Adventures in the North

As I planned out my blog posts about Ireland, I have to admit I was already somewhat dreading the entry where I’d have to talk about the messy politics of Northern Ireland. Reams and reams have already been written about the Troubles – political diatribes, military analyses, biographies, eyewitness accounts – what more could an outsider who’s expended just a few days of sustained mental energy on the subject possibly add?

But the same could be said for all the topics I’ve prattled on about on this blog, and the convoluted ins and outs of the Irish situation are likely to fade further and further into the backwoods of my brain over time, so I need to give it my best shot for my own benefit. So here goes.

As I’ve already intimated in earlier posts, Ireland and Britain haven’t been the cosiest of neighbours over the centuries. English monarchs had one eye on the Emerald Isle as early as the 12th century, and were more than happy to help when Dermot MacMurrough, the deposed king of the southeastern Irish province of Leinster, swore allegiance to the English crown in return for military assistance in defeating his usurper. The decade was barely out before he regretted that decision. Only five years later, Henry II came back to Ireland to unceremoniously dump MacMurrough from the very throne he had reinstalled him on, and claim his own sovereignty over Leinster. So ironically, it was an Irish chieftain who set in motion 750 years of often brutal British occupation.

Town by town, through several hundred patient years of military campaigns, the English gradually expanded their control of Ireland, taking control of Dublin, then the entire west coast, and finally the stubborn northern province of Ulster in 1601. Once all the remaining local strongmen had fled for their lives from Ireland, Britain was right there to step into the total power vacuum. Here were the beginnings of the British empire.

Once basic military control had been established, the next step was to Anglicise Ireland and turn it into a peaceful and productive colony. Initially this was done by “plantation” – the confiscation of fertile agricultural land from the local population for redistribution to English colonists. This left the Irish poor and dependent on their rulers, forced to work as tenants on the land that they formerly owned.

The second major control mechanism the British used in Ireland were the Penal Laws. This was a series of legislative measures put in place to marginalise Catholics  - why? Because the Roman Catholic Church was the only institution in Ireland powerful enough to challenge British authority. Under the Penal Laws, Irish Catholics could not vote, own land, hold political office, serve in the army or attend university. This incentive program to renounce Catholicism worked especially well on those who were already educated, wielded some power and influence and therefore had a lot to lose by remaining Catholic. Naturally, many wealthy Irish families converted to Protestantism and by the late 18th century, only 5% of the land in Ireland was in Catholic hands.

Imperialism really is a bitch. Ireland was treated as little more than an proxy battlefield and a food factory for many years. Sectarian hostility between rival British monarchs spilled over repeatedly onto Irish territory, and livestock and grain were exported to England even as literally a million people were dying of starvation during the famine. It was only a matter of time before the nationalist spirit took root in Ireland, kindled by the example of the French Revolution and America’s War of Independence.

Resistance waxed and waned until the IRA finally steered Britain to the negotiating table in 1921 after several years of guerilla warfare. Irish Catholics understandably wanted to get as far out from under the imperial thumb as possible, but there was always going to be the thorny issue of Ulster, Ireland’s northern province, which had a Protestant majority that supported continued union with the Empire. The final Anglo-Irish agreement gave the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster the chance to opt out of the new independent state and remain part of Britain, which they immediately did. So Ireland was partitioned, just like India was a quarter of a century later as a condition of their independence from the British.

In the new Free State of Ireland (it only became a republic in a referendum several decades later), Catholics formed the overwhelming majority. So after independence, the new nationalist government had a strong mandate to follow through with its aims. In the North it was another story. Protestants are the dominant community in Northern Ireland, but only just. Over 40% of the North’s population is still Catholic. And understandably, many of them were not happy at all with the partition of Ireland. Meanwhile, Protestants feared that the ascendant nationalism further south would incite Catholics in the north to turn against the country in which they lived.

"Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down" – David Trimble, Northern Irish Parliamentarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

It quickly became clear that Northern Ireland’s post-partition, pro-unionist government was determined to keep power concentrated in Protestant hands, through gerrymandering, the abolition of proportional representation, and discriminatory hiring practices in the civil service. One of the worst examples of this was in Derry, where municipal borders were redrawn to ensure a Protestant council would be elected, despite two-thirds of the city’s population being Catholic.

Derry was our first stop in Northern Ireland. Its history is particularly divisive. Built by Protestant plantation settlers, the walled city was surrounded by a Catholic army in 1689 during one of the many bloody sectarian wars fought on Irish soil. The citizens of Derry held out against the besieging army for several months and almost a quarter of their population died before the siege was broken.

The whole Protestant-Catholic thing feels very theoretical until you actually come to a place like Derry. As we walked the city walls and looked out over the neighbourhoods on each side, it was clear that hundreds of years later, the siege is still Derry’s defining historical event - that is, if you ask a hardcore unionist.

RIght next to one side of the walls is a working-class Protestant neighbourhood, where the catch cry of the siege, “No Surrender”, still seems to resonate loudly. Even the kerbs here are painted in the colours of the Union Jack, screaming “We’re British, not Irish!”

