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Whitewashing Ulster
// The price of the question
Only the residents of North Ireland, also known as Ulster, also known as the Five Counties, need to be told that the 30-year conflict there is over now. Before doing that, everyone should see Shankill Road in Belfast, its main road, which leads off up a mountain and is still the center of loyalist life.
I saw my first Irish loyalist in Belfast immediately on disembarking barking from the bus, which had traveled from the administrative center of Ulster's capital city, through a neighborhood of old wharves, where Irish Catholics had built the Titanic, to the 2 Shankill Rd. stop. A slightly tipsy young man of about 20 was showing his absolutely sober girlfriend from England the boarded up window of a store that had been bombed the year before, on which someone had written in large letters “Thank you Sarah for clearing off from here.” As the youth was making his presentation, his girl was seized with horror, delight and sympathy. For him, of course.
Shankill Rd. is lined with two-story houses built in the 1930s. All of them are windowless on one side, to protect them from the bullets exchanged between loyalists and police, which were heard as frequently as rain. Those walls have been decorated by the locals with murals in which they display, in naïve but powerful style, what they think about the prospects of the Northern Irish conflict ending where Protestants are in the majority.
How do the Irish look in those pictures? You see them climbing Shankill Rd. to betray England to Hitler in 1941, as friends of Yasir Arafat, as poisoners and killers of children. I won't describe the depiction of the Pope there. The loyalists in the pictures, and there are many of them, are all depicted in black masks with machineguns, defending law and order from the wily Irish traitors to Mother England.
While going up Shankill Rd., open the door of one of the Mountainveiw pub, one of the dirtiest on the strip. You will see guys sitting there 50-60 years old, who were around 30 at the height of the fighting on Shankill Rd. They looked at me and asked, “Where are you from, brother?” They were amazed to hear that I was from Russia. Tourists don't make it that far – the road is two and a half kilometers long. But my accent was obviously not Irish. They asked if the Russians are Catholic, just to be sure. Inside the Mountainview, there is no question of whether an Irishman can climb to the top of Shankill Rd. Just let him try…
The price of the question of a peace settlement in Ulster is what it costs to buy the paint to cover up the graffiti on Shankill Rd. And the willingness of local youth, before they become embittered. And the willingness of the Mountainview denizens to drink their cheap beer beside Irish. I'm afraid there is very little willingness. And just guess what the first question is when you walk in the door of the Three Crowns in the Catholic district, five kilometers off Shankill Rd.
Dmitry Butrin
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 06, 2006
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