travel

Looking Back on Lower Shankill

21 years later, I'm still making sense of a confusing visit to Belfast in 2003. If the Troubles were over, why was everyone still so tense? And when does the past finally become history?

Lower Shankill, Belfast, 2003.

The tension started before we even crossed the border. Our guide, upbeat since we’d left Dublin several days earlier, became quiet. Then he began to openly suggest he’d rather not be there. “I’m not rolling into Belfast in this green bus covered in fucking shamrocks,” he grumbled.

The sole Irish passenger on our tour, otherwise populated by Americans, Australians, and Canadians like myself, also appeared nervous. Earlier, we’d given him a creative and clever nickname: Irish Dave. He was somewhat older than the rest of us, already well into his thirties, and he’d lived his entire life in the Republic of Ireland, not far from the border with Northern Ireland. But he had never crossed it. This fact surprised me during my visit in 2003, but apparently it’s not uncommon even today.

Shortly before our scheduled arrival in Belfast, our tour itinerary abruptly changed. Our first night in Northern Ireland would now be spent in a small town somewhere outside the city. The explanation given for the itinerary change was vague but I don’t recall anyone complaining.

My memories of the town are fuzzy for reasons likely related to the excess consumption of Guinness. I retain mental snapshots of a night in the pub, a place so stereotypical that it feels silly to describe it: a small stone building, a wooden interior, a long bar, a jumble of ludicrously friendly locals in an informal circle playing fiddles and tin whistles. There was dancing. It was not a concert for us; we were interlopers, after all, not even scheduled to be there. It was just Friday night.

In the morning, another guide took us into the center of Belfast in a different shamrock-free bus. He dropped us in the Cathedral Quarter with instructions to split into small groups and take city tours from a line of waiting black taxis. Afterwards, there would be a plethora of pubs suitable for lunch. “But not that pub,” he said, pointing to a building on the opposite corner that looked indistinguishable from the rest. “That’s an IRA pub.” With no further explanation, he disappeared.

Belfast’s black taxi tours are still popular today. They straddle the line between cash grab tourism and a way to educate visitors about the history of Belfast during the Troubles, a period of open conflict between Loyalist Protestants and Republican Catholics that lasted roughly from the 1960s through to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

By the time I arrived in 2003 the international news had mostly moved on. The Troubles had been officially over for five years. Irish tourism was opening up. In addition to Belfast’s black taxis, new national companies such as Paddywagon Tours were offering young travelers like myself bus tours of the most popular sights in Ireland, with itineraries that made stops on both sides of the northern border. The Paddywagon marketing leaned heavily into stereotypes: cartoon leprechauns and shamrocks were to the Irish travel brochures what beavers and maple leaves were to the Canadian ones.

But for the Irish who had lived through the Troubles, the past could not be brushed away so quickly. Signatures on paper did not erase the decades of grievances and retaliations that peel away like the layers of an onion. Much of the nuance is opaque to outsiders. Finding reliable information about the conflict that all sides agree is completely neutral seemed nearly impossible 20 years ago, and is almost as difficult now.

Squeezed into a retro black taxi with a handful of my tour mates, our first stop was at a section of a so-called peace wall, one of many ugly barriers that had been constructed to minimize contact between Loyalist and Republican neighbourhoods. One particularly long section of concrete, corrugated metal, and tight chain link fencing stretched along Cupar Way, in a so-called interface area roughly halfway between Loyalist Shankill Road and Republican Falls Road. Miles of these walls still stand today, often positioned only a few feet behind homes and businesses. Apparently, some of the heavy gates that permit passage through these walls are still locked at night.

The walls of nearby buildings were painted with colourful and somewhat amateurish murals proclaiming allegiances, promoting paramilitary groups, and honouring those who had been killed in the conflict. Some of these murals are more subtle than others: men in black balaclavas holding automatic weapons send an unambiguous message.

I had heard much about the the IRA on the Republican side, of course, and the organization’s various confusingly-named offshoots. But the slew of paramilitary groups promoted by the Loyalist murals made for an even more head-spinning jumble of abbreviations: there was the UDA, the UFF, the UVF, the LVF, and more. These groups splintered, dissolved, and reformed under new names. Allegiances came and went. Leaders were murdered, imprisoned, or driven into exile. A May 2000 deadline for all groups to decommission weapons had passed without being met, so the deadline had been moved back by several years; then moved back again, and again. It was not until 2010 that all groups provided evidence that their stashes of guns and explosives were no longer a significant threat.

