Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  Burns went regularly to the Dumfries Theatre, which today remembers this modestly with a plaque on the outside wall, and inside with a six-foot statue in a special alcove lit as if he’s Jesus in a Renaissance painting. Once Burns was at a benefit night for the Dumfries and Galloway Hunt, and at the end of the play the audience was asked to sing ‘God Save the King’. Burns was among a group that tried to drown it out by singing ‘Ah! ça ira’, the anthem of the French Revolution.

  Eventually, Burns’s failing health meant he couldn’t work. He ran out of money, and had to beg from his friends to stay out of the debtors’ prison. In 1796 he died in poverty, at the age of thirty-seven.

  They’re immensely proud of their Burns connection in Dumfries, with much more than the glow of celebrity a town feels from a connection with someone like Charles Dickens. A hint as to the reason may be found in the attitude towards a series of floods that took place in the town shortly before my visit, when dozens of shops and houses in Dumfries were destroyed. But the thing that annoyed people most was that the national news was all about the floods at the same time in Cockermouth, in the Lake District, while theirs were hardly mentioned. It might seem irrational, when you’re clambering out of your upstairs window to be rescued by a fireman in a dinghy, to yell, ‘The worst thing is we haven’t even made the six o’ clock news!’ But maybe this was a symbol of a sense that no one in authority cares about towns like it.

  Similarly, issues such as high unemployment and the Poll Tax have been seen in Scotland as problems inflicted on them by the English, and a greater proportion of Scottish people rejected Tony Blair’s reforms of the Labour Party than in England. So if you’re in a town that’s had to put up with all that, you can understand if they get irate, and celebrate the man who died in the town who wrote, ‘We’re bought and sold for English gold, Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.’ Maybe the modern interpretation of the works of Burns for a town like Dumfries is that he makes them feel they matter.

  Andersonstown

  There’s a strange achievement claimed by Belfast, that everyone in the town seems keen to tell you. ‘Just up there is the Europa Hotel,’ they say, adding, ‘That’s the most bombed hotel in Europe.’

  It’s said with a certain pride, the way inhabitants of another town might point out the place where cotton buds were invented. Even the commentary on the open-top tourist bus that remarks on places of interest around the city says with an air of superiority, ‘Over there is the most bombed hotel in Europe.’ A part of me always feels like saying, ‘Yes, all right, but what competition was there? Is there likely to be some Jury’s Inn in Helsinki that’s forever getting blown up by paramilitary opponents of the Finnish national insurance system?’ Maybe during the war in Yugoslavia the Belfast Tourist Board were informed by The Guinness Book of Records that there was a bed and breakfast in Srebrenica only two explosions behind, and the IRA were given council funding to make sure the Europa stayed in front.

  The issue creates a rare unity between the communities, as Protestants are as keen as Catholics to share in this record-breaking success. It’s as if they want to say, ‘I didn’t agree with many policies of the IRA, but credit where it’s due, without them the Europa wouldn’t be the most bombed hotel in Europe.’

  The boast is part of an admirably dark affection for the city’s past. The bus tour must also be the only one in the world with a commentary that starts, ‘Unfortunately the first building we pass is this ugly insurance office, and you’d think with our history we could get someone to blow it up.’

  Ten years into the ceasefire, the people of Belfast seem keen to emphasise what makes their city different, which is its association with explosions and gunfire. And they probably wouldn’t be able to change that image, even if they wanted to.

  In the 1980s, I told my mum I was going to Dublin for the weekend and she gasped, ‘Ooh my goodness. Well, you be careful.’

  I said, ‘Mum, Dublin’s in Southern Ireland, a country that hasn’t been at war since 1923.’ And she said, ‘Well, be careful,’ making no more sense than if I’d told her I was going to Spain and she’d said, ‘Well, don’t go swimming, because if the Armada catch you, that’ll be your lot.’

  The Tourist Board has made some effort, with brochures and websites encouraging visitors to come and enjoy the Waterfront Centre, which has hosted various international choirs and so on. But there are places like this in many towns, vast glass soulless constructions that look like the international headquarters of a pharmaceuticals company, except there’s a huge poster on the door of a bearded Russian baritone wearing a crown and bellowing.

  And they promote the new St George’s Market, in which you can buy stuff like sausages spiced with Maltesers, and crêpes with kiwi-fruit liqueur and necklaces made out of dried rabbit pellets. Strangely, in the right mood, these places can be disarmingly seductive, but they’re cropping up everywhere, and hardly convey a spirit identifiable as Belfast.

  So then the city marketed a neglected element of the town’s history: that it was in a Belfast shipyard that local people built the Titanic. The whole of the shipyard area has been officially renamed the ‘Titanic Quarter’, there are Titanic festivals and exhibitions, and in 2009 the Titanic dominated every Tourist Board brochure and website.