You may have noticed that in the mural above, the city is referred to as Londonderry, not Derry. The city’s official name is Londonderry, but from day-to-day most people, Catholic and Protestant, refer to it as Derry, and the governing body is called “Derry City Council”. This ambiguity has become something of a political football. On road signs, the city is named Derry when you’re in the Republic, and magically changes to Londonderry when you cross the border. This is pretty much the only way you can tell you’ve entered the UK – the stringent border checks during the Troubles are a thing of the past.

We also saw several signs that had been vandalised by nationalists to erase the "London-" part. We didn't manage to get a picture of our own, but here’s an example from Wikipedia.

From the other side of Derry’s walls, you can look out over the Bogside, the neighbourhood that twenty years ago was Derry’s infamous Catholic slum. Here, predictably, you’ll see republican flags flying and lamp posts painted in tricolours.

The Catholics of Derry began marching for their civil rights in the late 1960’s. These street protests started peacefully, but were infiltrated by the Provisional IRA, whose mission was to reunite the North with the rest of Ireland by violent means if necessary. The marches became a magnet for hotheads of all stripes, and violence escalated. In an attempt to contain the unrest, the British government started to intern hundreds of Catholics, many of whom were civil rights activists with no ties to the IRA. In response, residents of the Catholic Bogside barricaded their neighbourhood against the police and army and declared it as an autonomous area, “Free Derry”.

Free Derry became a safe haven for peaceful Catholics, but also for the IRA and other violent nationalist groups. Finally, in 1972, on the day that became known as Bloody Sunday (yup, the one made famous by U2), the British Army went in to take control of the Bogside. The events that followed have long been (and perhaps will forever be) the subject of ferocious debate. It took until June this year – almost thirty years later - for the findings of a public inquiry into the events to be published. What has become clear is that in their attempts to regain the Bogside, British soldiers shot and killed innocent civilians without provocation, and then lied under oath to cover up what happened.

Northern Ireland’s sectarian woes had already well and truly begun by this point, but 1972 became the bloodiest year of the Troubles, with over a thousand IRA bombings, and the inevitable backlash from loyalist paramilitaries. Violent assaults, political assassinations, and forced homogenisation of neighbourhoods became commonplace. In short, life became miserable and scary for pretty much everyone. There seemed no end to the they-started-it, eye-for-an-eye spiral of violence.

The Troubles provided rich subject matter for many artists and musicians. In what was once Free Derry, you can today walk around “the People’s Gallery”, a series of murals painted on the sides of apartment blocks by a group called the Bogside Artists.

On a musical front, one of the songs I fell in love with on our trip was this one by the Northern Irish musician Phil Coulter. It’s about his humble but happy childhood in Derry, and the shock of returning as an adult and finding his city shattered by the Troubles. For every hardliner on either side of the fight, there were many ordinary people who didn’t care about history or nationalism and just wanted to get on with their lives.

It took 30 years for the leaders of the warring sides to finally commit to a peace process, which established power sharing between nationalists and unionists in Northern Irish parliament. Of course, there are still splinter groups (like the “Real IRA”) who disagree with the concessions made, and continue to engage in paramilitary activities. But by and large things have calmed down since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

From Derry we headed north to the cliffs and waves of the Causeway Coast. Coastal Northern Ireland is sprinkled with quaint little golfing towns, rural bed-and-breakfasts, and needless to say, gorgeous scenery. Our visit to Derry had been intense to say the least, so this was a nice change of mood.

I was particularly excited about this part of our trip, because we would be fulfilling my childhood dream of visiting the Giant’s Causeway. This is a formation of interlocking hexagonal stone columns that starts from the cliff face and slopes down into the sea. Local legend goes that the Causeway is a bridge built by the Irish giant Finn MacCool to get to Scotland and kick some sissy kilt-wearing giant’s ass. (There’s actually a matching set of columns on the other side of the sea in Scotland.) That’s the exciting version of the story - the boring geological explanation is that the columns were created by the cracks formed by cooling volcanic lava.

We spent some time just wandering up and down the Causeway, admiring Finn MacCool’s mad construction sk1llz0rZ, basking in the late evening sun, and listening to the waves crash against the columns. Then we followed the path that leads away from the Causeway along the cliff line to the turn back point (it’s actually 24km long, but closed in many parts due to rock falls). We were back in time to claim a nice bench to watch the sun set over the Causeway.

At this point, something super cool happened. Sean got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. Since he’s kinda sorta awesome, and probably the one person who will be able to withstand my peculiar blend of neuroses, hyperactivity and nerdiness for life, I said yes. That was pretty great.

(For those who actually survived through my history essay, there’s your reward - you got a paragraph of blog-schmoopy.)

We spent a night in Bushmills, the nearest town to the Causeway, and did a little more coastal road trippin’ before arriving in Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital city. In the bad old days, Belfast was nicknamed one of the “four B’s” – along with Baghdad, Belgrade and Beirut. Arriving in central Belfast today it’s hard to imagine – it feels like a mini-London, with its black saloon cabs, British chain stores, and majestic baroque city hall, whose lawns are the hangout of choice for teenage scenesters of all stripes. Belfast’s nightlife these days is apparently the envy of Europe, which I would fully believe considering the number of raucous stag and hen parties that seemed to be based at our hotel.

We visited the fabulous Crown Liquor Saloon, Belfast’s most famous watering hole, and one of the most beautiful I’ve ever had the pleasure of a beer in. Everything from the inlaid ceilings to the leadlight windows to the brass beer taps was exquisite, and yet the atmosphere was as casual and fun as your local corner pub. One of the unique things about the Crown is that a large portion of the drinking area is cordoned off into little square booths each with their own door. Perfect for hatching that nefarious scheme that’s been knocking around your skull.

