so i’ve just spent a week in belfast and a few days in corrymeela and i was absolutely dreading our last week in northern ireland (to be spent in derry). i’ve had it up to HERE with the other 14 people in the group. i never want to hear about conflict mediation and peace walls and interface areas and sectartian violence EVER again. AND THEN I meet my homestay family in derry.
a lovely young italian man picked me up– name is alessio. he’s married to a woman from derry. no kids. they invite a gay couple over for a bottle of wine. he cooks rosemary pork and parsnips and potatoes and something green and spinach-like with chili peppers in it. THEN rum-soaked bananas with chocolate and vanilla ice cream. and desperate housewives. and a bbc special on the history of the guitar.
despite a week full of conference rooms and NGOs and conflict flipping mediation, my week in derry is looking up.
also, they named their cat charles bukowski. alas, i could not understand this for the first 6 hours because their accents were so THICK that i had no idea what they were saying and finally connected the numerous bukowski titles in their library with their eccentricities and realized the cat was named bukowski.
AND i have a new favorite drink, courtesy of the bushmill inn…bushmill’s whiskey and ginger ale.
this will be far from a complete post on northern ireland…but you’ll survive.
super oversimplified background information about northern ireland: separate country from ireland. still a part of the UK. unionists (and most protestants) want northern ireland to remain a part of the UK. republicans (and most catholics) want to be part of ireland. they fought about this from like 1968-1994. men in masks and ak47s running around the streets. death squads. internment. almost anyone you meet in northern ireland knows someone who died because of the conflict.
started my journey from suburban dublin being LATE (surprise surprise). standing at my bus stop with a 45 lb backpack and already breaking a sweat, i realized that i was NOT going to make it to the train station on time if i took the €2 bus ride….and instead took the €25 cab ride (like $4 or $34ish). in the cab, i listened to how the irish government guaranteed all the banks. big deal apparently. helped the irish economy a lot.
took the train to south armagh. went on a bus tour in the rain where we got on and off the bus to look at piles of rock. thrilling. we saw a mini stonehenge (it’s older apparently) and the oldest stone in ireland with writing on it (oooooh! ahhhhhhh!). saw the grave of some dude from braveheart (braveheart’s brother?) and the well where st. brigid was from (very important saint in ireland….it’s all about st. patrick and st. brigid). we went to the two st. patrick’s cathedrals– one catholic and one protestant– which are both the respective irish captials for both faiths in ireland.
south armagh is actually interesting because it’s on the border of ireland and northern ireland, so it has seen a lot of conflict. up until recently, the british army base dominated the local town square. there were billboards in the town square about recent deaths (possibly linked to the ira). pretty chilling.
fast forward through our first couple of meetings in belfast. three of us get in a cab from our hostel to go to the local grocery store. he drives to the first main road from the hostel and then stops the car on the side of the road and mutters something in his super thick belfast accent and takes the taxi sign off of the top of the car and puts it in the trunk. apparently, the grocery store was located in a protestant area and he took the sign off because he didn’t want to be a catholic cab driver in a protestant area. because it was too dangerous. WHAT?!
little background– most of the cabs in belfast are still run by the paramilitaries. some are run by the local city council. the drivers are all supposed to wear long sleeved shirts to cover their political tattoos. so people in belfast can tell what kind of cab you’re in (catholic or protestant) by the cab company. our tour guides (former prisoners) and the nonprofit people have all been telling us, “well the conflict is pretty much over, but we still have some work to do with ex-prisoners and truth recovery.” but too risky for a catholic cab driver to go into a protestant area???? WHAT?!
tonight. we went to dan winter’s cottage, which is where the orange order was founded. as far as i can tell, it’s like an irish protestant version of the american legion– the idea of brotherhood and tradition with the potential for extremism and discrimination.
tomorrow we’re going to ian paisley’s church. he was (and still is) a very prominent politician and protestant leader in the conflict.
