Painting murals on the Shankhill Road
Take a train from London to Liverpool, take the ferry across to Belfast docks and get a taxi to the City Center
During the Troubles, so many taxis were hijacked, and so many taxi drivers were shot, that most of them gave up the job. But nowadays the Troubles are a tourist pull, and there are so many requests from visitors to be taken around the Falls Road and Shankhill Road that taxi firms offer special “Mural tours:”
Experience Belfast's dark side in the form of the murals at the (Catholic) Falls Road and (Protestant) Shankhill Road. Historical scenes, religious symbols and party slogans are emblazoned on almost every street corner of this infamous district.
As one such driver, Michael Johnston, explained to a visiting reporter from the Irish American Post.
Most people do want to see the areas they've seen on the television, and they want to know more about what's gone on, you know? You can ask anything you want to ask. Most people are a wee bit shy, but they want to know, so just ask. And feel safe.
The tours start with Lanark Way—known as Murder Mile, at the end, and passes through the iron gates of the optimistically named Peace Wall, built to separate the two sides in an attempt to reduce the violence. It is made of concrete and steel, topped with barbed wire, and stained by gas bombs, which have blackened the window frames of the houses on either side.
On the one side is the Falls Road, the Catholic area and a Republican stronghold; on the other, the heart of Belfast's blue-collar loyalists, the Shankhill Road. House size murals of demonic British soldiers covered the walls of the former, while black-hooded men holding automatic weapons survey the Shankhill coldly. Union Jacks and the Red Hand flags (symbols of the Protestant paramilitaries) adorn every spare inch or wall. Even the curbstones are painted red, white and blue, in a warning to Irish intruders.
Some have noticed that while the Republican murals are generally commemorative, such as the benignly smiling one of Bobby Sands, the young hunger striker sent by Mrs. Thatcher to an early grave, the loyalist images are invariably violent, featuring tanks and guns, tombstones and grim reapers in hoods. Even a mural depicting Cromwell, who oversaw a near genocide of the Irish people, is fashioned around some strange sort of battlefield skewering.
“The murals really are Impressive and worth seeing, it's just a shame that there is so much extra baggage attached to them,” observed one visitor enthusiastically.
A rabbi taking the Mural tour was offended to see that some of the Murals compare the struggle of the Palestinians for their land with the struggle of the Irish against the “Protestant settlers,” transplanted there from England and Scotland by King James I in the 17th century.
Right beside an Irish Republican Tricolor, is a mural depicting Palestinians behind barbed wire fences while Israeli soldiers point rifles at them, together with the message: “Palestine: The World's Largest Concentration Camp.” And conversely, traveling through Unionist towns and villages one may well see Israeli flags flying proudly.
There are other sights as well as the murals, such as the place where two soldiers were dragged from their vehicle and impaled on the metal stakes of a wrought-iron gate, or a church in which the pastor was murdered. There's the Sinn Fein headquarters, a rather ordinary looking house, with a mural around the corner which says, “Everyone Republican or otherwise, has their own particular role to play. Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” Then there's the Royal Victoria Hospital, specialists for fixing elbows and kneecaps, and with a pretty good burn unit too.
Disliking each other is a way of life for Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Since 1969, more than 3,000 people have been killed in sectarian violence. Nowadays that has subsided as the British and Irish governments perform a slow “peace dance” towards an eventual compromise solution over the “Six Counties.” But if the killing is over, the bitterness and hatred remains.
Today Belfast City Center is like many other British cities, with its Victorian architecture, like the City Hall and the leaning Albert Clock. And it's also like the other cities in the sense that there are surveillance cameras everywhere (and often helicopters hovering too), broken glass is all over the streets, burned out cars are left in the middle of intersections, and burned out buildings and boarded-up windows. The only difference is that here, security is carried out by tanks, and soldiers with machine guns.
Don't get out of the taxi, this is still considered the most dangerous street in Western Europe, and the murals really aren't much better close up.
Side tripRossport, Ireland, Ogoniland, Nigeria, and an unusual twinning arrangement
Wild and elusive, green and wet, Rossport emerges out of the sea mist in Broadhaven Bay, County Mayo, alongside a bumpy bog landscape populated only by sheep and occasional gas pipeline engineers.