On our second day in Belfast we took a black taxi tour. What started off as the odd visitor taking a spin past the political murals of troubled West Belfast is now a well-established part of the tourist trade here. It’s sardonically referred to by locals as the “bombs and bullets” tour, and it was undoubtedly a little weird to be gawking at not-so-ancient history so openly, but I would still consider this to be one of the best things we did on our trip.

We were picked up by our cabbie, George, from the front steps of our hotel (it is a taxi, after all). On the way to West Belfast, a hotbed of violence during the Troubles, he gave a quick overview of Northern Ireland’s history. He also explained the impact of the Troubles on the city’s landscape – most notably, the construction of “peace lines” – long, high fences that were built in the 70’s to create a physical barrier between hardline Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods.

There are still twenty of these peace lines in the city of Belfast, some over a kilometre long and forty feet high. The one in West Belfast is punctuated by a few gates that are kept open only during daylight hours on weekdays. At night and on weekends, the gates are closed, so that anyone who wants to make trouble in hostile territory would have to go all the way into the inner city to get back to the safety of their own neighbourhood.

Apparently the government considered taking the peace lines down a few years ago, but bowed to public opinion polls which suggested that 60% of residents in surrounding areas were still fearful enough to oppose their removal. The scars are going to take a little more time to heal, it seems.

George said that most people in Belfast couldn’t give two hoots about Protestant, Catholic, nationalist, loyalist, or any of that stuff. He’d grown up in a mixed neighbourhood himself, attended a mixed school and was as shocked as anybody when his home town became one of the four B’s. (In fact, we were never really sure whether he was Catholic or Protestant himself.) “If all schools were mixed,” he sighed, “We could kick this thing in one generation.”

These days the paramilitary groups on both sides seem like little more than rival street gangs who engage in tit-for-tat violence and make money through extortion and protection rackets. A lot of the more violent murals around town just look like a regional variation on gangsta culture.

Our first stop in West Belfast was the loyalist neighbourhood of Shankill Road. When you’ve just spent a week or so in the Republic of Ireland hearing the Catholic side of the story, it’s kind of a shock to come and see the loyalist murals here. For example, there was one paying tribute to Oliver Cromwell, the man who is seen as a racist genocidal puritan in Ireland but credited in England as an important political reformer. (Both are probably true.)

 

Shankill Road had a bizarre mix of very twee murals (children smiling and holding hands) on the one hand, and very aggressive and violent imagery (rifle-wielding paramilitary soldiers in balaclavas) on the other. The most provocative ones were painted during the height of the Troubles, and are slowly being painted over with friendlier motifs.

 

From Shankill Road we headed through an open gate in the peace wall to the Catholic neighbourhood of Falls Road. With all the goings-on you’d expect it to be like a different planet, but honestly, if you didn’t have to drive through a forty-foot high wall to get there and there wasn’t so much banner-waving everywhere, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two areas. They’re both working class communities, each street a neat row of terraced houses with low brick walls and wrought iron gates. It hits home that the people most caught up in the violence in reality probably have much more in common with the other side than what divides them.

Our first stop on the Catholic side was Bombay Street. This street was burned down by loyalists in 1969 after civil rights marches turned violent. After this, the first peace lines started to go up in Belfast. There’s a small cemetery here honouring IRA martyrs. It’s kind of hardcore.

Further on we saw the Sinn Fein headquarters, and a string of nationalist murals. Some of the murals express the IRA’s solidarity with with other separatist struggles around the world, such as the campaign for Basque independence from Spain.

I spent a lot of time writing this blog post, trying to figure out what my “opinion” on this whole situation is. I mean, obviously enough awful things have happened that it’s now a big messy cloud of grey, but I at least wanted to understand why everyone involved thinks what they think. The nationalist viewpoint is quite easily understood, I think – hundreds of years of injustice and oppression are going to leave a mark. Is violence in return the answer? Probably not. The unionist viewpoint was less immediately understandable to me, but in the end I think it comes down to fear and protective instincts. The same thing happened in America after 9/11. When someone kills the people you care about in cold blood, I don’t think there are many people who wouldn’t be incredibly angry and want to fight back. Is violence in return the answer? Probably not.

As Martin Luther King Jr said, a riot is the language of the unheard. People turn to violence when they don’t think there’s any other way. Every questionable act committed by one side is justified by a not nice thing done by the other side, and thus the cycle of misery continues. In the end, considering that neither side is completely blameless, all you can do is hope that more and more people ask themselves, do we want another generation to be fucked over by this? Children aren’t born with hate, they learn it. You have to just hope that society will take a big deep breath and somehow move on. I know that’s easy for me to say from out here.

And now I supplement my corny but heartfelt heal-the-world plea with a symbolic photo of Stormont, Northern Ireland’s parliament, where one hopes that the pollies are getting along and finding real solutions to the problems that make ordinary people think the answer is to turn against each other.

Fin.

