I Spent the Whole Taxi Ride This Morning Trying to Think of a Clever Title But I Couldn't.

We ran into one of Tomas's friends and nipped away from the parade and went into this family's house with about 10 other people. She fed us each a bowl of soup and bread and we were in and out in about 5 minutes, perfect timing to join back up with the parade before our friends noticed!

Driving back was almost as interesting. We went with Tomas's friend Donal, who from what I can figure is around mid-40s. We had gotten off the highway in North Belfast for him to get petrol next to an area called Mount Vernon (where I may be observing some groups), whose main attraction is a gigantic mural perched above a soccer field featuring a masked man with a gun that says "Mount Vernon Volunteers: Ready for Peace. Prepared for War." It's lovely. As we drove down through the neighborhoods en route to the Falls Road, Donal told us about where he grew up and where/when he got his "first proper beating for being a Catholic" (his words, not mine). He grew up in an area that was much more mixed than it is now, around Tiger's Bay. He was beaten up by a gang of Protestant boys when he was 4, and the lady who owned the shop outside of which he got beaten gave the boys some icies after they beat him up.

We then drove right through Tiger's Bay, and without so much as a warning, Donal said we were now in New Lodge, which is a Catholic area. No peace wall. No fence. No nothing to separate the two communities (as far as I could tell), but a change from a DUP office on one street to St. Somebody's primary school on the next. Apparently this area (with no surprise) was one of the deadliest during the Troubles. Around 500 Catholics were murdered along one stretch of road, the Cliftonville road, also know as the Murder Mile or something like that. We drove past a police station and Donal mentioned (ever so casually, the way someone in America might mention they'd eaten at that restaurant they'd just passed, not so good food) that his brother had been "put away" - i.e. arrested - for trying to blow it up.

It was pretty surreal. You hear all these stories about how things like that happened to people - neighbors being shot, family members beat up, people burnt out of their homes - but it has a very different taste when you're sitting in a car with a man who's experienced nearly every aspect of the Troubles. It gains a very real human face. It makes you afraid. I felt a very real sense of relief as soon as we turned onto the Falls Road, because West Belfast is much more insulated, and there's fewer little onclaves of different communities, making it much more homogenous. I feel safe there. I think that after hearing Donal's stories, I would feel less safe in North Belfast. It's not necessarily that I would feel unsafe in a Protestant community, so much as the fact that interface areas (where Protestant and Catholic communities intersect), tend to be the most violent. In West Belfast, in Andytown, I can be almost 100% certain that every person on the street or in the shop is from the same community - my community now - and that I don't have to worry about there being any flairups. You can see how that kind of mentality very quickly leads to entrenched sectarianism. I think it also applies on the Protestant side. For me, at least, as I said, I would be fine in any community. But according to Tomas, there's still real possiblities at flashpoint areas for Trouble to arise (again, why I wouldn't want to live in an interface community as much). For example, on his way back from a meeting a Derry a month or two ago, he and a few of the guys he was with from the IRSP (Irish Republic Socialist Party) went into a chipper called Bridie's in Drumahoe. Now, Drumahoe is home to a lot of policemen. Apparently, Tomas and his friends got some very, very frosty looks from the people inside, because they were wearing IRSP badges. That's why when we stopped there for Donal yesterday, Tomas told him to make sure he wasn't wearing anything that would identify him with the Catholic/Nationalist community.

And yet, you go out to a pub and you see and hear people from both communities interacting absolutely fine - people that have been friends for years. You wonder why there's such a difference between these people and the people in Tiger's Bay who have alarms in their homes going directly to the paramilitaries, or the people who yell sectarian slurs at each other during old Firm matches (when the Rangers play the Celtics in Scotland; Tomas is taking me to the conference final match next month and I made him promise to glue me to his leg because I'm slightly terrified).

It all gets very muddled, and there's not clear cut answer, though certain people on either side will tell you there is, and it usually involves some variation of kicking "those f*****s the hell out."

It made the Derry march interesting. While it obviously was about commemorating Bloody Sunday, in which 13 innocent civilians were gunned down by British paratroopers during a peaceful civil rights march, it was also about Civil Rights - something that, one would think, all people would support.

written by  ebienelson on February 2, 2009 from Derry, United Kingdom
from the travel blog: "She is the Belle of Belfast City..."
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