  At what point did the local chief of tourism declare, ‘I know how we can project the pride and ingenuity embedded in our past – we celebrate the ship we built that sank. You see, our ship became famous, not like those built in other shipyards that boringly arrived at their destinations and came back again. No one makes films starring Kate Winslet about those nondescript “all get there alive” vessels, do they? So our history isn’t just about tragedy and suffering, it’s also about the role we played in a thousand people drowning in freezing water.’

  But the Harland and Wolff shipyard, where the Titanic was built, is and should be at the centre of any projection of Belfast. Firstly this is because, unlike most shut-down industries, it still dominates the view of the town. The vast yellow cranes bearing the H & W logo, standing like goals in a giants’ football match, seem to be two streets away from wherever you look. They’re now officially preserved as historic buildings, and it was rumoured at one point that the cabins at the top were to be converted into restaurants.

  Maybe the brochure publicising this restaurant will begin, ‘Hi. We were once the famous shipyard that built a ship we called unsinkable that hit an iceberg and sank on its first voyage. Now we want you to try our restaurant that dangles precariously on a crane 300 feet in the air. What could possibly go wrong?’

  A glance at the shipyards, like anything in Belfast, also reveals much more about what has driven the city. Edward Harland and Gustav Wolff were members of the Protestant and Unionist establishment. They set up the shipyards in the 1860s and recruited a workforce from the Protestant Shankill Road, and from then until it closed in 2000, the workforce was almost exclusively Protestant. In 1971, for example, there were four hundred Catholics working there, and 10,000 Protestants.

  For most of its life the shipyard was extremely profitable, despite the mishap with the Titanic, and this was especially important during Ireland’s war for independence from Britain. Because while the British government could reconcile itself to losing the south and west of Ireland, it couldn’t bear the thought of giving up industrial Belfast. It was helped by Unionist politicians in the city, who stashed weapons and threatened civil war if they were placed in a United Ireland, and who hoped the shipyard would be a main source of recruitment for their soldiers.

  The result was partition in 1921, when most of the country became independent, except for the six counties that became Northern Ireland. This new country could only work if Protestants remained convinced it was in their interests to stay British. So they were assured that it would be their country alone. The first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, James Craig, announced, ‘We are building a Protestant land for a Protestant people,’ which was at least honest.
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  And so countless human stories are invested in those dramatic and beautifully ugly angular yellow structures. Almost every street, building and pub has a tale to tell of its role in that conflict, although the centre of Belfast now appears to be a typical British city centre: unfathomable roadworks, pubs advertising the next Premier League game showing on Sky Sports, huddles of smokers outside office doorways, slouched pensioners staring grimly out of a Wetherspoon’s window. There’s the George Best Airport close to the centre, which must make it awkward on a flight to Belfast when a passenger needs restraining for being chaotically drunk, as he can shout, ‘George Best was much worse than this, and you named the fucking airport after him.’

  There’s the Botanic Gardens that host concerts and food festivals, and in every direction are the misty hills that start at the edge of the city, suggesting that there must be something mysterious and best left alone on the other side of them.

  But once you’re out of the centre there’s no disguising the delicate issue of the city’s dividing lines. They’re illustrated on every available space in the form of vast and, to the layman like myself, beautifully constructed murals. When you consider that, throughout the rest of Britain, graffiti amounts to scrawled statements such as ‘Arsenal are shit’ with all three words spelt wrong, Belfast appears to have a thriving production line of talented young artists.

  The Tourist Office actually promotes these now on its website as an attraction, urging us to join their ‘tour of magnificent murals’, and the tourist agency ‘About to Go’ assures visitors: ‘Sectarian strife has become a tourist attraction.’ Maybe they hope that eventually hundreds of visitors will stand in the Falls Road muttering, ‘I love the use of light and shade here, the way the eyes shine through the balaclava, and the clever use of perspective as the Armalite merges with the dead volunteer’s coffin.’

  The most popular element of the open-top bus ride is the section that takes in these murals, and you wonder whether the plan is to employ actors to run up the Shankill Road firing missiles over the bus from hand-held RPG-7 grenade launchers as part of an exhibition called ‘The Paramilitary Experience’. They could get characters from the time to make the commentary you listen to through headphones as you go round, saying, ‘Hi. My name’s Mad Dog, and I’d like to take you on a journey back in time to a period known as “The Troubles”. If you see any suspicious-looking bags, this means you’re going the right way through the tour. And don’t forget to keep your belongings with you at all times, including your kneecaps. Heh heh, I’m only kidding with you so I am.’

  Something that is clear from the artwork by either side is how the conflict was much deeper than simple gang rivalry. The Loyalist Shankill Road is packed with Union flags, and Union Jack pennants hang by the hundred. The edge of the pavement is even painted red, white and blue, presumably in case a member of the royal family with curvature of the spine who can only look down happens to be passing through, so there’s no chance of them thinking, ‘I can’t see any outward expression of affection towards the monarchy here. They don’t seem to appreciate us much up the Shankill Road at all.’

  As well as depictions of King Billy, and eulogies to paramilitaries, many of the murals are of the royal family, including one of the Queen Mother in which she looks extraordinarily drunk.