we also learned about the red hand of ulster– story time! greatly simplified! when these guys were in ships and being all imperialistic and explorer-like, the first man to set foot on the land was the founder or ruler of the area. so in order to make sure he was first, a captain would cut off his hand and throw it onto shore so he would be first. thus, the red hand of ulster. also interesting– both sides in the conflict use the symbol in their propoganda.
in general, not a huge fan of belfast. it was an industrial city that experienced huge economic decline and lots of violence– there are still murals all over the city depicting masked men with guns. next week we go to corrymeela which is near giant’s causeway…apparently lovely landscape, etc. we shall see. in belfast until thursday.
okay last bit. saw how to lose friends and alienate people. so funny. but no one in the theater was laughing! and a british actor played the lead, so you can’t even say that they just didn’t get american humor. so weird.
Went to the Hugh Lane Gallery today in Dublin. Much more worthwhile than the National Gallery or the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The Hugh Lane started as a private collection (of Sir Hugh Lane) and is now a public gallery funded by Dublin City Council. The building itself was beautiful and functional, nicely integrating a recent extension, seen below.
National Gallery, in contrast, had all these hallways that went unused, stairways blocked off, and little nooks that were completely empty in the Millennium Wing. It’s like the museum people and the architect were not communicating when it was built– he incorporated all this great display space and the museum people decided they didn’t like it after the fact.
At the Hugh Lane, there was an exhibition called Other Men’s Flowers. The curator explained that the title came from the French moralist Michel de Montaigne – “in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together.” The pieces in the show all seemed to draw their inspiration from or be quoting from other works of art. Exhibition was so-so, but I thought the quote from Montaigne was applicable to a lot of what we do in creative and academic endeavors.
One part of the museum I found very strange– the museum has Francis Bacon’s studio in its entirety. They had a team of archaeologists meticulously record the thousands of objects that were in the room (in London) and then shipped it all to Dublin and set it up again exactly as it was the day that Bacon died. The room was a mess– paint smeared on the walls, newspaper clippings and pages torn from books all over the floor, hundreds of paint brushes, torn canvases, etc. Just odd to see it in the middle of a museum.
Cherishing the rest of my time in Dublin before I am forced to be with the group for 3 straight weeks in Northern Ireland (leaving this Tuesday).
Going to the Irish Film Institute tomorrow to see part of the Documentary Film Festival including a film about Annie Leibovitz and a series of short films.
Just realized I used proper captialization in this post. No idea why. Too bad I still write in fragments.
woke up today with nothing to do (and no real desire to find something to do). but alas, it was BEAUTIFUL outside–sunny and maybe 67 degrees. i felt guilty about sitting around in the house, so i took my host family’s dog (milo) for a nice long walk and tried to get to know the area. i usually just catch the bus that stops 1-2 minutes from the house, so i haven’t really looked at the rest of my neighborhood. about 5 minutes into the walk, i fell off a curb trying to cross the street and got some nasty scrapes. no dresses for me for awhile. tonight i’ll go into dublin and meet the rest of the group to go to bars and clubs for the evening.
we have about 10 days in dublin to finish up our politics and history lessons with our professors from trinity. then we leave for northern ireland for 3 weeks. then one more week in dublin. then ISP (aka FREEEEEEDOOOMMMMMMMMM!). during the isp, individual study project, we can go wherever we want in ireland for the month to do research for our 40 pg paper. i’ll probably do mine on art and politics (shocking, i know). the main attraction is that we don’t really have anywhere we have to be for the whole month.
phrases the irish love:
“brilliant.” not used in the way we’re all used to, like “albert einstein was a brilliant student.” instead, it’s more like amazing or wonderful. for example, my 9 year old host brother had a football match today and his mother asked him, “were you brilliant on the field today?”
“grand.” everything is grand. not great or good, but grand. how are you? just grand, grand, thanks. how was your day at school? it was grand. did you hurt yourself falling down while walking the dog? no, i’m grand.
