Growing up in England in the 70s and 80s, it felt like hardly a week went by that the IRA weren’t in the news. IRA bombs in both Northern Ireland and England were constantly in the headlines and everyone was in fear in case the next bomb went off in their home town. However, following various political negotiations, things did calm down a lot in England. Gradually Northern Ireland was in the news less and less and everything seemed to have stabilised.
My first visit to Northern Ireland was in 2014 with my friend Betty, for a long weekend and as we both like to pack plenty into our trips, I’d booked plenty of things to keep us occupied, including a black cab tour which took us on a tour around the Belfast murals.
The black cab tour was a personal tour, fixed price for however many of us wanted to go, restricted only to the number that could fit in the cab, but there were just the two of us on this tour.
Our driver and guide, Steve, picked us up at our hotel in his blue cab to take us on our tour of North Belfast. Far from all the problems being over, I actually discovered during this tour that Belfast was still full of the troubles and tensions reported on the news 3 decades ago, but because there were no longer any bombs going off in mainland Britain, Northern Ireland didn’t generally make the news headlines. There were still items on the news about the marches from time to time, where the Orange Order wanted to march and follow their historical routes which passed through Belfast streets that were now Catholic areas. Other than that, most news about Northern Ireland related to fairly ordinary politics. However, Northern Ireland had hit the headlines again just before my visit to Belfast because Gerry Adams had been arrested a few days earlier. With all this in mind, we set off on our tour.
Steve said he wasn’t going to tell us whether he was Protestant or Catholic at the start of the tour, he was going to let us guess later. The black cab tours advertise themselves as giving a balanced view of the Northern Ireland conflict from both sides, so if I had a problem working out if he was Protestant or Catholic, he would have done a good job. Steve started off by explaining how complex the problems still were in Northern Ireland in general, illustrating this by telling us about someone brought in to try and negotiate between the two sides. Each side argued about what flag they should have and when the issue of the flag couldn’t be resolved, the arbitrator gave up, saying that if they couldn’t even come to an agreement about a flag then there was no hope for resolving anything else! This seemed to be a pattern in the stories told throughout the tour, even though these were supposedly peaceful times, no agreement could be met about anything and the conflict was still ongoing. The divide between the Protestants and the Catholics seemed just as bad as it had ever been, as I was to discover as the tour went on.
We first visited the Shankill Road estate which is a Protestant part of the city to see the murals, which are painted on the side of the houses. In theory, it was safe to walk around the Shankill Road estate on your own and look at the murals without a guide; the locals could tell who the tourists were. I decided against this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if I looked at these murals without a local explaining them there was no context to them. Secondly, I wasn’t convinced it was as safe to wander around on our own as the literature claimed. The cab drivers all know each other and are known on the estates, so whether Steve was a Protestant or a Catholic, it didn’t matter, he was happily chatting to the other driver/guides bringing tourists to look at the murals. Some of the murals depicted Celtic legends and historical figures, such as the Red Hand of Ulster and William of Orange on horseback. Others were much darker and depicted the city’s recent past, such as the memorial to a Loyalist gunman who was killed at the age of 30 and the disturbing “Lone Gunman” painted in such a way the optical illusion made you feel that his gun pointed at you wherever you were standing. If you didn’t like these murals on the side of your house, it was tough, the alternative was to live somewhere else, but it appeared that the locals were keen to live in one of the houses with the murals.
After seeing the Shankill Road estate we moved on and Steve stopped to show us the high metal fences and gates that were present all over the city. He explained that these fences divided the Protestant and Catholic areas of the city and the gates were closed and locked every night and neither vehicles nor pedestrians could get through after they were locked. Some of the more dangerous areas were closed off all weekend. The roads weren’t opened under any circumstances once those gates were locked, not even for emergency vehicles. Steve said it would take you 45 minutes to drive from one side to the other once the roads were closed, so if your house was on fire, by the time the fire engine got there, it would have probably burnt down. This grim reality of life in Belfast in 2014 was a shock to me. I had no idea things were still so bad.
We also saw part of the Belfast “Peace Wall”. The name is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not exactly a statement of peace. The best that could be said about it was, it divided areas of the city and prevented worse fighting than already existed. It was basically the equivalent of a Berlin Wall that kept Protestants and Catholics apart. The Peace Wall doesn’t completely surround the city; instead there are several sections that were built throughout North Belfast. It was built to segregate the city, and unlike in Berlin, and as with everything else in Northern Ireland, the sides can’t agree on whether it should stay up or come down. The general consensus in 2014 was that the violence would escalate if the wall came down. This was the same reason that roads were closed every night. Again, like the road closures, I had no idea that Belfast had a dividing wall. Berlin was synonymous with its wall, Belfast wasn’t. Maybe with all of the other things going on in Northern Ireland people hadn’t really focussed on the Peace Wall.
As I mentioned, Gerry Adams had recently been arrested which had made the news headlines and there were still protests about a particular Orange Order march that couldn’t take place in full at the moment, because they wanted to march the historic route which would provoke violence as it passed down a Catholic road. Every day the march would start and be blocked by police when it reached the Catholic area to prevent violence, but the Protestants argued it was their right to march on this historic route, even if it did now go through a Catholic area and would consequently result in rioting. It all seemed a complete mess with no resolution in sight as there was no obvious solution.
We then headed to Bombay Street, a Catholic part of the city that had witnessed a lot of violence in the late 1960s. The houses on Bombay Street backed onto the Belfast Wall and Steve pointed out the metal cage that was attached to the back of the houses adjacent to the wall. This was colloquially known as a “Belfast conservatory” and offered some protection from any petrol bombs or other missiles that might be hurled over the wall. This was Belfast? It sounded like Beirut!
