saint patrick

The trip was bound to be a good one; I was looking forward to writing about it afterward.  The excess of St. Patrick's celebrations in the middle of the Christian austerity of Lent, a day of unrestrained drinking interrupting forty days of penance, penitence and repentance.  Ireland is a very Christian island.  I was wondering how the the contradiction would be squared.  My observations would be done in the north, on the fourth green field, as the Irish say nostalgically.

Over the years, the Northern Irish have become used to squaring contradictions.  Just a few decades ago bombs would go off on a weekly basis and people be killed regularly for reasons that don't need rehashing here.  Let's just say that the situation calmed considerably with the signing of the Good Friday agreement fifteen years ago.  There were still Unionists and Republicans, nationalists and loyalists, Catholics and Protestants – which are, by the way, not ingredients to a Venn diagram of the conflict but various ways of looking at the same two sides – but they decided to get along and try to make things work.

Things have worked for the most part.  Outside the occasional riot, recently flag-related, Northern Ireland isn't much different from the rest of the UK.  Police stations still sometimes resemble set pieces from Total Recall, but the fortifications are coming down.  Replacing the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was considered biased, even sectarian, with the Police Service of Northern Ireland went a long way towards building trust in the communities, and more relaxed security has been a result.  Another was the turning of Belfast from a city under siege to one of great economic promise in the early 2000s.  Now it is under economic distress like any other medium-sized city in the UK.

When I flew to Belfast last weekend, it was not only to quench my curiosity but also to see a friend of many years.  Culturally, he has nothing to do with Northern Ireland or the conflict.  Luck of the bad kind (denied entry to the country of his choice) and the good kind (an eager employer offering him an alternative to the job he couldn't do anymore) combined to bring him to Northern Ireland more than five years ago.  Now married, he has a small family and is unlikely to leave anytime soon, but he remains an outsider without passion or prejudice.

My friend lives in a terrace of British looking houses, narrow and tall and stacked side by side with no space going to waste.  Who needs a yard when it rains all year?  There's parking in the front and the next terrace in the back.  Inside it's cozy and cute and dominated by staircases.  I slept high up in the attic.  It was raining all night.

It continued to rain throughout the weekend.  It was also windy and miserably cold.  Divis mountain was covered with snow.  Every step outside was a challenge, and we didn't do much besides shuttling between St. George's Market and Caffè Nero, between restaurants for dinner and pubs for drinks.

At first glance, a visitor to Belfast notices nothing of the troubled past.  Then a garish white-blue-and-orange police Land Rover slowly rolls into view, heavily armored and with wire mesh protecting its windows and emergency lighting.  Among the doleful shoppers in a slightly dilapidated pedestrian area, it seems wildly out of place, but like cosmic background radiation, which testifies to the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, it's a reminder of what used to be.

Not an ice cream van

The conflict isn't over.  When Belfast City Council voted, on 3 December of last year, to restrict the flying of the United Kingdom's flag to certain holidays, loyalists objected on the grounds that this constitutes a grave disrespect to their country.  Protests, sometimes exploding into riots outside City Hall, have been simmering ever since.

When I was there, all was quiet, though it seemed to me a particularly propitious day to protest.  St. Patrick's day, the holy day of the patron saint of Ireland, is a celebration of Irishness and green and pride and, by extension, everything that's not British.  In what seemed to me a blatant display of cultural insensitivity, the Union flag flew over City Hall.  Youths shrouded in the same flag or wearing it printed on leggings as we saw that night are perceived as provocations.  But St. Patrick's day was chosen by the Council as one of the days to fly the flag.

On Monday we went to the Titanic Museum.  Titanic was built in the shipyards of Harland and Wolff, on the right side of the river Lagan, just across from central Belfast, but what should be a major tourist draw was for the longest time ignored with considerable embarrassment.  That the boat only sailed for five days might have had something to do with it.  That it took 1500 lives when it sank might have contributed as well.  But in 2012, a hundred years after the disaster, a shiny new museum is dedicated to the construction of Titanic and the historical context of industrial Belfast, the world's dominant supplier of linen before shipbuilding became big.

The museum is spectacularly designed and pulls out all the stops, trying hard to justify the eye-watering admission prices, but it falls short when the actual sinking is concerned.  Whose fault was it, I want to know.  Was the recklessness of the captain, so eager for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic that he ignored warnings of icebergs, to blame?  Was it the operator's delusion of the ship's invulnerability?  Was the shipmaker negligent in implementing safety features?  Who decided on the number of lifeboats and vests, and who was responsible for evacuation procedures?  After three hours immersed in history coming alive, these questions remained unanswered.

Also unanswered remained my questions about boozing to the hilt during Lent.  Due to the demands of the wee one, we missed the parade.  Later that day, my friend and I checked out various pubs downtown and near the university and had a pint here and there, but where was the party?  The mood around us was rather subdued.  People were drinking as they would be on any other Sunday, meeting friends, chatting.  There were silly hats and little plastic shamrock flags but no brawls and no puking in the streets.  No one appeared drunk.  I was left a bit disappointed.  What would I write about?