A week in Northern Ireland

Pictures: (top left) me at the Giant's Causeway, (top right) a mural in the city of Derry commemerating the events of Bloody Sunday, (bottom) view climbing up to the Carric-a-kee rope bridge.

I just returned from my weeklong trip to Northern Ireland. I spent a week in Belfast and then this weekend in Londonderry (or Derry- that difference in name actually means a lot to people and demonstrates the large degree that everything is polarized by the Unionist-Nationalist divide). Our trip coincided with a rare 30 degree heat wave (translating to about 86 degree F). Although not really all that hot for summer, I must be adapting to the weather b/c it sure felt hot.

In Belfast, I stayed at Queens University. I was a very old looking gothic set of buildings. Our housing accomidations were single dorm rooms with a shared kitchen space. Queens was nice altough a bit removed from the city center. Our program managed to pack a lot of events into the week, so I am a bit exaushted at the moment. We visited Belfast City Hall and had a "reception" with the Lord Mayor (it was really just presenting us with a plaque and then a tour). We took a full-day excursion to the Giant's Causeway and the Carric-a-kee Rope bridge. Both of these coastal spots were amazing. The Causeway is a natuaral phonemon that produces highly regular 5 and 6-sided stones that pattern the coastline. Plus it is surrounded by huge cliff sides. The Rope Bridge, obviously took some effort in design, connects a part of the coast to a smaller island and provides breathtaking views of the Atlantic coast. I never realized that ocean water was really that blue.

No visit to Northern Ireland could be complete without an examination of the pecular events that have shaped its history. Since the partition of Ireland in the 1920's, there have been alternating periods of tension and relative peace. Much of Belfast was bombed out in WWII, so much of the sites, such as city hall have been largley reconstructed. The violence of the Troubles still looms large here. One of our day tours was a visit to local murals. Murals have become a way to express almost any feeling about this violence from calls for peace to continued celebration of IRA, UFF, UDA, etc paramilitaries that caused chaos in the city. I must admitt that the type of neighborhoods that housed Belfast's murals were very run-down. As one of my peers put it "its a bit like a gang war, where you put your gang colors on your house." It was always clear if you were in an Unionist or Nationalist (more commonly and less aduquitely grouped as Protestant and Catholic) area based on either Union Jacks or Irish tricolor flags hanging from lamposts and shop windows. Sadly, although as our tour guide put it "things have gotten much better", there are still clear demarcations of territory made even more acute by the erection of so-called "peace walls" that seperete some neighborhoods.

Not that the story, is all gloom but it has a long way to go. We finished the week by taking a trip to Stormont (the N. Ie. Parliment). It was a beatiful building that hasn't held a single session of Parliment in several years. The UK government at Westminster has been struggling to get a devolved Parliment up and running but hasn't been able to do so. Our round table discussions with members of 3 of the 4 major parties showed why polarization is still a problem.

Now back in Dublin, and have finally moved into my last housing accomidations for the trip. So I don't have to move again. I will be traveling to London next week, I cannot wait.