Links

• British occupation of Ireland
  • Dermot MacMurrough
  • Plantations
  • The Penal Laws
  • Oliver Cromwell in Ireland
  • The Siege of Derry
  • The Irish Famine
  • The Irish Free State
• The Troubles
  • The history of Northern Ireland
  • Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association
  • Free Derry
  • 1969 riots
  • Bloody Sunday
  • Northern Ireland Peace Process
  • Good Friday Agreement
  • Irish Republican Army
  • The Orange Order
  • Royal Ulster Constabulary
• The Bogside Artists
• A very nice photo slide show showing life in Belfast during the Troubles from the soldiers’ perspective.

A clifftop ramble

Music wasn’t the only reason we visited the little seaside village of Doolin in County Clare. This windswept stretch of Ireland’s west coast is famous around the world for the starkly beautiful Cliffs of Moher. In a country that’s known for its gorgeous coastline, surely this string of brooding black crags could lay claim to being the most stunning stretch of all.

Places like this were made for solitude and quiet contemplation, but unfortunately it’s been a while since the Cliffs of Moher were a local secret. Being featured prominently in a Harry Potter movie probably hasn’t helped much. The cliffs are Ireland’s most popular tourist attraction, with almost a million visitors per year.

On our way north from County Kerry, we stopped by the Cliffs of Moher Visitor Centre, a huge complex whose parking lots seems to rival the cliffs themselves for sheer square acreage. The view from the lookout here is definitely incredible (that’s where I was when I took the picture above), but we hoped that by staying in a little town like Doolin, we could discover the rugged beauty of the cliffs from a slightly different perspective – on foot, from a quieter slice of the coast.

We asked our hostel owner Karl how far it was from Doolin to the cliffs, whether it was realistic to walk there. Of course, he said. You’ll just need to head right at the main street, go over the first stile, walk another ten minutes, go over another stile, then make a direct beeline for the cliff edge, then you’ll come to an inlet, which you’ll need to go around, then watch out for the sea cave... at some point, our eyes glazed over and rolled back into our heads and Karl realised it would be better to just write it all down.

After a stupidly good breakfast of fresh-from-the-oven fruit scones from the local deli (omnomnom), we headed with map in hand to the end of the Doolin main street, over a stile and into someone’s farm. We picked our way along a muddy unpaved road for a while, before turning off to follow the fenceline along the ocean. It was quiet and brooding and beautiful.

We skirted the cliff edge for a good couple of hours, occasionally jumping the fence to avoid the particularly crumbly-looking bits. We didn’t encounter another soul for most of the way – our only company was the occasional four-legged farm creature chewing torpidly in the grass.

Soon we came to a patch of farmland that was a little different from the rest. It was clear that at some point in time, there had been more here than just the cattle and the gusting breeze. Several stone buildings were scattered across the gently sloping field, now fallen into ruin and overgrown with gorse and blackberry. We had seen abandoned houses like this all over the Irish countryside – sombre reminders of horrors of the Irish Famine.

The Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century is one of the central events in the Irish national consciousness. In 1841, a census counted Ireland’s population at just over 8 million. During the four years of the famine (1845-8), which was triggered by crop failures, one million people died of starvation and disease in Ireland. The famine sparked the mass emigration that Ireland has been known for ever since. By 1900, Ireland’s population was only half what it was in 1841.

Life was full of desperation during the Famine. Growing up in Australia, our primary school history lessons were full of stories of the First Fleet – the flotilla of British prison ships that brought convicts to the Port Jackson penal colony (now the city of Sydney). One of the things we were taught, which took on a fresher poignancy for me after visiting Ireland, was that many of the prisoners who were sentenced to transportation had been found guilty of nothing more heinous than pinching a loaf of bread to feed their children. Very Jean Valjean, isn’t it?

One of Ireland’s most famous songs, and one of my favourites, is about a man who is sent to Australia for stealing food for his family during the Famine. Have a listen, it’s sad but very beautiful.

In short, the Famine was just awful. But as with many countries that have thrown off the colonial yoke, the horrors and injustices of this period became a rallying point and a major catalyst of the Irish independence movement. For centuries, the Irish people had been harshly marginalised in their own lands – under British rule, Catholics could not vote, own land, hold political office, serve in the army or attend university. The utter failure of the British administration to ensure people were getting the basic necessities of life (incredibly, Ireland was still a net exporter of food during the famine!) was the final straw. From here it was just a matter of time before serious organised resistance formed and kicked out the British.

But anyway, back to our late summer day in County Clare.

As we continued past the old abandoned village, we left the farms behind and entered the protected wildlife area that spans about 200 hectares of maritime grasslands. You could certainly tell that no bovine lawnmowers were allowed here – the grass was long, pillowy and soft. But what the wildlife refuge lacks in cows, it more than makes up for in birds. We lay on the matted grass by the cliff edge, and watched as white water crashed into black rock, the wind whipped through the waving emerald grass, and hundreds upon hundreds of gulls carved graceful arcs out and back from their cliff, like so many paper aeroplanes at a Microsoft company meeting.

It was hard to believe that just half an hour’s walk away was Ireland’s heaviest concentration of tourist coaches and a Cliffs of Moher penny stamping machine. If I had to pick a highlight of our whole Ireland trip, this would be it!

The peat, ah, the peat

So, Dublin? I spent two weeks trying to fill up a blog post about you and failed. So for the sake of my sanity, I’m just kinda sorta going to skip over you altogether. Please don’t take it personally, it’s not you, it’s me, and all that good stuff. Raincheck?

