(Gnuse) Belfast, Today, Five Years Ago

It’s been fourteen years from the Good Friday Agreement, and the Belfast streets show it. Military checkpoints have been shut down, gates in the Peace Wall remain open, and the last British military watch tower was dismantled five years ago. The red-bricked streets around Victoria Shopping Centre bustle with tourists and teenagers pressing their ways in and out of shops—shops whose doors are no longer guarded with security who search the bags of customers at the doors for explosives. If the depictions of a war-torn Belfast from In the Name of the Father and The Boxer were accurate, they certainly aren’t anymore. Even the poorer neighbourhoods of Belfast lack the camouflaged soldiers and helicopters that helped portray the city as a battleground with ubiquitous barriers and Orwellian surveillance.

                My first night in Belfast, I met Tony, a Dubliner on vacation who had come up for some friends’ wedding, and we struck up a conversation. We chatted at The Crown, a stunning pub in the middle of central Belfast, where carved royal unicorns and a schizophrenically Victorian color scheme reminded us, just in case we had forgotten, which nation’s “crown” The Crown had been named after.  It didn’t take long for us to begin to remark about how the Belfast we saw looked so different from the one we had expected.

                “I’ve been here recently—well, since after the Agreement—and it’s changed so much even since then,” he said. “The murals are still up—have you seen them?”

                I told him I hadn’t yet.

                “You should check them out, they’re great. The murals are still up, but you can tell it feels different here now.”

                I agreed with him. I had never been to Belfast before, but after a walk through the city I had to admit that I didn't see the signs of hostility that I thought I would. It seemed ridiculous that I would now.

                “Well, of course, the wall’s still up, too, but I think it’s different now,” he said.

                We talked a bit about travels and politics before Tony brought up the topic again. He said about five years ago today he knew a woman who wore a Gaelic football jersey into the bar. Being in the middle of July, the Orangemen were out marching, and it wasn’t long before a man came in and started giving her trouble.

                “He was a great big fella, he came walking in, all puffed up, saying things about Catholics,” Tony said, making a stern face and motioning like he was marching. “And he started giving her—you know—he started giving her some trouble.” Tony paused to take a drink. “She was fine, don’t worry, it was just talk. But he had his face all squinched up, with hate, just pure hate, like this,” Tony said, forcing his face into something terrible. “You fucking Fenian bastard!”

“But for him, later that evening it was his daughter’s twenty-first.  He'd thrown some nice party for her. Apparently he turned down some Republicans at the door and there was a scene. Pissed them off bad. So they ran over him with their car that night."

"That was today?" I asked.

"Yeah, five years ago," he said, shaking his head. "There's two sides. People do horrible things on both sides."

We drank from our beers. I stared at the beady-eyed camera looking at us from the ceiling. The daughter would be twenty-six today. Twenty-one now, I counted that five years ago I was sixteen, and I thought of myself then. I haven’t changed that much.