The Falls Road walking tour is a brutal introduction to Belfast’s troubled history. Just hours after arriving in Northern Ireland for the first time, I find myself standing in West Belfast’s Republican heartland chatting to our guide, Pádraic, about the fifteen years he spent in prison for his part in shooting a policeman. Gerry Adams is around the corner telling the story of a former paramilitary murdered on the spot a few days earlier, and later on I will hear of massive local support for a Protestant group that forced two badly beaten teenage thieves to parade along their local high street as atonement for their crimes. And all this is just a half-hour flight from Glasgow?
We meet for our first tour of the day at the end of the Catholic-dominated Falls Road, close to the border with the Protestant Shankill estate. Our guide, Pádraic McCotter, is a former IRA volunteer who now runs tours through a prisoner reintegration project called Coiste. The other tourists are almost as fascinating in their own right, showing just how far reaching the notoriety of Belfast’s troubled years have been – we are joined by visitors from Switzerland and Liechtenstein along with two elderly American couples, zipped up in green jackets emblazoned with the logo of a Boston Irish club. Predictably, they have Irish ancestors, and are in Belfast to get in touch with their roots. Some of the traditions of the area have evidently passed down to them through the generations, as they proudly declare that they won’t be visiting the Protestant Shankill estate while they’re here; just the Catholic area.
Shankill, as Pádraic puts it – perhaps speaking from experience? – is only a stone’s throw away from the Falls Road. The two communities are separated by a ‘peace line’ – a ten metre high wall, topped with wire netting and barbed wire, that would look more at home in the West Bank. It is one of around forty such divisions in Northern Ireland, erected in the early 1970s to reduce violence between rival groups. Pádraic tells us that before the wall was put up, residents of both areas would throw bricks and petrol bombs at their unknown neighbours on the other side. The wall makes people feel safer, he says, and is not unpopular in the community.
Walking up the Falls Road, the murals are astounding. Far from the violent calls to war that one might expect, most of the giant wall paintings that illustrate our route are memorials to hunger-strikers and those shot by the army or rival paramilitary groups. Many of the murals we see relate to events outside Ireland, and are often directed at the USA – one brands the US President ‘A crazy son of a Bush’, and calls for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
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About half-way up the street, we pass by Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams filming a television interview in response to the murder of a former IRA man, who was beaten to death just one week earlier on the spot where we are standing. The tourists look shocked – wasn’t all this supposed to be over with the Good Friday Agreement? Pádraic is quick to explain that it wasn’t a political or sectarian killing, but was carried out by a couple of local thugs after the man challenged them over a break in at his home. Our guide is sure this sort of thing happens in Glasgow as well and, sadly, he’s right.
Several people I meet are concerned that the reduction in violence achieved by the peace process has been met with a sharp increase in petty crime, much of it drug related. The taxi driver who shuttles us to our second tour in the Protestant Shankill area – a rarity, as many local drivers will still refuse to cross between the two communities – complains that local kids “are selling drugs like potatoes”. “You wouldn’t have had that ten years ago,” he adds, ominously. “They’d have been shot.”
Arriving at the interface, one of the electronic gates that allow traffic through sections of the wall during daylight hours, our driver insists that we can’t possibly want to see Shankill. There’s nothing there, he says, we’d be better staying in Falls Road. But we insist, and he departs, slightly bemused. It has started to rain, so we are picked up in a car by our guide William Smith. A former prisoner himself, having served five years of a ten year sentence for for attempted murder, he was a founding member of the Red Hand Commandos, which later merged with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and he now leads tours with a company called Epic, the Unionist equivalent of Coiste.
By Chris Watt
Photo: Jim Wilson