(Steve, my colleague from the Irish Midlands, would be proud of me. Apparently Irish people who aren’t from Dublin have the same attitude to Dublin as non-Torontonian Canadians have for the big TO.)

Instead, I’ll start my Ireland recap at the point where we picked up Sinead, our little black rental car (I told you before, I compulsively name all cars!), and puttered off down the highway towards Ireland’s southern shores. A first for this trip was that I was the primary driver, and not Sean – the main reason being that I was the only one with driving-on-the-left experience. You would think that the Irish would drive on the right to stick it to their former oppressors across the pond, but I guess the die was cast by the time they kicked them out.

Our planned route mainly hugged the coast, with most of our time concentrated on the famously scenic southeast and northern shores. We weren’t blessed with the best weather the first few days, but we managed to stay in good spirits, mostly thanks to our ritual of sitting down for cream tea instead of lunch each day. There really is something spiritual about a hot pot of tea and a good crumbly scone, especially when one is a little damp.

Our very first stop outside Dublin was the tiny village of Ballon – a completely unremarkable place apart from the fact that Sean’s maternal grandfather was born and raised there. In fact, we could even track down the very house where Grandpa Morris grew up. Now it’s a pub!

As we headed south, we drove through Kilkenny and Tipperary, the two counties that had contested the All-Ireland Hurling Final just the previous day. Hurling is a Gaelic sport whose origins that dates back at least two thousand years. The best way I can describe it is as the bastard love child of field hockey and lacrosse, or perhaps golf converted to a team sport and played under the influence of amphetamines. The play is physical, the pace is furious, and watching the game in a Dublin pub as a novice spectator, I never managed to shake the instinct to cringe every ten seconds in anticipation of someone getting belted across the skull by a heavy wooden bat. Curious? Here you go.

The All-Ireland Final is Ireland’s Superbowl – the game the whole country stops to watch. And yet one of the most interesting things about hurling is that even in this day and age, it’s still a strictly amateur sport. The players and team managers all have day jobs and have to their own funds, annual leave and free time (which can be up to forty hours a week) to play for their native county.

In an age where even “gentlemen’s games” like cricket have professionalised, it’s kind of cool to watch a sport where teams have to make the most of the talent they have and can’t use money to make trades and buy the best players. It’s certainly easier to emotionally invest in a team like that, and from what we could see from our drive, the good people of Tipp and Kilkenny were all in. In each town we passed through, every shop on the main streets had a special hurling-themed display, and on the back streets almost every house was decked out in the team colours.

The other major stop on our first day was the Rock of Cashel – actually not a rock at all, but a big green hill looming over the otherwise unexceptional flatlands of County Tipperary. Atop the hill is a Catholic cathedral and monastery dating from the 12th century. During the Irish Confederate Wars in the 17th century, Protestant soldiers sacked Cashel, laying waste to the unique and historic buildings on the Rock, and indiscriminately massacring not only the clergymen on the hill but also hundreds of ordinary folk in the town below.

The New Model Army might have let their horses relieve themselves inside Cormac’s Chapel and scraped off every ancient piece of Catholic ornamentation that irked them, but they didn’t manage to wreck the place completely. Today, you can still visit the Rock of Cashel and walk around in the shells of the old buildings, pondering their former glory and the turbulent times gone by, all the while soaking in the verdure and peaceful silence that the Tipperary countryside enjoys today.

Our first day finished up in Cork, the namesake town of Ireland’s southernmost county. While we didn’t get much time to explore the place, we did have probably the best meal of our entire trip here, at a restaurant called Market Lane. Foodies take note!

On Day 2 we headed right to the south coast of Ireland, and that’s when things started getting seriously beautiful. But not before they started getting NARROW.

The pretty bits of Ireland are full of these tiny, windy roads. They barely even seem like they should be two-way, but every so often you’ll have to make way for a gigantic touring coach coming in the opposite direction, with all of about two seconds to get out of the way because of the tall hedgerow and trees on both sides. The bizarre thing is that all of these roads are signposted with a speed limit of 100kph. I could barely make it over 80 without having mini-heart attacks, and yet would often end up with a queue of cars behind me.

But we avoided any major car-tastrophes and made it to Baltimore, a tiny port town where we got our first gander at the Irish Sea. We washed down some fish and chips with a stout and enjoyed the fresh air. Then the road started going up, up and up as we entered County Kerry.

The Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula are two fingers of land that jut out of Ireland’s southwestern corner. Both are blessed with absolutely incredible natural beauty. Driving through this place, you wonder whether your windscreen is photoshopping the view as you go along. Unbelievably green hills crisscrossed by ancient stone walls slope gently towards the clear blue sea. Whether they meet the water at sheer, dramatic cliffs or gentle arcs of picture-perfect beach, it’s impossible not to want to stop at every single pullout on the road. In the distance, chains of windswept, unspoiled islands fade into the haze of the Atlantic horizon. I think I simply have to accept that County Kerry defies any pathetic attempt of mine to describe it in prose. So I’m going to shut up now and let my pictures do the talking.