“gorgeous.” they often describe food or meals as being gorgeous– as opposed to supermodels or mansions. the fajitas my host mother made were just gorgeous. the meal that the hostel prepared for us was gorgeous.
they LOVE this song in the pubs in temple bar. and every time, there’s some big girls singing along:
just returned from 5 days in the ever so rural co mayo. the worst part of it? being forced to spend every moment with the group. the only time i was alone during the whole 5 days was in the shower. i need my alone time. an hour minimum every day. when i don’t have it, i withdraw from all group situations and become this quiet, spacey, angsty girl who smokes cigarettes (i know! bad! very bad!). to make matters worse, i had no internet. but some good came of the trip….i’m not a complete brooding mess…
co mayo was about a 4 hour train ride from dublin. for five days, we learned about the current controversy in the area concerning shell’s plans to put in natural gas pipelines and a refinery. generalizations will be made…don’t yell at me!
the 30 second version: riots, imprisonment, farmers, local culture, military deployment, hunger strikes, water pollution, pipelines, explosions, politicians, local government, natural gas, fishing, environmentalism, economy
enterprise energy ireland found natural gas reserves off the coast of co mayo. it’s a huge reserve called corrib field and would be able to supply half of ireland’s natural gas needs for the next 10-15 years
shell bought out enterprise energy ireland
irish government signed a contract with the oil company. shell gets very low corporate tax rates (ireland has the lowest in europe i believe), irish government gets…..nothing? there is no discount on the gas being sold back to irish citizens…no other special provisions
shell wants to put the refinery a couple miles inland. normally, the gas is refined at sea or onthe shore, but this time, shell would have to bring in the unrefined (and more dangerous) gas through a populated area to the refinery. since this is more dangerous, the local protest movement is called “shell to sea”– as in, they don’t care if shell is really there, they just want the gas refined at sea.
i think this is interesting because my gut sierra club reaction is– shell shouldn’t be opening more refineries and laying more pipelines in the first place, on land or at sea! i would have guessed that the activists were pressuring them to shut down altogether and pursue alternative energy.
pipelines shell wanted to lay go through the land of farmers. farmers got angry and didn’t want to give up any of their land or live near a dangerous pipeline. irish goverment issued a compulsory acquisition order to five farmers– now called the Rossport 5. compulsory acquisition=eminent domain in the US
the five farmers who wouldn’t allow Shell on their land went to jail for 94 days. one of the farmers received the goldman prize, which is like the nobel prize of the environmental world. we met him and hung out on his farm– those pictures of the massive cow and the wild horses are from his farm.
pipelines go through 3 different conservation areas– EU now getting involved because Shell hasn’t proved that it won’t disturb those conservation areas
the land they built the refinery on was bogland. they cut away the top layer of turf and let out lots of aluminum into the soil and runoff. the aluminum went into the local drinking supply and has been at levels much higher than the allowed WHO recommended level.
at a number of the peaceful demonstrations and marches, significant police brutality has occured. old men thrown into ditches. noses broken. etc.
one local citizen went on hunger strike for 10 days until one of the ships involved in laying the pipes (?) left irish waters.
we met with representatives from shell who called themselves spindoctors 5 minutes into the meeting. they answered about 50% of our questions directly. they gave us a packet of propoganda. as far as they’re concerned, they’re trying to work with the community, they are willing to compromise on some points, and the irish government has given them the green light anyway, so it doesn’t really matter how much they compromise…
bottom line: the people of rossport, erris, kilcomon parish, etc don’t want the shell refinery or its high pressure pipleines in their community. the government has sold out its citizens. shell will almost definitely succeed in laying the pipeline and operating the refinery.
will post more tomorrow about the rest of the trip.
have been MIA for awhile and will continue to be unfortunately because i’ll be in super rural co mayo for 5 days. will update afterwards. snapshot of the last week:
went to a hurling game, tipperary vs. kilkenny
became friends with a truck driver from tipperary
went to the second biggest shopping mall in europe
wore shoes that hurt my feet (shocking, i know)
had some drinks at Temple Bar
went for a ride in a z4 with a nice irish banker who happens to work with my host father (oops)
attended a debate on immigration and integration in ireland
drank strawberry beer and has the WORST headache the next day
in mayo, we’ll be learning about a huge campaign to keep shell oil from setting up pipelines off the coast of mayo. one local activist has gone on hunger strike. website here.
