Photos from Ireland and Nothern Ireland

 Click HERE to see photos from my trip to 

Ireland and Nothern Ireland.

Attending the International Downtown Association World Towns Summit in Ireland/Nothern Ireland - First Stop Dublin

 

I love to travel because I love to learn first hand about other places work, so when I saw that my work trade association, International Downtown Association, was gathering BID professionals for a study tour of Ireland and Northern Ireland, I signed up right away. The trip included visits to Dublin, Dundalk and Belfast, where we spoke to BID and community leaders and urban planners about projects they were working on. Along the way my peers and sat down in sessions to discuss the challenges facing cities and societies. It was so interesting to hear other perspectives and other possible responses and to dig deep into other cities and see first hand what they are doing. I have been to Ireland twice before, but this trip I saw it completely differently.

First stop Dublin.

An Afternoon Learning About Public Realm Improvements in Dundalk, Ireland - County Louth

Next Stop: Dundalk, Ireland. Located in County Louth midway between Dublin and Belfast, just south of the Northern Ireland border. Dundalk is a historically industrial and port town that was hit hard from two big moments in Irish history, first Irish independence from British Empire in 1921, which meant UK factories moved out, and when Ireland joined the European Union when more industrial jobs moved to other parts of the EU. This meant it suffered a long economic decline.

So in comes the Dundalk Business Improvement District in 2009, Ireland’s first BID, to literally brighten things up. They have transformed the downtown, making it a destination.

One project I was most impressed by is that 6 years ago they started painting the downtown building facades themselves, covering up the typical dingy greys and whites with bright cheery colors. They brought back old store signs to emphasize the nostalgia people felt for the place with the goal of getting the community to fall back in love with the city. They also have a major mural program. The BID also was able to find resources to create a new public plaza that they use for big public events like their Christmas lights and celebration to attract tourists and also small ones like a weekly farmers market to get locals to spend more time downtown. Click through my pics to see other little details they have added to the streetscape making Dundalk a great place to visit.

Visiting Belfast, Northern Ireland

 

The last stop on the International Downtown Association World Towns Summit was in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a place I have been eager to visit. Belfast is a city in transition. The Good Friday Peace Accords were signed in 1998, but there is still a visible simmering tension between the Loyalists (Protestants loyal to the United Kingdom) and the Republicans (Catholics yearning to break away from the UK.) Another post will follow about that, but this one will focus more on other elements of Belfast as it recovers from years of financial decline and conflict and begins to grow.

Once an economic powerhouse where the British Empire manufactured textiles and built ships, Belfast has nice architectural bones with lots of red brick factories and row houses, sprinkled with some new glass towers rising above. Belfast celebrates that they built the Titanic and says with a laugh that the ship was just fine when it left their docks. They tell stories of milling lots of linen in their glory days. I kept imagining ships full of Indian cotton arriving on their shores.

As part of the Summit, we got to meet the Nightlife Czar and Willy Jack, the Whiskey Guy, who owns a couple pubs and a whiskey museum and is dedicated to building tourism in Belfast. These guys have helped add lots of murals and art all over the city transforming the imagery beyond martyr murals memorializing past conflict.

The Summit also had us speak to other leaders like a policeman who talked about the challenges to rethinking policing - saying that instead of being a “police force” they are a “police service” trying to show they are there to serve all the community instead of forcing them to behave a certain way; a professor dedicated to studying “The Troubles” to learn how to move past it and the director of the Belfast Stories Center, a new museum that will try to capture the wide variety of stories from that time and create a space for cultural regeneration. It was clear that Belfast believes telling its stories from the past and including as many voices as possible is key to a peaceful prosperous future.

One of the issues dampening the idea of Irish unification is the economic lagging of Northern Ireland, but what I saw were signs of progress like a new rail station and news that they were replacing their old fleet of trains with new ones next year that will trim the time it takes to get between Dublin and Belfast to 90 minutes, making economic connections between the cities much more feasible. I also saw plenty of life on the streets and full fancy restaurants and some new commercial towers.

More reflections about the conflict in Belfast, Northern Ireland

 

Years ago when I was in middle school, I spent a summer in the UK with my family. One stop that jolted me was visiting Londonderry or Derry (depending which side you were on.) That was in 1984 and it was during The Troubles, the time when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was trying to bring attention to the inequalities of life for Catholics and kick the United Kingdom out of Ireland. Londonderry was a war zone, with barbed wire on rooftops, where the streets were eerily silent. This was a prominent life experience for me and probably one of the ones that sparked my interest to want to travel in conflict zones to see them with my own eyes. Mostly what I remember taking away was the darkness of war, but always having a really hard time with the roots of the conflict, since in my world Protestants and Catholics live side by side with no friction. Like so many long standing conflicts I’ve learned this is about access to capital and power more than religion, but that was hard to fully understand with a young outsiders mind. After the trip I continued to follow the conflict and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, that finally created a road to a more connected future. But I never traveled back to Northern Ireland to see the differences till now.

So beyond urban planning curiosity, outlined in other posts, here are some pictures of Belfast today and how its citizens are telling their history. I was sort of surprised that there are still “Peace Walls” that separate Loyalist from Republican neighborhoods with locked gates each night from 8pm to 6:30am to prevent violence and also to see wired barriers to protect houses on the Republican side from things being thrown over the walls and fences. This is the kind of horrible stuff I’ve seen in the West Bank, but didn’t expect it in Northern Ireland today. 28 years after the peace accord, they said the walls just keep getting higher. Neighborhoods were marked by big murals, which I think of as martyr posters, memorializing the names and faces of those that have been killed in conflict or specific dates and incidents that keep the memories alive.

We took a fascinating walking tour of West Belfast with a guide on each side that had participated in the conflict and now shared their stories. Mark, our guide on the Loyalist (UK/Protestant) side was still seething with rage and showed us that the conflict is not over. He took us to a memorial garden with names of people killed more recently, reminding us that this conflict was still raw. Anne Marie on the Republican (IRA/Catholic) side told us about times she was tortured and stories of the conflict and growing up there, but seemed much more hopeful of the future, saying her daughter’s could have hope for their future when she had had none at the same age. (If others go to Belfast, I highly recommend a tour like this to get a real telling of very recent history.)

Other neighborhoods, still segregated, have murals and flags and plenty of reminders of whose side they are on, but seem to be a bit more open to coexistence. I, of course, hope this is their future, but was reminded how deep the scars of conflict lie and got the sense it does not take much to stir up anger. There are groups on both sides working hard to lower tensions when they spark.

These days in the center of Belfast it would take a locals eyes to notice the remains of the conflict through all the development and new things that keep popping up in this recovering city, but in the poorer neighborhoods the conflict continues to visibly smolder.

Here’s one example of a separation that I, as an outsider, couldn’t see without a locals eye was… I went to a pub and there was live music. The Irish colleague I was with pointed out that it was a Republican place. I asked how he knew. He said it was because of the music they were playing. Then when we left he noticed a t-shirt in Gaelic, the Irish language. Clearly if you are a local little signs are everywhere to remind you whose side people are on.

I left the country feeling pretty hopeful that overtime the divisions will fade. There is a good amount of economic development going on and the veterans who suffered from The Troubles are aging and hopefully their kids don’t feel quite as much fervor, though from what I read and heard, schooling is still fairly separated, so the rifts are taught over and over again. Another interesting thing I learned is when thinking about Irish unification is there never really was a unified Ireland. These two countries and peoples on the same island have always thought differently. But still I hope that a unified Irish island is achievable in the not too distant future.