In Kerry we made our first foray into a Gaeltacht, or officially Irish-speaking region of Ireland. Although English is the most widely-used language in everyday life in most parts of Ireland, the primary official language of the Republic as enshrined in the constitution is in fact Irish. Historians point to several reasons for the decline of the Irish language – the ban on teaching Irish in schools during British rule, and the mass emigration of native speakers to North America during the Great Famine are big ones. Economic realities also compelled many families to educate their children primarily in English. For all these reasons, Irish is now the only official language of the EU that isn’t the most widely spoken language in its home country.

But since Irish independence in 1922, the government has been actively working to preserve Ireland’s linguistic heritage – hence the creation of the Gaeltachtai, areas where Irish is still the natural local vernacular, and measures are continuously being put in place to keep it that way. It goes without saying that all schools in the Gaeltachtai are Irish-medium. In 2003, the government passed the Official Language Act, which took all English road signs out of the Gaeltachtai. (In the rest of the Republic, road signs are in both Irish and English.) The stated aim of the Irish government is to have a quarter of a million daily speakers of Irish by 2030.

It’s an uphill battle when your Irish-only zones are so freaking beautiful, though. Much of people’s income in areas like the Kerry Gaeltacht comes from tourism, which obviously means that the siren song of English is still very strong. And more and more property in these picture-postcard places is being snapped by outsiders, which is both diluting the Irish-speaking nature of the Gaeltachtai, and pushing up prices beyond the reach of young Irish-speakers, forcing them to move to more affordable, predominantly English-speaking parts of Ireland.

In the Kerry Gaeltacht, we stopped for petrol and snacks in a small town on the Dingle peninsula. I was sitting in the driver’s seat waiting for Sean to go pay, when a middle-aged lady carrying a baby and a shopping bag peered into the open window on the passenger side and asked politely, in very broken English, whether I could please move my car so she could pull hers in. As she walked away, my ears caught a snippet of her conversation with the child on her hip – she was speaking in Irish! I’d met a real proper Gaeilge speaker, proper enough that her English sucked. That made me at least a little optimistic that Ireland can claw a bit of its history back.

More road trip in my next...

Berlin: Back for more

I first set foot in Berlin last November, timing my visit to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It didn't take very many hours wandering its patchwork of neighbourhoods and monuments to realise that I was at one of the real epicentres of modern history. For better or for worse, the fate of hundreds of millions of people has revolved around this place for over a hundred years.

And yet Berlin is no crusty museum of a city. At no point in time do you ever feel that it's anything less than a real metropolis with real people, real personality, and its own unique set of charms and problems.

I packed a lot into my first visit (highlights included the best falafel of my life, and seeing Mikhail Gorbachev in person), and yet I left with the feeling of having barely scratched the surface. So the second time around, I gagged the complaints of my bum hip with anti-inflammatories and determined to wander as far and wide as it would consent to take me.

We stayed in Friedrichshain, previously a neighbourhood of East Berlin. It definitely feels rougher around the edges than Schöneberg, the leafy, quiet suburb I sayed in during my last visit. Apart from the wedding cake Soviet architecture of the iconic Karl-Marx-Allee, and the East Side Gallery (the longest remaining section of the Wall, now converted to an art gallery), it's mostly big old communist-era apartment blocks (these days rented by Berlin's student population), and the rumble of trains chugging in and out of the Ostbahnhof, where I met Sean at the end of my train ride from the airport.

We dropped my bags at the hostel and walked to Boxhagenerplatz, the hub of the neighbourhood's student nightlife. Being Friday night, it was buzzing with activity. We stopped at a kebab shop for some late night sustenance, then ducked into a 24-hour convenience store (after a year in shut-at-8 Bavaria, I'm infinitely more grateful that such a concept exists), picked out some beers from the fridge, and took them out onto the street to drink, stroll and people-watch.

Being able to drink in public places is actually one of the things I'll miss about Germany. Not to say I walk the streets with a beer in my hand every day, but it's nice to be able to take a beer down to the lake or river in summer to accompany your swim or picnic, or cradle a hot mug of glühwein at the Christmas markets. I read that there have been moves in Germany to ban public drinking, and while I can’t speak for the rest of the country, my experience in Munich has been that the practice doesn’t seem to cause too much trouble. I live in a student area and see intoxicated people fairly often, and can’t say I’ve ever seen things get further than exuberance and high spirits. Overall, people here seem much better at handling themselves with alcohol than in other places I’ve lived.

The next morning we crossed the pretty Oberbaumbrücke over the River Spree into the neighbourhood of Kreuzberg. Our ultimate aim was to reach Tempelhof Airport, the airfield used by the west during the Berlin Airlift, but I was just as eager to see Kreuzberg itself, which from several friends’ descriptions seemed like it could potentially be my favourite Berlin neighbourhood.

As we zigzagged across town, we noticed that the traffic light men kept changing. For a few blocks we’d be seeing the jaunty, top-hatted East German Ampelmännchen, then a few steps later we’d be waiting at a normal West German traffic light, and then we’d be at an Ampelmann again. Berlin has blended back into a seamless continuum so well in this part of town, that it’s impossible to tell at any point whether you’re in the former east or west, like a scar that’s miraculously healed without leaving a physical trace. At the same time, this hit home to me what a shock it must have been for Berliners to wake up one seemingly normal Sunday morning and find a militarized barrier running through their previously unified city. I screwed up my eyes and tried to imagine a wall dividing the block in front of me from the one behind me, and simply couldn’t. It was unfathomable.

