Easing in to understanding: Northern Ireland

 February 18, 2023

              Students appreciate the light start to our experience with Northern Ireland: while they’ve been looking forward to corporeally engaging the history and tension we’ve studied, I know there’s no small trepidation for the emotionality and weight to come.

              We therefore enjoyed the festive shopping at St. George’s Market, Maddie sharing a crepe stuffed with cream and chocolate, Abbey happily taking the tags off a woolen scarf; and later, in the Ulster Museum, students were wowed by the layers of exhibits: first history and natural history, and then geology, and elements, and biology, and fashion, and art--studying the effects Rembrandt etchings proudly displayed bore out on Irish and Northern Irish artists that followed, or learning that the fierce dragons of straw suspended atop the five-story atrium had been fashioned by the museum’s resident basket weaver, or hearing the facts Eddie knew of the massive Irish wolfhound encased in plexiglass on the ground floor. They enjoyed the grand ceilings in the rotunda of City Hall and its careful exhibits of city history.

              Students also were glad to acclimate to some of the small cultural details without the full weight of the troubled history, like which way to look when crossing a street and which side to travel on a sidewalk, and the difference between a cuppa (mug with tea bag) and proper tea (brewed loose), and odd old sayings, like the one that describes a dreamer as a head full of sweetie mice, or the absurd detail that the harp on the Irish flag points a direction opposite that of the iconic harp on a pint of Guinness, Guinness having trademarked the logo first. It’s a no-worries culture, or so we’ve seen.

              And yet, there have been signs of the tensions always at hand. As one side said, We have a shared past, but we don’t have a shared memory. We saw this in the dozen Union Jack flags raised above the City Hall fence over card tables with small posters, and saw it again in numerous murals and partisan  posters throughout our walks. We heard it in small moments, as when Janine was inquiring about a bus and was asking about Londonderry—a guess based on the man’s name and geography—and he responded, Never heard of it, and then told her, when she re-oriented to the nationalist name Derry, Yes, we’re the smart ones. We heard it again when the hosteler last night said he was surprised an American school came to this city to learn more about the history of Ireland, whoops, I mean Belfast. It was even there in the blackboard used in an episode of Derry Girls, when it was a funny-ha that Catholic students and Protestant students were brought together, first to come up with the differences between them and then the similarities, but there was only room for the difference.

              City Hall judiciously addressed the city’s storied tensions by avoiding a couple decades in the late twentieth century but pointing to roots of division. And the Ulster Museum had a direct exhibit about the Troubles, spanning many rooms and many more feelings.

              Belfast is a city with familiar weather, language, and shops. But we sense something all around us.

A link to an album of this trip is attached here.