Belfast, Tuesday, October 11, 2011Oct 11, 2011
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Garfield Bar, Belfast
Belfast homes behind the wall built to protect Protestants & Catholics from...
| Jet lag caught up with us today and we slept in. After lunch, we met Terry Flynn, our "driver"/travel guide and piled into his van for the first time. The picked up Ken, our local Belfast guide, and then went on a tour of Belfast. Ken did a great job pointing out the sights and explaining what we were looking at. The city is part of the United Kingdom and it is the capitol of the province of Northern Ireland. The currency is the English pound. The Belfast metropolitan area has about a half million people. Not long ago, Belfast emerged from forty years of sectarian violence. It was usually expressed with bullets and bombs which killed 1500 of its residents. Throughout its history, Belfast has suffered off and on from this kind of political violence resulting largely from Northern Ireland laws which discriminated against its citizens based on their religion. We were all fascinated with the "peace" walls erected between neighborhoods to keep Catholics and Protestants separated and with seeing West Belfast where so much of the conflict occurred. Although the "troubles" have officially ended, the residents of Belfast continue to live largely segregated by religion, their neighborhoods separated by walls. Since the "troubles" ended, the numbers of walls between neighborhoods has tripled. There are now more than 80 such "peace walls". Ninety percent of Belfast children attend segregated schools. http://theamericanscholar.org/letter-from-belfast-city-of-walls/ We drove to the old shipbuilding area of Belfast. The city was once home to one of the world's largest shipbuilding industries. The Titanic was built there and a new Titanic Museum under construction in the area of the old shipbuilding industry. It promises to be a huge tourist attraction and a boon to the local economy. We all took photos at the Northern Ireland Parliament, which is situated in a picturesque, park-like area called Stormont. That evening, we walked to and from the highly recommended Mourne Seafood restaurant on Bank Street. Afterwards, we met Terry in the hotel bar to plan our travels over the next few days and to have more of that Bailey's. I am now humming, I wish I were in Carrickfergus. |
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