I loved Kreuzberg every bit as much as I expected. It’s a neighbourhood of contrasts and variety. There are a few square blocks known as “little Istanbul” – crammed with Turkish restaurants and grocery stores and delis whose tantalising displays made me want to stop for a second breakfast of breads and spreads and falafel. Oh, and I found some pretty kick-ass sunnies.

Once we crossed the idyllic Landswehrkanal, a peaceful stream plied by narrowboats and framed by graceful bridges, the blocks took on a distinctly West Berlin feel, with leafy playgrounds and gorgeous old pre-war apartment blocks, their wrought iron balconies filled with flower pots. This was one of the few areas of Berlin that was somewhat spared in the final hellish days of World War Two.

My favourite shopping street was one with an old red brick church with a tolling bell, an old pre-war market hall filled with fancy cheesemongers and antipasti vendors, and dozens of unique shops and cafes lining the footpaths. If I ever move to Berlin, I already know where I’ll be going apartment hunting.

Our wander through Kreuzberg brought us to Tempelhof Airport, the site of the dramatic Berlin Airlift of 1948-9. Tempelhof ceased commercial operations in 2008 and the city of Berlin took the unusual step of converting the airfield into a vast public park. So now you can grill sausages in the long shadow of the air traffic control tower, have a bike race down a runway, or picnic under the rusting hulk of a World War Two bomber.

Unfortunately, none of the above were a go for us on our visit. Gunmetal grey clouds were already frowning down on us as we skirted the severe semicircle of the old Nazi-era terminal building. And by the time we got right into the middle of the park, just far enough to be outside sprinting distance to any form of shelter, it started to pour. Running for cover was enough of a lost cause that we simply shrugged our shoulders, accepted the second shower and began to play “Airlift”.

The weather played games with us all through our visit. It lavished sunshine on the Brandenburg Gate when we revisited it late on Sunday afternoon, brutalised us with wind and rain as we waited in line to go up to dome of the Reichstag on Sunday morning, and turned scattershot by the time we made the hike all the way out to the 1936 Olympic stadium in Berlin’s far western suburbs.

Our last stop was the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park. After the Red Army captured Berlin at the end of World War Two, they filled their sector of the city with monuments paying tribute to the Russian soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. The most famous of these is inside Treptower park, a public garden in the southeast of Berlin.

After visiting the Communist statue park in Budapest, I was expecting the memorial to be on an epic scale, and I wasn’t wrong. It isn’t so much a single monument or statue as it is a progression of themes that build up to a climax. You enter the memorial through a grand archway, ornamented with carved stone wreaths and inscribed with tributes in Russian and German to the heroes who gave all in the victory over Fascism. You then pass through a silent, green corridor of weeping willows and to the feet of a poignant statue of Mother Russia mourning for her dead children.

At this point there are some interpretive panels that describe the Soviet Union’s experience of WW2. This is a subject I didn’t know much about, and I was shocked to read that twenty-five million Soviets – civilian and military – died in the war. Twenty-five million! That’s the populations of Australia and New Zealand combined. Growing up in the British Commonwealth, I’d heard a lot over the years about how much loss of life the western countries had sustained in the war, but this was a number that hit me right in the guts.

Despite all my professed open-mindedness, I think I have grown up subconsciously thinking of Russia as simply a dark lurking force that messed up Eastern Europe. In actual fact, things would probably have been much worse had they not done all they did in World War Two. Obviously it was not an act of charity to go to war with Germany: once Hitler reneged on his truce with Stalin and decided to invade Russia, it was simply a matter of self preservation. But it’s unfortunate that the Cold War has in a lot of ways overshadowed and made a lot of us in the west ignorant of the contributions and sacrifices of the Soviet Union in WW2.

Digesting all of this, I explored the rest of the memorial in a different frame of mind – definitely not with the cynicism I felt when I visited the statue park in Budapest. By the time I reached the zenith of the memorial – a green hill topped with a massive statue of a sword-wielding Soviet soldier cradling a rescued child in his spare arm and crushing a swastika underfoot, I felt like my view of European history had become a little more nuanced.

No more 3x5

Everyone has their level of travel snobbery. Some people are like Philippe, from the awesome travel guide parody Molvania:

A professional traveller since his youth, there is not a city or town Philippe has not recently been disappointed by. No matter how obscure the destination you can bet he has been there before you and found it was not half as good as it was in the 1970s.

I’m no Philippe – my snob line falls somewhere between buying snow globes of places where it doesn’t snow, and leaving my camera at home. I like photography, and I’m not above looking like a dorky tourist to do it. In fact, I find that just being in photography mode makes me more observant. The incentive of being able to capture something unique forever makes me look for the little details in my surroundings. Like the Hungarian postboxes that reminded me of those chicken walkers in Return of the Jedi.

So I was somewhat bummed when my camera ran out of battery only halfway through my first day in Budapest. The Magyar capital is a beautiful city, and the weather was perfect for photography. To top it off, I’d forgotten to pack my charger, so I was forcibly snap-sad for the rest of the weekend.

I spent the rest of the day trying to store up as much as I could in my memory and my notebook – the decadent grandeur of Buda Castle, the peaceful, green hike up St Gellert Hill to the 360-degree views of the communist-era citadel. Not to mention the countless gorgeous art nouveau buildings. Budapest’s most famous architect, Ödön Lechner, liked to intricately decorate the roofs of his buildings, even they were invisible to the observer the street. “Birds can see it, though,” he reasoned.

