our group was 15 people so most of us went to the pub together and talked over the day. We had mainly girls on the tour with lots of Aussies and Americans in the group. We got up in the morning and walked the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge before getting back on the bus to head to the giants causeway.



Me at a little harbour we stopped at for some photos just outside of Ballintoy



Emmett on the rope bridge.



The giants causeway, an amazing rock formation that goes underwater all the way to Scotland where it resurfaces.

After the causeway we headed to Derry, now in the north it's called LondonDerry but in the south it's called Derry. It was called Derry long before the London was added and many of the roadsigns with LondonDerry on them are vandilised so the London is removed. Only the queen can change the name and she has not despite being asked by the Derry city council who dropped the "london" from their name a while back. It's a petty point of rivalry between the two sides, it was one of the only things Joe put his foot down on, he said "it's Derry."

Derry was our main night out as a group, we ate out and went to a catholic pub to hear traditional irish music, including it turned out a bunch of out war/resistance songs. The guy I sat next to was called Seamus O'Neill, he was great. He was at the pub with his family, they had just been to mass for the second anniversary of a family death and it was basically a wake style night out drinking for the clann. He was a local taxi driver and he told me about the songs that were being sung and we joked and drank for ages, I think he was happy to have his mind off the meaning of the outing.

We rolled home and fell out of bed the next morning for our walking tour with John.

John was quite open about the fact that he was hung over and so were we, never the less you don't go to Derry without seeing the murals and learning a thing or two about the troubles. The conflict in Derry was different to the conflict in Belfast, Derry was about land and civil rights, it was a fight against the authorities not the protestants. Yes the authorities were protestant but there was no fighting people who just happened to be protestant, no burning houses down, it was all rallies and riots against the police and the army. John was there, he was the perfect guide. He told us how the catholic community were treated and why they were fighting and unlike Belfast Derry are at peace, they don't fight there anymore. The murals are very emotional and again have a different tone to any of the Belfast ones. John finished the tour by explaining peace to us, he told us we probably take it for granted but for him it was the greatest feeling of his life the day he got to live in peace. He declared that the peace would last in Derry because he wouldn't give this feeling up for anything and neither would his children or grandchildren.



The Bogside, the catholic area of Derry where all the troubles were, also known as "free Derry", you can see the murals on some of the buildings.



One of the more famous murals, the death of innocence. Annette was 14 when shot by British troops, they say she was about to throw a bomb but this is not widely believed. She was on her way home from school when she stopped to watch a disturbance in the street, she represents all children killed in the conflict. The butterfly used to lay at her feet in dull colours but this was changed when Derry got peace.



John in front of the final mural, a peace dove in the oak leaf, the symbol of the Bogside area.

It was on the bus and home to Dublin with a couple of little stops on the way after the walking tour.



Us at a lookout outside of Derry on the way back to Dublin, cold and tired.

I really enjoyed the tour, there is so much I haven't written about here that I learnt and experienced in three days. This is recent history and it's worth going to see it while it's fresh, when people like John die no one will ever be able to tell you exactly what Sunday Bloody Sunday was like again. It was amazing.

Aimee