Ireland: A Terrible Beauty
Belfast, Northern Ireland. The epicenter of “The Troubles”: since 1969 at least 3466 political killing. 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 walls. Hundreds of three-color Irish flags, flown from windows, 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 naÃ?¯Ã?¿Ã?½ve 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 can not 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.
Shortly later, a skinny, young man who had never shaved a whisker from his face came in and asked for a Boddingtons. Though he was of drinking age he looked fifteen and the man with the camera abused his lack of manliness. After three sips he left his beer at the bar and exited. He turned to me.
What are you looking at? You’re not from around here are you?
No, I’m from New York, but I heard about your wit and charm, how you have the ability to demean boys half your size and age. It’s quite a talent and I wanted to see it for myself.
Chagrinned, he apologized and turned back to his beer. He swallowed the rest of his pint, stood up and looked to the barmaid. I could tell that the barmaid was waiting for him to say something to her, or she wanted to say something to him but didn’t want me to hear. I got up and pretended I had to use the bathroom.
When I returned, the seat next to mine was empty. The barmaid read the curiosity or the question on my face. She spoke as she poured me another pint.
The March is tomorrow, isn’t it?
I nodded, as if I understood.
Maybe that was the tension I felt. My guidebook said that it was safe to visit the Falls/Shankill area in a guided tour bus or taxi during the day, except during the week of July 12th, which is the day of the Orangemen March. I vaguely knew that the March celebrated the military victory, hundreds of years ago, of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic Monarch James II. I also knew that in 1998 the Good Friday Agreement had been signed. This gave the Irish more say in Northern Ireland’s politics in exchange the Irish relinquished their desire to unite all of Ireland. Things hadn’t gone as smoothly as anticipated: the IRA hadn’t disarmed quickly or completely enough and Home Rule was again threatened. Though violence hadn’t broken out, like a California forest at the end of a long dry summer, all that was needed to create a major conflagration was an errant spark. It seemed, at least from my viewpoint, there were lighters and matches in all the pockets of the people I passed.
The way she told me his story, I could tell there was real love, however dysfunctional, between them. Though an award winning photographer for a Belfast paper, he was as well known for his prodigious drinking as his nasty and bitter tongue. This time of year he was at his worst. She was actually happy I stood up to him, as too few did, and as far as the young man was concerned, she said he was only trying to keep him from going down the same road that forced him into her bar every afternoon for his pint and shot.
I remembered an image-from a magazine, a newspaper, television, a movie? I couldn’t recall. On the right side a group of teenagers stood with rocks in their hands in front of a flame-engulfed abandon building, on the left were tanks and soldiers in riot gear. The photo was snapped a split second after one of the youths pitched a rock at the soldiers, just at the moment a bullet tore through his chest. I doubted that he had taken that particular photograph, but someone had. I didn’t even remember if it was from Shankill or Falls Road, it could have been taken in Israel or Iraq or Bosnia or Chechnya or a hundred other places where similar scenarios has been played out.
When I pulled out my British pounds to pay. The barkeep said, “That okay, dear, he took care of you.”
I left the bills anyway. I already had my ticket back and I would only have to convert my British pounds back into Euros and eventually into dollars, better to leave them as a tip.
It was an old story perhaps, the brash drunk hiding a sensitive and deeply caring heart, but it was one I was happy to stumble upon, one that I needed after seeing the worn faces etched with defeated and discarded dreams. On the train back to Dublin, Yeats hunting words, from Easter 1916, came back to me: “a terrible beauty is born.” Yes, a terrible beauty is born: it is living and breathing and walking amongst us, masked with arrogance and scented with booze.