This was the last pretty roof I got before my camera died, of the St Matyas Church in Buda:

The next morning, I headed to one of Pest’s famous old kafehaz (coffeehouses) for breakfast. The city centre is dotted with these venerable establishments, lined with sumptuous wood panelling, and profuse with gilded, embossed arches, intricately painted ceilings and delicate chandeliers. I was so busy gawking that a couple of times I forgot that I was meant to be drinking and eating.

It was really starting to bug me that as much as I tried, I would never have any proper reminder of all the beautiful things around me. At some point, I instinctively reached for my notebook and started trying to copy the sinuous vines and flowers painted on the ceiling above me. Here’s what I ended up with.

It would be clear to anyone who saw the original ceiling pattern that I have all the artistic talent of a sink plunger. But I enjoyed the way that, like photography, drawing something could draw me deeper into its details. I loved the first coffee house so much that I ducked into two more during the course of the day, and sketched in all of them, pretending to myself that I was a cultured artsy-fartsy type. If only I’d brought my beret on this trip.

By the time I visited Memento Park, the Communist sculpture park on the outskirts of the city, I had gotten a little more audacious. Memento Park is a curated selection of communist-era sculptures that were removed from around Budapest after the fall of communism.

It was really interesting to walk around and see the relics of the past century, and to imagine them in the context of a living, breathing city. A stone fresco of soldiers lay horizontally on the ground surrounded by grass. With their hands over their hearts and legs splayed in a synchronised march, they looked a bit like they were sunbathing. I got to see Stalin’s massive boots, the only thing left standing after his statue was toppled in the people’s revolution of 1956.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

I was really wishing I had my camera to capture the scale of some of these figures. Making do, I decided to make the leap from the abstract patterns of Art Nouveau ceilings to the much harder-to-master human form.

I know, ROFLMAO. My imaginary stick figure lady looks like she’s standing underneath a giant statue of Superman after butt liposuction. But I did manage to convey the scale, and give myself a good chuckle. The statue I was actually trying to draw was this one.

(From www.mementopark.hu)

One of the really cool things about Memento Park is the museum next door. Apart from a crash course in 20th century Hungarian history (which I sorely needed), it also has a little cinema looping a series of training films produced back in Communist times by the Ministry of Interior Affairs. The illuminating topics include “How to search a house”, “How to recruit informers”, and “How to hide bugs”. As you can imagine, the films are incredibly paranoid in tone and, with the benefit of decades passed, rather amusing. Some of my favourite excerpts:

• During the tutorial on conducting home searches, a man carefully makes incisions into the upholstery of a chair with a knife and pokes into the springs of the seat, accompanied by the following voiceover: “The dissection of furniture is only advised on a very well-founded suspicion.”
• Mission control to a spy outside someone’s window: “Any difference between before and now?”
  Spy: “There used to be one piece of pottery on the shelf, now there are two.”
  Mission control: “Ok. We’ll check behind it next time.”
• Spy: “Oh god, they’re hugging now. Probably just for show. I think I’m going to puke. Dirty traitors.”

Speaking of feeling like puking, I think one of the only things I didn’t like about Budapest was the food I had there. I’d heard a lot about Hungarian food being one of the jewels of Central European cuisine, so I was pretty excited when I showed up at a little hole-in-the-wall Magyar restaurant known for its cheap and cheerful three-course dinners. I ordered their standard house menu, which got off to an auspicious start with a scrummy dumpling soup. It wasn’t too different to the Knödel soup you get in the restaurants in Munich.

The main course was a different ball game. My eyes almost popped out of my head when I received a plate piled high with deep-fried onion rings, over a dozen fried goose livers, and about three baby lettuce leaves masquerading as a side salad. It was the kind of meal that would make Craig Ballantyne weep. Now, I’m all for onion rings about once a year, but after about three bites of goose liver I was done with the whole plate. It was just excessively oily and rich, in the same way that foie gras is – except that when you order foie gras, it usually isn’t served in a pile rivalling Mont Blanc.

It made me feel awful and embarrassed to leave my food untouched, especially since it was clearly a regional specialty. I tried to redeem myself the next day by enjoying a really nice bowl of goulash. The goulash in Hungary is very different from what I’ve had in Germany and the Czech Republic – it’s prepared as a brothy soup, not a thick stew. And it’s red and paprika-y, not brown and peppery.

My train left Budapest at 9pm, so I spent my final hour wandering in the late afternoon light along the Pest side of the Danube. One of the things I walked past was the Hungarian Parliament, which is an architectural tribute to the Houses of Westminster in London. They even put it right by the river to be matchy-matchy.

Only a few hundred metres south of the Parliament is a smaller, but equally powerful monument. Centimetres from the edge of the stone embankment is a higgledy-piggledy row of shoes sculpted by two Hungarian artists. The work is a memorial to ordinary people who were ruthlessly shot into the Danube by Fascist militia in the closing chapters of World War 2. Clearly this was an time of the world gone mad, and the mix of shoes – work boots, court shoes, tiny children’s sandals – is a sobering reminder of the terrible price of intolerance and war. One of those tiny, easily-missed slices of quiet contemplation that I am always glad to discover in a big bustling city.