When my older sister and I planned our trip to Ireland this past winter break, we included Belfast on our itinerary with barely a second thought. Although I was looking forward to the scenery and my first official pint of Guinness, the real purpose of our journey was to research the troubles in Northern Ireland for my sister’s senior thesis, and she had set up several key interviews there.
All our guidebooks had waxed poetic about the untapped sightseeing potential of Northern Ireland, and relegated the tension and violence there to historical blurbs in the wake of the Peace Accords of 1998. We couldn’t understand why our parents expressed reservations about our destination, telling us that as Catholics we would feel like second-class citizens there.
When we first arrived in Belfast, it seemed like the guidebooks had gotten it right. We stayed with a friend of my sister near Queen’s University in a student neighborhood filled with lovely Georgian architecture and upscale shops. My sister and I both loved the city right away; it seemed like a more intimate, refined version of sprawling Dublin. Everyone we met that night in the pubs was friendly and enthusiastic about meeting us, and the issue of our religion never came up. Later, however, I found out that we had been in a rarified atmosphere of all-Catholic pubs.
The next day, I began to get an inkling of what my mother had been talking about. My sister was conducting interviews at the headquarters of the Ulster Unionist Party, a Protestant group firmly committed to retaining Northern Ireland’s ties with England. As I waited, a secretary very kindly offered me tea, the ubiquitous gesture of hospitality in that part of the world. We made polite small talk for a bit, and she handed me an information packet to pass on to my sister. Just as she began to leave, she asked my name. At my response, she got an odd look on her face and asked, “So are you Catholic?”
In America, my name means little to most people, but apparently in Ireland it instantly identifies me as Catholic. The secretary smiled nervously and quickly retreated to her office, as though I had just confessed to a case of smallpox. As I flipped through the pages of the packet she had given me, I realized the cause of her sudden distress. The stuff was blatant propaganda, with leaflets devoted to such projects as “Keep Our Schools Safe and Smart,” goals which were to be accomplished through the simple solution of keeping them Catholic-free.
As uncomfortable as I felt reading those pamphlets, Sinn Fein’s offices in Dublin two days later were even more disquieting. While I waited for my sister to do her interview, I browsed the giftshop, full of propaganda from the opposite side. There were t-shirts emblazoned with “I Still Hate Margaret Thatcher,” and books glorifying the violent terrorist measures of the IRA. I am a Catholic and this is ostensibly a Catholic movement, but it felt incredibly alien to me. I no more wanted to be associated with it than I had with the Protestant propaganda in the North.
While we were in Belfast, we had taken a “Black Cab” tour of the city, a chilling ride which shows tourists the spots in West Belfast where murals commemorate those who died in the Troubles. Our driver showed us several murals painted with pictures of his friends and relatives who had died. This was another world entirely from the affluent area in which we had been staying, and we were unnerved.
Despite the peace agreement, it still felt like a war zone. We saw how close the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods are to one another, with huge barbed wire “Peace Walls” erected between them in an attempt to stem violence. Our Catholic driver told us he would never dream of walking into a Protestant neighborhood, contending that they would be able to know his religion just by looking at him. Then he asked us if there was anywhere in America we wouldn’t walk because of our religion or politics. We immediately and confidently assured him there was not. “Well, what about in the Red States?” he asked. When we told him we were from a Red State and got along just fine with our Republican neighbors, he seemed skeptical. “That’ll change,” he said darkly.
Two weeks later, as I stood along the parade route on Inauguration Day, I thought about the cabbie’s question. Here were Red Staters and Blue Staters standing next to each other in a way Protestants and Catholics never could in Northern Ireland, but it was not quite the picture of unity I wanted to think it could be.
The atmosphere was definitely one of hostility. Profanity-laced anti-Bush polemics competed with self-righteously patriotic chants of “USA.” Protestors shouted that the Bush faithful were idiots, and conservatives accused liberals of anti-Americanism. Watching the scene, I felt the same sense of dissociation from the conflict I had felt in Ireland; despite identifying myself as a Democrat, I didn’t want to be aligned with angry flag-burners any more than I did with jubilant war hawks.
Later that weekend, as I was busy patting myself on the back for rising above petty political partisanship, I realized that I wasn’t quite as broad-minded as I’d been telling myself I was. A friend of mine invited me to attend a College Republicans party with her, and I looked at her like she was crazy.
“Why? I don’t want to meet anyone there. I wouldn’t have anything to talk to them about.” Even as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that this was the same mind-set I’d been so appalled by in Belfast. These were probably great people with interesting things to say, but I didn’t want to drink from a Republican keg any more than a Protestant would want a pint of Guinness at a Catholic pub.
