me a large scotch. What a bloody awful country…’ He gasped for a drink because he simply did not know what do about the essential problem of Northern Ireland, a problem that still exists today: the province is populated by two distinct groups. The overwhelmingly Protestant unionists consider themselves British and want the north to remain part of the United Kingdom. The overwhelmingly Catholic nationalists consider themselves Irish and want the north to become part of a united Ireland. A unionist might speak of ‘Northern Ireland’, a loyal province of the United Kingdom, and a nationalist might speak of the ‘six counties’, an arbitrarily displaced chunk of the Irish nation; but they are both referring to the same piece of land of 5,452 square miles, roughly half the size of Wales.
Back in the Seventies and Eighties I would probably not have heard the terms ‘unionist’ and ‘nationalist’ as often as the terms ‘loyalist’ and ‘republican’. Broadly speaking – because these definitions are subjective – republicans are those who have supported the use of force to create a single independent Irish republic, while loyalists are grass-roots unionists, many of whom have supported the use of force to maintain the union with Britain.
When I arrived in Belfast the Good Friday Agreement was a decade old and the Troubles appeared to be over. But several months later Northern Ireland was reminded of what it had been missing. On the evening of Saturday, 7 March 2009 two pizza delivery men arrived at the Massereene army base in the town of Antrim. Four soldiers came out to the main gate to meet them. As the pizzas were handed over, gunmen in a nearby car opened fire with semi-automatic rifles, leaving all six men lying on the ground. The gunmen stepped out of their car, moved forward and opened fire again, before driving away. Two of the soldiers were killed. The other two soldiers and the delivery men, both Polish immigrants, were wounded. ‘For the last ten years,’ said Ian Paisley Jr. of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), ‘people believed things like this happened in foreign countries, places like Basra. Unfortunately, it has returned to our doorstep.’ Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Real IRA, a group of dissident republicans who had broken away from the Provisional IRA in 1997. Shortly after the murders at the Massereene barracks a policeman was shot dead in Craigavon by the Continuity IRA, another dissident organization which had broken away from the Provisional IRA, back in 1986. These attacks were intended to provoke a reaction from loyalist paramilitaries, to reignite the tit-for-tat killings that characterized thirty years of the Troubles, to force the British to bring soldiers back onto the streets of Northern Ireland, and to reawaken the war. The overwhelming majority of people in the north, including most of those for whom violence was once a way of life, are keen to see that the dissident republicans do not get their wish.
Northern Ireland has changed a great deal since the days of violence – but Belfast remains a city with a grim reputation to overcome. Paul Theroux, writing in 1983, was not seduced: ‘I had never imagined Europe could look so threadbare – such empty trains, such blackened buildings, such recent ruins. And bellicose religion, and dirt, and poverty, and narrow-mindedness, and sneaky defiance, trickery and murder, and little brick terraces, and drink shops, and empty stores, and barricades, and boarded windows, and starved dogs, and dirty-faced children – it looked like the past in an old picture.’
And if this is how it was to visit, how much worse to live in the place? A local man told me of a drive south along the Ormeau Road in the late Seventies. He passed a building standing on its own, while those on either side lay in ruins. ‘Look at that!’ he remembers saying to his wife, ‘How has that building escaped the bombs?’ When he drove back up the road a few hours later, it was gone. Yet even during the bad times, when the evenings saw the city’s streets empty, pubs deserted, and restaurants closed, there were visitors to Belfast who could see beyond the obvious. ‘It’s a charming port, one of the world’s great deep water harbours, cupped in rolling downs on the bight of Belfast Lough,’ wrote the often acerbic P. J. O’Rourke in 1988. He admired the buildings too: ‘The city is built in the best and earliest period of Victorian architecture with delicate brickwork on every humble warehouse and factory. Even the mill hand tenement houses have Palladio’s proportions in a miniature way.’
The port, the linen mills, the rope works, tea-drying, whisky and tobacco manufacture: these were the foundations of Belfast’s once great civic pride. Walking around the city today, that pride hangs on in the self-conscious grandeur of the neo-classical buildings, the immensity of the Laganside cranes, the self-assurance of Queen’s University, the extravagance of the Grand Opera House, and the dignity of the figures that stand in front of City Hall, embodying hard work and learning. Modern Belfast may not be a beautiful city, but it has nothing at all in common with the war-torn nightmare that sent Theroux scurrying on to his next port of call. While it may mourn the loss of its industrial strength, it has welcomed peace, and it is trying to create an identity for itself. It is busy and vibrant, a collection of areas rather than a unified whole, not yet sure whether it will be a city built around its specifics, or an urban mess of shopping malls and car parks. Its restaurants, clubs, hotels, and cafés are unself-consciously appreciated. People in Belfast speak to you, they are friendly, city dwellers without the sneer. Perhaps that’s because in Belfast you can exist in two worlds at once, staring out over Cave Hill as you wait for a bus in the centre of town. It does not take long to escape into the hills, where generations of Belfast children have played at being soldiers.
It doesn’t do, however, to overstate the affability. While I found people from Belfast (Belfasters? Belfastians?) friendly and keen to talk entertainingly on all manner of subjects, I encountered wariness too. Of course I did. I was writing a book. I was a busybody, and an English busybody at that. Northern Ireland people have had every reason to be wary over the last few decades. As Seamus Heaney warned in the title of his 1975 poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could have dangerous consequences. As I settled into my journey, befriending strangers and begging interviews, encounters that began warmly could sometimes chill, as though I had stepped across an invisible line. A lot of the time that line should have been perfectly obvious. Once, standing about with a group of republicans, all of them friendly and chattering away, I asked a question about a particular man. I asked whether he had ever come under suspicion as an informer. It was a foolish, foolish question. For all I knew, he could have been a personal friend of everybody in the room. For all I knew, he could have been in the room. Everyone stopped speaking, and my legs gave way a fraction. ‘Be very careful…’ said one man, before repeating the warning twice. It was a lesson in Northern Ireland etiquette.
On another occasion somebody said of me, ‘He knows more than he’s letting on.’ I’m still not entirely sure what the man meant, but I suppose he was suggesting that I might be working for the secret services. Once I was actually told by a republican that I’d been ‘vetted’ but it was all right, because I wasn’t a ‘spook’. When I asked him how he could be so sure, he smiled. The fact is that Belfast is a complicated but friendly place. Hospitable too. I was bought many drinks and cooked many meals by people who weren’t flush with money. And if there was suspicion based on my English accent, or the level of interest I was taking, well, how could it be any other way in a place where informers are still reporting back to handlers? In the wake of the March 2009 killings the authorities were quick to reassure the public that the dissident groups were well infiltrated. And people have not forgotten about men like Robert Nairac, an undercover army officer who was killed in South Armagh in 1977 while pretending to be a Belfast republican. He raised suspicions by asking questions in a pub. An English stranger asking questions can still raise suspicions.
Belfast may have an impressive industrial heritage (after all, its yards built the Titanic and the Olympic), it may be strikingly situated, and it may be friendly, but these things are not what the city is known for today. It is known for its Troubles, its murals of gunmen and hunger strikers, and the great iron curtain that separates its communities, euphemistically described as the ‘Peace Walls’. And no matter how much a visitor has read about this peculiar divide, it still comes as a shock to find the Catholics of the Falls Road and the Protestants of the Shankill Road living mutually exclusive lives, so close to one another.
It is difficult not to encounter striking images in the city. Walking around the ‘interface’ area of Ardoyne in north Belfast, I looked into a Catholic back garden backing onto a Peace Wall.