  None of this, however, is the gloating of a dominant people, akin to the taunts of white South Africans during apartheid. I’ve sat in a pub at the city centre end of the Shankill that seemed, at first, like any grimy inner-city dive; just two old men in opposite corners sipping bottled beer while wearing their caps, another man at the bar studying the racing page through his illegal smoke, and a silent craggy barman with hands outstretched on the bar, who makes you want to ask which crisps he’s got so you can see him snarl the words ‘Cheese and onion’ with understated menace. But across every wall were framed photos, hundreds of them, showing the Shankill Road in its glory through the ages. And in every photo was evidence of the determination to be British, not Irish, as banners celebrated a succession of monarchs, men marched for the Orange Order and fought the Papists. One in particular was from 1912, and showed a crowd of around thirty of the poorest people you’ll ever see, shoeless and literally in rags, as if they were auditioning for a production of Les Misérables. They were marching under a huge banner, itself ragged and barely holding together, that said ‘No popery’.

  Of all the problems in these people’s lives, you had to wonder, was this really the priority? They must have spent their evenings, nine to a room, huddled together, saying, ‘We don’t need to go worrying about luxuries like clean water and warmth and food for our starving child. It’s keeping transubstantiation out we’ve got to be careful of.’

  Loyalism could never boast that it gave its followers much in terms of material wealth. After partition it could offer them the right to work in a shipyard, and now even that’s gone, unless they can sauté a scallop at height.

  Coming back down the Falls Road, the engine of the Nationalist side, are portraits of the hunger strikers who died in prison in 1981, as well as harps and starry ploughs and other symbols of Ireland beside poetic pleas for a free nation, often in Gaelic. But occasionally there’s one that stands out for its ability to peer over the Belfast hills. Along one stretch of a disused building is a portrait of Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave who helped persuade Abraham Lincoln to make the abolition of slavery the central issue in the American Civil War. Then there’s a smoking Gaza, and a picture of Romanian refugees, with a message supporting their right to safety, evidently put up following an incident in which their hostel was set alight a few weeks earlier.

  Perhaps because Nationalists see their battle as not mainly against Protestants, but against governments and armies, this allows them to identify with other groups doing the same across time and space.

  But there remains a disconcerting flaw at the heart of their philosophy, which is similar to the Loyalist view, that while they may not see ‘the other community’ as a natural enemy, nonetheless they do view them as separate. And so, strangely, ten years into the ceasefire, there seems to be a greater multitude of flags and bunting criss-crossing the roads on both sides now than there was during the fighting.

  For example, there’s the leisure centre situation. Halfway up the Shankill Road is the Shankill Leisure Centre, with a modern glass front, so you can see people in leotards puffing on those step machines through the window, and you get a whiff of chlorine as you pass the door. Then you turn down a side road, past a car park full of rubble and into the Falls Road, where five minutes’ walk from the Shankill Leisure Centre is the Falls Leisure Centre, identical in every way except that it’s for Catholics. To the outsider this is a ridiculous surplus of leisure centres, but the ceasefire isn’t a process in which the two communities learn to live peacefully with each other, it’s one in which they learn to live peacefully apart from each other.

  Otherwise, the worry must be that a mixed swimming pool could lead to a row about whose turn it is to use the water slide, and then it will all kick off again. This is the philosophy accepted by all sides in charge of post-ceasefire Belfast. The peace will be kept by each ‘community’ living separately, but each being entitled to identical resources. So presumably if the rowing machine in the Catholic leisure centre breaks down, someone from the council has to go and break one in the Protestant one, until they can both be repaired at exactly the same time.

  This means that in many ways segregation has become even greater since the fighting stopped, so there are fewer children in mixed schools now than before. If anyone should doubt this trend it appears in concrete, in the shape of huge walls, known as ‘peace walls’, that snake their way between Catholic and Protestant areas, not just between estates but through them, sometimes bending round one particular garden and back again to complete the ethnic division. Presumably if there are any mixed marriages surviving on these estates, the wall continues through the middle of the house, after off
icials have been round with a clipboard to work out who sleeps on which side of the bed, so the wall can go right down the centre.

  And yet, however fragile, the ceasefire remains intact and will do for the foreseeable future, for the uncomplicated reason that most people prefer not to have to dodge gunfire, or pass through four checkpoints on the way to buy a bag of crisps, especially when there appears to be no prospect of the paramilitaries achieving their aims.

  The transformation of the city under the ceasefire is illustrated by the nature of its festivals. In August 2009 I was asked to do a show at the Andersonstown Sports Centre, as part of the West Belfast Festival, an annual event that first took place twenty years earlier as a cultural wing of the Irish Nationalist movement. Andersonstown, at the far end of the Falls Road, is the most unyielding of the Nationalist areas, and back then an evening of culture was almost certain to end with a room full of people standing, with moist eyes and glasses aloft as they sang along to a ballad that went something like:

  ’Twas in the year of eleven seventy-three that brave ol’ Tomas O’Hara

  Was shot with an arrow fired from the men sent o’er by Henry the Second,