You may catch site of several rare bird species, such as the Little Egret or the Hen Harrier. Then again, here and there the visitor may catch site of mysterious signs referring to a twinning arrangement with Ogoniland, or hear snatches of what (at least according to the local papers) is the new song in the bars:
Davitt, Pearse and Tone fought to free our land But Fahey, Burke and Ahern gave it back with the other hand.
We're not like dogs on leads We shall not be led They'll have to do like in Nigeria Hang us or shoot us dead.
In fact, there's not much to see. No problem for a No Holiday. One of the things you used not to see were the five local County Mayo men, sentenced to indefinite terms in jail—for obstructing Shell Oil in its efforts to construct a high-pressure pipeline across the famous bog to a new refinery inland. The signs offering an unofficial twinning arrangement between Rossport and Ogoniland, Nigeria are a nod to the experience of their African fellow Shell-watchers in the Niger Delta, where an estimated 6,000 locals have died since Shell came to extract the mineral wealth that lies off the coast there. It is also a salute to Ken Saro-Wiwa, author and spokesperson for the “Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni people,” who wrote that Shell's activities had destroyed wildlife, and plant life, poisoned the atmosphere and therefore also the inhabitants of the surrounding areas. “Whenever it rains in Ogoni, all we have is acid rain which further poisons water courses, streams, creeks and agricultural land.” In 1995 though, along with eight colleagues, Ken was hanged by the Nigerian government. In his final address to the court he declared defiantly: “I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial and... the crime of the company's dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished.”
Back at the Irish High Court, Justice McMenamin told the five that he “reluctantly” had no option but commit them to prison indefinitely for contempt. (Perhaps the reluctance was because he would have preferred to have them hanged.) And if Shell's investments in Nigeria are flourishing, back in Rossport, the game is not going entirely its way. Where once an invading French army perished, sinking into the Irish bog several centuries ago, now several sections of pipe and items of earth-moving machinery, lie at the bottom, like the soldiers before them, sunk without trace.
There are a lot of controversial oil projects and pipelines. It seems that international oil companies run a quarter of Africa, whilst huge swathes of Central Asia and the Middle East jump only to their call. Global oil production is said to be now in its last bloom, running sharply down over the next fifty or so years, and competition for the last few profitable fields grows more and more intense. Take Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, for example, bordering the Caspian Sea. These two oil republics, run by US-friendly dictators, together hold oil reserves three times as great as those of the entire United States. A pipeline planned by the British transnational “British Petroleum” would take this oil through Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean. A special arrangement with the Turkish government gives the consortium building this pipeline the power to ignore all “environmental, social human rights” and other laws, an arrangement that certainly simplifies things. Then there is Russia with its huge oil and gas resources, busy constructing a pipeline under the Baltic Sea to supply Germany and Britain, and in the other direction, starting from the pristine Siberian wilderness of Perevoznaya, home to black-spotted leopards, 2,500 miles (4,023 kilometers) to Japan and China. Not to forget the pipelines and flares across Nigeria where the derricks nodding in the tropical delta are slowly poisoning the Nigerian people.
Responding to criticism of Shell's pipelines in Nigeria, one Richard Tookey said in 1992 that: “You suggest that the pipelines should be buried as a means of preventing pollution. Much of the area SPDC (Shell Petroleum Development Corporation) is operating in is swamp, so burying pipelines could, in fact, exacerbate the risk of fractures and spillages.” But evidently what is true for swamps is not true for bogs.
Some risk of sinking into the bog.
It seems everywhere Is officially twinned with somewhere else, someone's hopeful initiative to bring the world a little bit closer together in suitably apolitical friendship. Some towns are twinned roughly by size, but some are unlucky, like my local town, Alençon, which is twinned with Gravesend in the UK. For French speakers, and as Alençon is in France this may be relevant, “grave” means “serious” and it probably seems a good thing to put on their proud county town's signs. But to Londoners, the dismal suburb of Gravesend is indeed a place best avoided until you die.