i am extremely frustrated with the buses here. usually, buses have route maps– you can see exactly what streets the bus uses and where it stops. here, they only put the end destination on the outside and at stops, you can read a list of all the places it stops. this is completely and totally useless if you’re not familiar with the area. the names of the stops are meaningless. thus, i have been too afraid to go anywhere except into dublin and back because i have NO IDEA where any other buses go…where they might stop…etc. AND all of the ticket scanners are messed up. on the bus and on dart (light rail). that’s right, i have to take a bus AND dart. i COMMUTE.
i grew up in wisconsin– where it gets so cold we have cold days, not just snow days. your snot freezes in your nose. you get windburn, not sunburn. but i have never in my life been so cold as i’ve been in ireland…and it’s not even really winter yet! i won’t let myself wear my warmer outfits yet because they keep telling me it gets much much colder. GREAT! TWO THUMBS UP ON THIS GIRL! my host family has turned on the heat ONCE this entire two weeks (too expensive to keep it on all the time here). i went to bed the first few nights wearing the most intense long underwear patagonia makes. i swore that i would never ever wear uggs and i am caving and having them sent over. i want california NOW!
we went to kilmainham jail today (called kilmainham goal in old irish, pronounced the same way). don’t want to write that much about it. it’s cool because i learned about jeremy bentham’s panopticon in art history and then went to one that jeremy bentham actually helped design. the idea is that if all the cells face each other, the prisoners are under constant observation by each other and the guards– much better than a long hallway of cells. will post pictures that illustrate the point later. my host mom said, “oh it’s just like visiting alcatraz, right?” NO, absolutely not. with kilmainham, we’ve studied the people who were held here…and they just so happened to be irish revolutionaries (now heroes). there’s a question of JUSTICE there. the irish being wrongly imprisoned for trying to assert their independence. with alcatraz, it’s just the filth of american society. completely different.
a few years ago, i had watched the movie veronica guerin and forgot all about it until today– when we walked around the worst neighborhood of dublin with a man who had known the real veronica guerin and given her the same tour of the public housing, the drug problems, the coffin church, etc. here’s the trailer to the movie that pretty much sums it up (ignore the first few seconds,the real trailer is after):
if you don’t watch the youtube clip: veronica guerin was an investigative journalist who wrote extensively about the drug trade in a certain area of dublin. she was eventually killed by the drug dealers she was investigating.
the movie was produced by jerry bruckheimer and starred cate blanchett as veronica guerin, so it was very well done. the scenes were shot in the actual neighborhood where the drug dealing was going on, which is where we walked around today.
the area’s seediness went back the 19th century, when it was called the monto (short for montgomery, the name of the street) and known as the busiest red light district in all of europe. public housing went in and the drugs came. first hash, then heroin in the 1980s. so many children died of heroin overdoses that the local church was known as the coffin church. our tour guide’s sister had lost FIVE children to drug overdoses.
what we all found surprisingly was that almost none of the original architechture remained from the 19th century. the flats (the public housing) from the 1920s were still standing– that’s where the drug trade was/is going on. but the buildings from the area’s time as a red light district have all been replaced with very modern office buildings, an obvious result of the now dying celtic tiger.
we also saw the original home of THE jack dawson (leonardo dicaprio in titanic). and we saw one of the magalene sisters laundries (also a recent flim…the magdalene sisters..filmed at and about a different laundry)
just today, there was an article about how guerin’s killers are still operating out of prison. so this is still a very relevant topic in ireland and i was lucky to see the physical places affected by the situation– especially accompanied by our insider historian-guide, who was born in the flats and still lived in the area.
i would have taken pictures, but i stuck out enough as it was on this tour. not trying to take pictures of heroine addicts here.
not naming any names, but why do study abroad students post pictures of their new foreign bathrooms? unless it’s really interesting or beautiful– it’s just a toilet, no? the pictures i’m talking about– you’ve got a tile floor, harsh lighting, and a white porcelain toilet! is this something new??? are we taking the pictures to show they’re the same? just don’t get it.
