February Journal

The end of the month is coming upon me quickly here. It’s nearly time to post again my monthly update. This month I want to write about a pair of incidents that I’ve been witness to over the past few weeks. And even to call them ‘incidents’ brings to mind an actual event, something that has a beginning, middle, and end. The stories I am about to tell don’t act like that. Instead, they are like snapshots. With decades leading up to the photo and no end in sight, the pictures I want to paint still capture something of the culture here that I find striking. Naturally, since I have two stories to tell, one will involve loyalist suspicion of nationalists, and the other just the opposite.

Snapshot 1: Within the past few weeks twice over have people I know (in this case, each was a retired woman) have refused to take the shortest route to my house because of a street that I live near. My neighbourhood is called the ‘Greater New Lodge’. The New Lodge Road runs from the end of my street (Thorndale) through a Republican area and straight down to the store where I do the majority of my grocery shopping. It is the most convenient and fastest way to get from home to food and back. Along the New Lodge are a fair number of Republican murals depicting armed conflict, economic deprivation, unjustifiable murder, and martyrs. The road itself is perhaps a half-mile long.

When I was talking with the first woman, we were discussing how I got to and from grocery shopping and I said that I rode my bike up and down the New Lodge. Her response was physical. She pulled her neck back, and sat back in her chair. Shock. “Oh,” she said, “would you not just go to Duncairn Gardens and go up that way?” (Duncairn Gdns. is angled so that to travel up it means travel away from my home, not toward it.)

“Of course not”, I replied, “That road angles north and would take me further from home.”

“Well, I just wouldn’t go down that New Lodge.”

Looking for support, the woman turned to another person in our group who interjected, “Ian’s right. The New Lodge is closer to his house.”

Duncairn Gdns. is the same street Macrory Presbyterian Church is on (if you remember the issues I had trying to find a spot to plant those 50 trees back in the fall), and is a Protestant inter-face road between two primarily Catholic/Nationalist neighborhoods.

The second part of this snapshot happened a week later when another retired woman with whom I have contact was driving me home. When casually talking about directions around the city and the fastest way from point A to point B, I said, “Well, if you just take this road straight up, you can turn right onto the New Lodge and the end of that road is right where we need to be.”

Her response was similar, if more dramatic, “Well, Ian, I’m an old woman and I like my car. I don’t think that we will be doing that.” The implication that driving the New Lodge would mean having bricks, bottles and the like thrown at us and the car was clearly implied. Now, I have never been assaulted or harassed or felt unsafe walking or riding the New Lodge, for the record.

Snapshot 2: The second snapshot I would like to provide I just saw last night. I hopped on my bike and headed to Manny’s (my fish and chips dive) for supper. I placed my order and while I waited in line noticed a flyer behind the counter with a man’s face dominating the upper half of a standard sheet of paper. Below the sign read in large, bold, capital letters, “MURDERED LAST FRIDAY NIGHT WHILE LEAVING THE JAMAICA INN.” In smaller letters below: If you have any information about this killing please help the family out by telling someone. Tell your parents. Tell your priest. Tell your teachers. Tell anyone!

What I want you to notice is not who is listed on the flyer, but who is not. Living in a predominantly Catholic area, I was not struck by the inclusion of, ‘tell your priest’. What I did note was the exception of, ‘tell the police’ (here called the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI). Oftentimes the PSNI is seen as a representation of the British government that many Nationalists feel unjustly rule Northern Ireland. For that reason, there have traditionally been very few Catholics serving in the armed forces (either military or policing). There would be very little desire on the part of Catholic/Nationalist/Republican families to support and work for an organization that was seen as representative of a colonial government they wanted to expel.

I knew this background when walking into Manny’s last night, but I did not expect to see such a clear manifestation of that belief system. While earnestly searching for this man’s killer, the official service that is meant to conduct such investigations had been omitted from the grassroots, information-gathering and disseminating aspect of the process. As an outsider to this society it struck me squarely as counter-productive.

Now, perhaps you are thinking, “Both of those pictures are illogical. That doesn’t make any sense. Those people in Belfast won’t drive down a street even though it’s more direct, just because Catholics live on it? That’s crazy. And, more than that, they want to find this man’s killer, but won’t involve the police because the cops are mostly Protestants? That makes no sense…”

The reason why these two snapshots of Belfast exist for us to look at is 800-years of complexity. There are no simple answers to why such feelings of suspicion, distrust, animosity and fear perpetuate. But, do me a favor; read over the stories again. Try to think about what the feelings of the people here must be like in order to produce the actions I’ve written about. If your sentiments echo the ones I’ve written in the previous paragraph, then consider what would life have to have been like to make these seemingly illogical actions, perfectly reasonable. In Belfast that’s exactly what they are.