Dublin and Belfast

  • Irish facadesI’ve had trou­ble know­ing where to begin talk­ing about the two Irish cities we’ve vis­ited. The last time I was in Ire­land was in the early 80′s, and it’s good to see that their econ­omy now isn’t what it was then, when a pass­ing Irish­man noted me look­ing at a long line out­side of a build­ing and said, “That’s the dole queue [the line to the wel­fare office]. Dar­lin’, that’s where you’ll find half of Ire­land.”

    Dublin
    Dublin streetI don’t know what the sta­tis­tics are now, but Dublin had all the hustle-bustle you’d expect to find in any big city. And for Anglophiles like Greg and I, just being there makes you feel like you’ve come home some­how. I don’t know how it is for oth­ers, but when I see cob­ble­stone streets and highly-ornamented old brick and stone build­ings, I’m already think­ing that this is the way life should always be. I even­tu­ally stopped tak­ing pic­tures of all the beau­ti­ful archi­tec­ture, because it was every­where. And the tour guides throw dates of ori­gin around so much — 17th cen­tury, 18th, 13th, 16th — that those even­tu­ally become mean­ing­less as well.

    BagpiperOn this day, we had only one errand to attend to. Since it was Greg’s 40th birth­day, we had told him that he could take any direc­tion he wanted to in Dublin. But when it came right down to it, we steered him into one of the lovely over­grown parks in town for a pic­nic lunch. We were stand­ing idly around when bag­pipe music started to play from one of the copse of trees. There isn’t any­thing Greg likes bet­ter than bag­pipe music, and so he stayed rooted when the piper in full regalia appeared out of the trees and slowly made his way across the lawn to us, tak­ing lit­tle steps that seemed to have some mean­ing. He stopped right in front of Greg, stopped play­ing and said,”Happy birth­day.” Yep, we had hired him for the occa­sion, and the expres­sion on Greg’s face was, as Visa says, price­less. But the piper’s next remark prob­a­bly meant almost as much: “I’ve got a mes­sage from your peo­ple — Come home!” Greg is adopted and so doesn’t know his her­itage, but he does look quite British, and cer­tainly right then, I don’t think he or I could’ve thought of any­thing nicer to be.

    Belfast
    Belfast docksIn many ways, Belfast looks like Dublin, as you’d expect. When I vis­ited the last time, we didn’t attempt to go to the north of Ire­land, because “the trou­bles” — as the Irish quaintly refer to the long and bloody bat­tles over Irish inde­pen­dence — were in full swing. I don’t know quite what I expected to see when we came here, but at first blush the city gave no indi­ca­tions of those ter­ri­ble days of daily bomb­ings and ter­ror­ism. On closer exam­i­na­tion, you real­ize it’s everywhere.

    Belfast spireTo be sure, there are still many beau­ti­ful cathe­drals and build­ings, but the tour-guide on our open-air bus told us often that this or that build­ing had just fin­ished being repaired, or that funds had just been col­lected to rebuild a neigh­bor­hood, or pointed out an incon­grous bill­board and men­tioned that it was there to hide the space cre­ated by the build­ing that had been blown up. And going down one street, he told us that the Protes­tant neigh­bor­hood was on one side and the Catholic neigh­bor­hood was on the other. Even­tu­ally, we came to a place where there’s a wide stone wall that sep­a­rates one side from the other. They’re called “walls of peace”, and the door that leads between them is locked at 6pm each night. Barbed wire is every­where, and our guide pointed out that the top two floors of an innocuous-looking apart­ment build­ing are com­pletely taken up with sur­veil­lance and secu­rity equip­ment. (“Ye might’s well tek a pic­ture of them, because they’re takin’ pic­tures o’ us.”)

    What else can you expect from an area where the mural on one build­ing depicts guer­ril­las with machine guns as heroes, and the mural one block later is a lov­ing trib­ute to the Queen Mother of Eng­land. It’s amaz­ing a truce was ever reached, though it has a bit of the feel of a truce borne not out of a solu­tion as just the fatigue felt by every­one for a fight that never seemed to end. So I don’t know if they solved any­thing in their truce, but at least life is allowed to go on, and that alone seems to delight them. Or at least I assume so, from the great friend­li­ness that was shown to us as tourists.

    PaddyOurs was the first cruise ship of the sea­son, and I expected a lit­tle bit of the dis­dain that all natives reserve for tourists. But it was just the oppo­site — the peo­ple were so unfail­ingly friendly that it became a lit­tle embar­rass­ing. When we’d ask direc­tions, peo­ple were so eager to help that they almost took us where we were going, when we were fid­dling with the money in con­fu­sion, a busi­ness­man stopped and gave us the com­plete run­down. And when we stopped into Kelly’s, a 300-year-old pub, we became the spe­cial friends of Paddy, who looked like he might’ve been sit­ting by that same stool by the fire­place for all 300 years. He had such a won­der­ful brogue (“Me nem’s Puddy”) and gift of blar­ney (“Jist so ye’s know, I’m a talk­a­holic, not an alco­holic.”) that he might’ve been cast for the part.

    It never occurred to me that any­one would look on tourists as hal­cyons of bet­ter days return­ing, but then I’ve never vis­ited a town where mere sur­vival was a great joy.


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    May 26th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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