2/18/05
Friday we left Greystones a little after 7 a.m. (I know… totally heinous). I slept a little on the bus ride up north.
Our first stop was South Armagh. It’s the area directly on the border between North and South. The tension there was tangible and the military presence was massive. Every hilltop had a surveillance tower. Two nationalist tour guides met us and got on board our bus just south of the border. They took us into several villages in Armagh and even let us get out and look into the cracks in the wall of a British army base. The whole time, we could see cameras following us.
Armagh looks a lot like Wicklow geographically, but due to the military presence, they get very few tourists. Its created beauty is lost by the comings and goings of military helicopters and by the obvious sentiments of a people who wish the borderline had been drawn a little further north. As it is, the line is invisible and the only indication we got that we’d left the Republic behind was a change in the type of road pavement. In some places, the line even bisects houses. The tour guide pointed out one such house and joked that the resident changes his front door each year to the side where the taxes are lower.
Here’s a photo of one of the helicopters delivering British troops to South Armagh.
We left Armagh and drove to Belfast. Our first stop was the Falls Community Center in West Belfast (the Catholic side of town). We ate lunch and watched a video montage of the oppression Catholics have faced in Northern Ireland since the partition of the island in the 1920s.
To try to get a balanced point of view, we went to Shankill, the protestant side of town, where a tour guide (an ex-political prisoner who killed five Catholics during the “troubles” in Northern Ireland) showed us various murals depicting paramilitaries, historic events and Queen Elizabeth. We also got to see the “Peace Wall” (a wall that divides the protestants and Catholics in Belfast). The wall has been standing longer than the Berlin Wall.
In Belfast, walls, barbed wire and fences abound. According to the locals, they keep the violence down to a minimum. As Frost would say, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Here’s one such wall along the Peace Lane.
We ate dinner at the Felons Club, a West Belfast hang out for ex-political prisoners (to put this in perspective, a tenth of the adults in Belfast have spent time in prison, mostly for political reasons). The food was plentiful and heavy.
We returned to our hotel completely exhausted. I felt sick and our smoking room did not help matters. Before we arrived in Northern Ireland, Dr. Harbin explained that the UK hasn’t caught on to the whole “cigarettes kill people/second-hand smoke=bad” thing and people smoke indoors and in public places ALL THE TIME. Ugh. Gross.
2/19/05
I woke up feeling like crap, but I felt a lot better after the full Irish breakfast in the hotel restaurant. We boarded the bus for Sinn Fein (a nationalist political party) headquarters to meet our West Belfast tour guide. He was an ex-prisoner as well, except he was republican (which is entirely different from US Republican. In Ireland, republicans are usually catholic and are pushing for a united Ireland).
We toured the West Belfast area, looking at murals and gardens of remembrance. We saw Bombay Street where people were run out of their homes while a mob burned their homes to the ground simply because they were catholic. Last, we went to a cemetery to see the republican plots and the graves of the hunger strikers.
We ate lunch and hung out in the city center for an hour or so. Carly, Nicole and I found the bank that got robbed around Christmas, and then we sat in a bookstore and relaxed for a while. It was an excellent break from the tensions outside.
We met back at the bus to go to a Gaelic Athletic Association club house called St. Galls. First, we watched the movie H3 (The Irish pronounce it “haytch tree”). It’s a docudrama about the blanket and hunger strikes of the H-Blocks in 1981. Prisoners arrested for IRA activities were denied political status by the British government, so they protested their treatment as criminals in several ways. During the blanket protest, they refused to wear their prison uniforms, which meant they wore only army-issued blankets. They also did the dirty protest, where they didn’t bathe, refused to leave their cells, and smeared excrement on the walls. After about five years of protesting, they went on Hunger Strike. Ten men, including Bobby Sands, died on strike. It was a horrific film, and I was thoroughly scandalized by the end. Unfortunately, the movie was incredibly accurate, according to two ex-prisoners we met after the movie. One of them spent 55 days on hunger strike. He would have been the 11th to die.
We ate dinner at St. Galls and then headed back to the hotel for the night.
2/20/05
We headed to Portrush on the Antrim Coast for church in the morning. Portrush is a cute little town that smells like Band Aids. I went to a Presbyterian church where a guy from Iran spoke about Eman Ministries. According to him, Iranians are the Muslim people group most easily converted to Christianity.
Our next stop was Dunluce Castle. We climbed around on the ruins and explored a little cave underneath the castle. We ate lunch on the bus and headed for Giant’s Causeway.
Giant’s Causeway is a geological phenomenon where hexagonal pillars form over time from cooled lava. I think these formations are only found in Northern Ireland and Scotland (a mere 12 miles away. We could see the Scottish coast from the Causeway). Irish mythology holds that the giant Finn MacCool built the causeway to Scotland to fight a giant over there. Here’s what the Causeway stones look like:
After hiking and climbing around on the rocks, we headed back to Belfast for dinner at St. Galls.
2/21/05
Monday marked our first full month in Ireland, so for our “anniversary,” it SNOWED. The Harbins have been in Ireland for over a year and this was the first time they’d seen snow. It was really wet, thick snow a lot like the kind we get at TU. Here’s some SNOW.
Our first stop was Stormont Assembly Hall where the parliament of Northern Ireland meets. Here’s a photo of the building.
First we had a Q&A session with a representative from Sinn Fein. Next we met with a representative from the Democratic Unionist Party. Our bus driver’s cell phone went off in the middle of the meeting, so that was funny. He hates the DUP.
We left Stormont and went to the CS Lewis memorial in East Belfast. It’s a statue of him looking into the Wardrobe. I didn’t know Lewis was an Ulsterman. Learn something new everyday.
Next we drove to Derry, a walled city near the Northern Ireland border where Bloody Sunday happened. We went to a little, make-shift museum and met with a man whose 17-year-old brother was killed in the Bloody Sunday massacre.
We went on a tour of the city walls and to the Bogside where several battles between nationalists and British troops occurred. Here’s a photo of the Derry freedom wall.
We left Northern Ireland and drove to Donegal. We stayed in the Abby Hotel in Donegal City. It was fabulous. My room was NON SMOKING!!! Oh the joys of civilization.
2/22/05
After a full Irish breakfast, we walked down the block to Donegal Castle, a restored castle once owned by the Irish earls the O’Donnells. After the Flight of the Earls, the English Brooks were given the estate. We took a short tour and then headed for Sligo AKA Yeats Country.
Our first stop was Yeats’ grave. “Cast a cold eye on life, on death— Horseman pass by.” It was really windy, so I didn’t linger very long by the dead poet.
Next we went to Glencar Waterfall, the setting for Yeats’ “The Stolen Child.” We had lunch at Dooney Rock and Lough Gill before heading to Innisfree, the famous lake isle of Yeats’ poetry. It’s a dinky little tuft of trees in the middle of a small lake. If Yeats hadn’t written a poem about it, no one would have cared about it. Our bus driver, Brian, gave us his own rendition of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and we all had a good laugh.
Here’s a photo of Innisfree. Whoopee.
We headed back to Greystones but stopped in Dublin to hit up McD’s. I hadn’t had a hamburger in a month, so it was rather nice. The garda (Irish police) and fire department stopped by our parked bus because they’d misunderstood a call about some bushes being on fire. They thought it said a bus was on fire. Even Irish people can’t understand Irish accents. Ahaha.
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So that’s my trip. Again, sorry it took so long to post.
