Belfast, Ireland: A Terrible Beauty
By Terence Donnellan

Galway, Inis Mór, Westport, Doolin, Tralee, the Cliffs of Mohre, the Ring of Kerry, the green, sheep-filled fields of the Dingle Peninsula, Kinsale: postcard towns and picture-book villages visited before returning to Dalkey twenty minutes from downtown Dublin. My cousin Jim’s cottage was a short walk from Vico Road—the most expensive piece of real estate in all of Ireland. Bono has a house there, and Enya has a castle (yes, a castle). My summer trip was ending, but I had one more day before I had to return to New York; having seen the Beauty, I wanted the Beast.

Belfast, Northern Ireland. The epicenter of “The Troubles”: since 1969 at least 3,466 political killings. Falls Road runs parallel to Shankill Road. On one side the Irish Catholics, on the other the English Protestants. The physical distance between the two streets may be slight, but traveling from one side to the other is often more treacherous than crossing the sea between Ireland and England in a dinghy.

I walk from Belfast center to Falls Road—on the northern outskirts—where the faces and names of martyred Irish heroes tattoo the brick and cement wall. Hundreds of three-color Irish flags, flown from windows, doors, flagpoles and streetlamps, snap and waver in the wind. Outside Sinn Fein’s headquarters an entire wall is muraled with the smiling face of Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker to die.

Tension fills the air, or maybe it’s just my imagination, having read too many books and seen too many movies where bombs and bullets rip through civilians who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Without a map, I need to ask direction to Shankill Road. The clerk in the pharmacy, perhaps 22, looks at me as if he didn’t quite understand my question. I ask again. He calls into the back room. A woman, perhaps 19, comes out. She mentions a road, perhaps two or three blocks north, that might be open; she’s not sure. I ask if either one has ever gone to Shankill Road, not more than half a mile away; neither has.

The almost-secret passageway has enormous steel doors—which have been pushed open—with the words: ROAD CLOSED written in white letters on ominous red signage. Beyond the doors, I see on either side three sections of fencing, one on top of the other. The lowest level is fifteen feet of cement. Above this, ten feet of green metal fencing of some sort, and topping this off, another ten or twelve feet of chain-link fencing, bringing the total fence height to approximately 35 feet. It’s completely empty and silent, vacant until it bends again at the other end. I walk feeling like I’m inside a waterless and empty canal lock. It takes about twelve minutes to reach Shankill Road. Here are also enormous steel doors with the words: ROAD CLOSED. Walking past them onto Shankill feels like coming through a wormhole into another dimension.

Again, flags—Union Jacks this time—flutter in the breeze, and the names and faces of the heroic English dead stain the facades of building, but the biggest difference isn’t the flags or the fighters, and it’s not just the broken down buildings and empty lots strewn with broken liquor bottles, condoms and other detritus, it was the people; unlike the rest of Ireland where the faces were filled with hospitality and warmth, joy has been drained from these visages and supplanted with suspicion, distrust and hatred. Perhaps they didn’t notice their own lack of smiles, or did not hear the absence of laughter, even from the youngest children. I was quite surprised: I did not suspect this. But this is what war does to people. I guess it was naïve not to realize this was a war zone, but what did I know beyond newspapers and television?

It was not just the years of “The Troubles;” Ireland has been fighting England for centuries; and though there has been lulls and ceasefires, the slate has never been washed clean or the memories forgotten. The pain and misery these people feel cannot be discarded like an old newspaper or turned off like a television. After hope dies, hatred grows stronger, becomes a buoy onto which the drowning cling; out of such hatred killers and suicide bombers are born.

I needed a drink. I started walking the twenty-five minute walk back into the heart of Belfast, but thirst got the better of me, and I ducked into a British pub.

I was sipping my Guinness when the door banged open. A bleary-eyed man walked in exclaiming, “Was I in here last night?” With a top-of-the-line digital Nikon, lensed with a 70-200mm zoom, around his neck, I knew that if he was a drunk he wasn’t one without means. Or maybe I was wrong because after he sat down next to me, he asked the barmaid to buy him a drink. Verbally she turned his request down, but a few pleas later she brought over his keys, his wallet, and cold pint of Boddingtons and a shot of Jameson’s. It was obvious they were more than casual acquaintances, and listening to their talk, I sensed that he remembered a lot more of the previous evening than he let on.

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