Northern Ireland October'09

Belfast City

Everything about the centre of Belfast looks normal, it is the same currency, the same time zone, the same shops and the people all speak the same language as you. It is not until however you go out of the city centre a little way that you start to see that Belfast has some very serious issues.

We did a black cab tour which takes you out of the city centre somewhat and from here you will see the issues come to the fore. Literally on one side of the city you have the Catholics (the Falls) aligned with Ireland and on the other you have the Protestants (the Shankle) who align themselves with England.

It was clearly not enough to have them living on different sides of the city so they have also erected a massive wall (the peace wall) to keep them apart. In each of the respective parts of town they have painted murals reaffirming their respective allegances (as per the image below).

Each side of the city has to be treated the same by the city council so it is costing them a samll fortune because if for example they wanted a new swimming pool they would need to make sure that there was a pool on the Catholic side but also the exact same facility on the protestant side. There has been a lot of violence in Belfast between the 2 groups over the years to the point where the English police only left in 2008.

Above- Nadia signs the 'peace wall'

Above- The gates that seperate the 2 sides are locked on weekends from 7pm on Friday night and dont open again until Monday at 6am.

Below- Back to reality in the centre of Belfast
The Giants Causeway

Our tour for this did not start of too well when the tour company Paddywagon tours forgot to pick us up! Unpreturbed though we got on another tour and headed out to the Giants Causeway which is a cool rock formation which is entrenched in myth and legend.

The shortened version of the legend suggests that the causeway was created by a giant man named Finn MacCool who created the path by throwing some of the mountains in the water to get to has adversary in Scotland. When the Scottish giant came over to Ireland to attack Finn was very tired from creating the causeway so he thought of a genius plan. He dressed himself in babies clothes and sat in a cot. When the Scottish giant arrived Finns wife said that he was out but to wait for him as he wouldnt be long. The scottish giant saw the size of the baby in the cot and thought if this is the size of Finns baby then how big would the father Finn be! He ran off scared all the way back to Scotland tearing up the causeway along the way so that Finn couldnt follow him.

We got very lucky with the weather on the day we visited the Causeway, Nadia was always going to need to wear the 'puff' jacket though.

Giant shadows!