July 27, 2012
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(written on 12 March 2013)
I got up in the morning and almost immediately my back screamed for attention. OK. Not good. What’s more, my stomach had been difficult all night as well (I shall spare you the details) so I had the feeling that I was slowly falling apart. With great difficulty (walking down stairs had suddenly turned into a challenge) I went to the hotel’s breakfast room and had a rather delicious Irish breakfast, and not soon thereafter I left the hotel, again at a snail’s speed. My first destination was a Starbucks just down the road because I could sit down there again to give my back some rest, as well as read a newspaper. The Olympics start in London today and there was a great picture of Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders on the front page of the Guardian, which of course I photographed and posted on Facebook straight away.
The Belfast Telegraph had more alarming news of a possible merger of some militant republican splinter groups that had threatened to create a new style IRA with all the violence that had come with the old one. The newspaper clearly thought that was bluff, but somehow it hadn’t even managed to convince itself of that. Belfast’s recent history is exactly what I had in mind for today because I was planning on going to the Shankill Rd. This part of town was the focal point for unionist sentiments during the troubles. This is where the heart of Britishness beat strongest in Northern Ireland and that’s what I wanted to see for myself.
So after a stroll through some southern neighbourhoods and the city centre, I headed towards the Shankill Rd, the main road leading west from the city centre. The picture was all too familiar. Sure, there were the shops and the bars and the churches that the public gardens that can be found in any high street, but there also many murals. And the language on the murals left nothing to the imagination; the people in this area would fight till their deaths to remain part of the United Kingdom and nothing less would suffice. One mural showed a street sign with two arrows to the left pointing towards “Eire” and “War” and two arrows to the right pointing towards “United Kingdom” and “Peace”. No points for guessing what they could possibly mean with that. And it was like this all down the Shankill Rd, with the moits poignant memorial at the place where once the Bayard pub had been. This pub was bombed by republicans (Provisional IRA) in 1975, killing five people and injuring more than fifty. On the sign it read “But the Irish Republican Army was not an army, nor were they so-called freedom fighters. They were a homicidal guerrilla grouping! A criminal organisation devoid of conscience! An organisation which fouls the decency of humanity in every sense and on every level!”, and so on, and so on. Funny how in a part of Europe where religion is so immensely strong, any signs of forgiveness and compassion are extremely hard too find. The scars are still way too visible, the wounds still raw and fresh. This will take much more time.
At the end of the afternoon, after having seen enough of the Shankill Rd, and after having walked back through a unionist (i.e. Catholic) part of Belfast (separated from Shankill by many fences and by streets that actually got locked on either side by huge gates in the evening and night) I ended up in the city centre again. Not much later I was back in my hotel, but I also left quite soon again because tonight was a very special evening. After dinner in a Wetherspoons pub, I went down to the gardens of City Hall (picture of Queen Victoria’s statue in front of the Olympic rings was taken there) to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. I watched it all for many hours on the giant TV screen that had been erected in the garden and I loved every single minute of it. What a spectacular show! Of course the scenes with Queen Elizabeth and James Bond were hilarious and very well done, but the whole atmosphere in the stadium was just so electric that you could almost feel it in Belfast. It was a wonderful experience to see it together with hundreds of people in the centre of one of the four capitals of the constituent countries of the UK – though of course the games are officially for London, not the country. Only when the parade of countries seemed to drag on forever and ever, did I decide to return to my hotel (and – oh joy! – that’s when my back was finally OK again!) and watch the rest there. I was back just in time to see the Netherlands march into the stadium. It was only when Paul McCartney started to… ehm… let’s call it ‘sing’ that I’d seen enough and I switched off the telly to go to the land of dreams…
