Category Archives: Belfast

Belfast, Belfast Castle, Northern Ireland, Peace Walls

Sunshine in Belfast

September 18, 2018 humrob@me.com 3 Comments

Yesterday we trooped like good tourists to the Titanic Museum. I wrote a review on TripAdvisor entitled, “A Disappointment of Titanic Proportion.” I’ll just leave it at that and pop in one picture just to prove our attendance.

Oh, but one more, the venerable “Crapper” aboard the SS Nomadic, the Titanic tender ship. Click to enlarge so you can see the logo.

We have fallen in love with those “Hop On, Hop Off” buses. They give a great tour of the city and we end up seeing things we wouldn’t otherwise see, getting a sense of the city overall.

We decided to walk the few blocks from our hotel to Queen’s University and the Botanical Gardens and after trouping around there . . . hop on.

Our street – can you conjure a more definitive Belfast street scene?

The first building in our path, the handsome Union Theological College.

Ah, a new job!

Then on to the Botanical garden – more flowers.

Such a dandy chap!

The Palm House Conservatory, finished in 1840, and one of the first to feature curved glass and cast iron.

Just a few steps to the iconic university building with walls of stained glass.

Time to hop on. It was raining when we boarded so no pictures to show until we got to Royal Victoria Hospital where I guess they are not accepting new patients (click to enlarge).

As the bus zigged and zagged through the now sunny neighborhoods, the guide let us know if it was Catholic or Protestant. The city is still mightily segregated. Here is a “peace wall” which started springing up in 1969 to “minimize inter-communal violence”. This one is still standing around a Catholic neighborhood and the gates close at 6:30 every evening.

Here a slowly crumbling prison where folks were held without cause.

And on we went to Shankill Road (yesterdays post referred to the Shankill Butchers) where allegiances were proudly displayed.

Then you turn a corner and flash back into the world of Irish Ozzie and Harriet.

The Belfast Castle is nestled in the hills just outside the city centre. The gardens have a view across the river to the shipyard.

Another turn, another declaration. This claims territory for the Ulster Volunteer Force.

The fragile peace is palpable.

For the sake of history, here is the Albert clock. Vickie built memorials all over the empire in an effort to impress upon everyone how sad she was to lose her German husband. I’m not a bad photographer, the clock tower leans. Never one to be told no, Vickie had the thing built over a submerged river.

Back to the hotel and a view out our window of the mammoth H & W cranes next to the Titanic dock.

It just started raining while the sun is shining . . . pot of gold?

Since we are getting to the end of the trip, we can safely add a tip for hoteliers around the globe. THESE THINGS DON’T WORK. You step on the pedal and it hits you on the shin!

Belfast, Belfast Troubles, Northern Ireland

A Poignant and Troubling Day

September 16, 2018 humrob@me.com 2 Comments

During the “troubles”, downtown Belfast was enclosed by a steel wall and vacated at the end of the business day. It became known as “Dead Centre”, which appropriately, is the name of the tour company which guided us around today. As a child, I saw the “troubles” through a television set and some pictures in Life magazine.

Here in Belfast today, I saw through the lens of testimonial, time, and place.

Paul, our guide, is a teacher now with a degree in political science but lived through the troubles as a child.

When he was four a store a few doors from his home was bombed and his parents found him upstairs sound asleep amid broken glass. Some of his earliest memories are of his family carting out their possessions to move to a place of safety. Paul also does mediation work between Republicans (predominately Catholic) and Unionists/Loyalists (predominately Protestant). His perspective both personal and intellectual brings clarity to the disturbing history of this city.

We started at City Hall (note; Births, Deaths, Marriages and Civil Partnerships).

Here Queen Vickie, holding the orb, stands in authority (perhaps the root of the problem).

In just a short walk we were in the middle of dead centre. The steel wall was a ring of fencing around the city centre, you had to be searched to enter. It did not come down until 1995. Here you can see what it was like to go to work each day.

Even now the streets are deserted at night and shops closed on Sunday leaving a ghost town feel amid the clash of architecture past and present.

Across the street from this shot was one of the first bombings in the entrance of a night club. The bomb was set by a paramilitary squad who pulled up, held the bouncers at gun point, set down the bomb and then told them they had ten minutes before it exploded.

In 1972, the Abercorn Restaurant was bombed, killing 2 and injuring over 130. The IRA was blamed but no one was ever charged.

The scene then.

And now.

This is the sight of Mooneys Bar where three Scottish soldiers (two of them brothers aged 17 and 18) were lured out of the bar and into the hands of IRA paramilitary then shot at a remote location.

The response from the Protestants was to start the Tartan Gangs and the Shankill Butchers who would kidnap, torture and murder random Catholics. The point being, if you couldn’t kill an IRA soldier, you killed a civilian.

July 21, 1972, is remembered as Bloody Friday when 20 car bombs went off all around Belfast in less than 80 minutes terrorizing the entire city.

This building in 1972.

And today.

During the course of the Northern Ireland Troubles there were 16,209 bombings and attempted bombings. Most in Belfast, a compact city of 300,000 individuals spread over just 42 square miles. Compare with Chicago at 1,318 square miles and you can understand the concentration of terror involved in living each day.

Signs of hope appear randomly throughout the city. Charming cobbled streets, flowers, and a street mural project that reinterprets the violent murals of the past. And what is more hopeful than a smiling Cavalier?

As Paul said, “A city that has one eye on the past is wise, a city that has both eyes on the past is blind.”

Belfast, Northern Ireland, Uncategorized

Tinker, Tailor, Tourist Spies

September 15, 2018 humrob@me.com 3 Comments

We tinkered with our route this morning and had some extra time which we used to travel the coastal route paying the dividend of more stunning beauty. As promised, no more pics of landscape.

We entered Belfast and were immediately aware of its unique identity. It’s a more urban feel with abundant graffiti, a little grit on the streets and a plethora of Thai restaurants (I think we are about to see Thai food hailed as the first global cuisine, it is ubiquitous). Belfast has a little over 300,000 citizens, so a smallish city. It’s been occupied since the Bronze Age and Queen Vickie gave it city status in 1888. We’ll be tourist spies tomorrow on a “Troubles” walking tour but Belfast is now known as one of the safest cities in the UK. We are staying just blocks from Queen’s University and the neighborhood is young, diverse, full of street life and vintage shops.

This statue sized drinking fountain is affectionately inscribed with the phrase, “Whoever drinketh here will surely thirst again.” Nice to know.

But now for the win of the day. Wayne has been in search of a replacement for his threadbare 35-year-old tweed jacket. He didn’t want something new or different – more of a reproduction. We searched in Dublin, made a special stop in Donegal to ferret something out (see current label below) all to no avail.

We did locate the closest Donegal tweed fabric in Dublin at Kevin and Howlin where they said they couldn’t make the jacket but did cut a swatch of the fabric and filed it with his name on it in hopes that a tailor in Chicago could do the construction. Belfast was our last hope. So we set out with a list of tweed stores proffered by google.

The first was a bespoke shop, North Clothing, Gentlemen’s Outfitters. The proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Inside, the proprietor, Michael Donnelly, a tailor in his own right was about to get a sale. He got on the phone, talked to the store in Dublin, measured Wayne up, and we’re dropping off the old jacket for him to copy before we leave on Wednesday. So he’ll end up with Donegal tweed from Dublin made into a new jacket in Belfast. Couldn’t get more Irish than than that.