Again I was overwhelmingly shocked that things were still so bad in the city in 2014. But this was the shocking reality of living in certain parts of Belfast. Despite the danger of living in a house that backed onto the Belfast Wall, Steve said most inhabitants thought it was a privilege to live there. Bombay Street had a memorial to the terrible riots of August 1969 where the city was in the grip of bullets, petrol bombs and fire for several days. Innocent victims caught in the crossfire were shot dead; most of the houses on Bombay Street were burned to the ground.
Steve also asked us if we’d heard of rubber and plastic bullets. I just assumed that they would be rubber or plastic versions of normal bullets, basically the same as blanks. Steve produced a couple for us to look at. It was unbelievable. Far from being the same size as normal bullets, they were enormous. Bigger than Betty’s hand. They were invented by the British specifically to deal with riots in Northern Ireland as a non-lethal alternative to traditional bullets. Unfortunately these huge missiles were difficult to control and the size of them meant if they hit someone they would cause serious injury and sometimes death. Thankfully they are no longer used by police in Northern Ireland.
We moved to another section of the Belfast Peace Wall and there was a lot of graffiti scrawled on this part of the wall. Steve gave us each a marker pen so we could add our names to it. After initially hesitating, I added my name to the wall. It seemed that everyone did this when they came on a Black Cab tour and the wall was covered in graffiti, so a couple more signatures weren’t going to make any difference. Now my name is on the Belfast Wall forever!
Steve then asked us if we thought he was a Protestant or a Catholic. At first I’d been convinced he was a Protestant, but he had said a couple of things about Gerry Adams that suggested he might be a Catholic. Betty was positive he was a Protestant. I also guessed he was a Protestant, but with less conviction now. My instinct about him possibly being Catholic because of his comments about Gerry Adams proved to be correct. He was a Catholic. He also got us to put our hands up against the wall for a photo. He said that the police used to get Catholic protesters to put their hands up against the wall and stand there for hours, if he could do that for hours, we could stand there for a minute for a photo.
Steve then revealed a bit more about himself and his family situation. He was a Catholic, but his wife was a Protestant and they had to live outside Belfast because it was the only place where a husband and wife of different religions could live. He said it would be dangerous to live in either the Protestant or Catholic parts of the city when they didn’t share the same religious background. Steve said his father-in-law was in the Orange Order and when he first got married his father-in-law never spoke a word to him, completely ignored him even if they were in the same room. It was only when their son was born that his father-in-law started to talk to Steve. However, Steve’s son played Gaelic football and this was labelled as a “Catholic” sport and, for this reason, his father-in-law had never been to watch his grandson play, he couldn’t risk anyone spotting him there and reporting him to the Orange Order. It all seemed very sad.
I was also interested to know, were there atheists in Belfast? Were there people who were neither Protestant nor Catholic, that didn’t take one side or the other? Steve said everyone was either a Protestant or Catholic; Polish immigrants lived in the Catholic areas because Poland was a predominantly Catholic country and even Muslims were either Protestant Muslims or Catholic Muslims. It seemed completely ludicrous to me.
The final part of our tour took us to the murals on the Falls Road. There was a brand new mural of Gerry Adams following his arrest which wasn’t yet finished. Then it was the end of our tour.
It was a fascinating and thought provoking tour and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who visits Belfast who wants an insight into what it’s like to live there even though the Troubles are supposedly over.
Steve said that it had only been 14 years since the Peace Treaty and you couldn’t expect the two sides to trust each other after only 14 years. My view was that if they didn’t trust each other after 14 years they never would. And if they had to lock up dividing gates every night so that people couldn’t travel between the Protestant and Catholic areas, it looked like they were no closer to trusting each other than before the peace negotiations.
At the start of the tour we were told we’d be presented with a balanced view which might make us change our opinion about what happened during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I heard both sides of the story on the tour which Steve portrayed as fairly as anyone could have done, but nothing he said made me change my personal opinion on the conflict. Growing up in the 70s and 80s with the news filled with IRA bombings wasn’t something I was going to forget after a couple of hours on a city tour.
The problems in Northern Ireland in general and Belfast, in particular, are incredibly complex. It seemed to me that the Northern Ireland conflict had started almost 500 years ago, most people didn’t even know the origins of it, but it was still going on to this day.
I went to the Belfast Museum in the afternoon which gave more insight into the Troubles and what was happening in Belfast at the height of the Troubles.
And going back to the safety aspect of walking around the murals of Belfast on your own, it appeared that my instinct had been correct, walking around on your own was not a good idea. Later that very same day, there was a news report that a journalist had been attacked for taking photos of the new Gerry Adams mural on the Falls Road. There were reports of something happening in Belfast almost every day, the only difference was, the reports didn’t make the headlines in England any more. But the conflict was still ongoing and still very real.
Despite all of this, I loved Belfast, I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and I would definitely go back. And the Black Cab tour was undoubtedly the highlight of my trip.
We travelled to Belfast on the first weekend in May 2014.
We went on our cab tour of the Belfast murals with Paddy Campbell’s Belfast Famous Black Cab Tours . The cab will pick you up at your accommodation and drop you off there or at a convenient location in the city centre.
We stayed in Belfast city centre at Premier Inn Belfast City Centre located in the heart of the city within easy walking distance of all major attractions.
We flew to Belfast City Airport from Leeds Bradford Airport with Flybe. Belfast City Airport is situated conveniently 4 miles from the city centre.
Your account shows how heavily censored our news/propaganda is. Thankyou for the insight into an on going situation which has supposedly been resolved.