UFF Mural in Lower Shankill, Belfast, 2003.

When our taxi entered the heart of the Loyalist area of Lower Shankill — where the curbs were painted the same red, white and blue as the Union Jack — we passed enormous piles of carefully stacked wooden shipping pallets, some rising several stories into the air. Men were clambering up the sides to build them still higher. At the very top were perched the green, white and orange flags of the hated Republic of Ireland, ready to be symbolically burned in the huge communal bonfires scheduled for that evening.

Bonfire preparation in front of the Crumlin Road Courthouse, Belfast, 2003.

On a side road known as Shankill Parade the driver pulled over, and we all got out. He led us into a large vacant lot, and explained the significance of some of the nearby buildings and political murals on their walls. Three or four small boys were lurking at the far edge of the lot, watching us. They had short cropped hair, football jerseys, and scowls that made them look older than they were. As our driver talked, I felt something rattle in the gravelly dirt beside my feet, but I paid no attention. Then it happened again. I looked across at the boys and saw one winding up to lob a stone in our direction. “Oi!” he cried, and the others joined in a chorus. “Oi! Oi! Oi!”

Rock-tossing kids near Shankill Parade, 2003. In the background is mural honouring a murdered Loyalist named Jackie Coulter.

Our taxi driver had stopped talking. But he wasn’t paying attention to the boys, who were too young to be threatening; he was looking the other way, back towards the taxi. He barked out some instructions, but his accent was thick. My tour mates and I looked at each other. “What did he say?” None of us knew.

But we could no longer ask our driver for clarification because he was suddenly twenty feet away from us, then thirty feet, sprinting towards the taxi, his arms pumping frantically. Middle-aged and somewhat overweight, he did not have the appearance of a man who ran often, or without good reason, so we followed him, though at a slower pace. I turned around and took a photo of the boys, who were now staring at a large green military vehicle that had roared into view on the road, moving at extremely high speed past our taxi and towards the far end of the lot. I took a photo of that vehicle as it passed, the letters on its side too blurry to decipher now.

Our driver was waiting impatiently at the taxi, gesturing at us, doors opened wide. We got in and asked what was happening. “British military operation,” he said, driving away quickly. “Today is not a good day.” The tour evidently over, we headed back to the tourist zone for our lunch at a non-IRA pub where I ordered something listed on the menu as “Irish stew”.

As it turned out, entirely by coincidence, I had arrived in Belfast on July 11. To the Protestant community this date is the Eleventh Night, an evening of merry bonfire burning that precedes the Glorious Twelfth. These events mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when the Protestant King William of Orange defeated his Catholic challenger to secure the throne of England, Ireland and Scotland. Parades organized by the Orange Order commemorate this historic event every year in cities around the world, but in Belfast they are also an opportunity to express political allegiances and show support for continued British rule in Ireland. Particularly in times of high political tension, the parades are seen by others as being “triumphalist and provocative” and are sometimes accompanied by increased fears of violence.

In 2003, I left Belfast somewhat confused about my experience. If the Troubles were over, why was everything still so tense? Why was the British military still policing the streets? After I got home, why did the media only reference the conflict in the past tense, if at all?

I later learned that the tension I’d seen play out firsthand actually wasn’t between Loyalists and Republicans, or Protestants and Catholics. Instead it was part of a larger pattern of infighting and feuding within the many Loyalist paramilitary groups. After 1998, with the political and religious justifications for their existence mostly gone, the groups had devolved into something more akin to criminal gangs. They began pursuing more mundane interests: drugs, prostitution, and racketeering. Soon the groups were fighting each other using the weapons they had previously stockpiled to fight Republicans.

As the feud escalated, leaders of the paramilitary groups were gunned down in their cars; in retaliation, others were shot in the street. Homes and pubs were firebombed. Even uninvolved family members of key figures were targeted. By 2000, the feuding in Shankill had deteriorated into what one police officer called “dodge city”. The British Army was forced to increase street patrols and enforce checkpoints to keep the peace; the eventual end of their long operation in Northern Ireland would not come until 2007.

My Belfast visit came early in a longer European trip. It was one of the first times that I began to realize that some of the history I found so interesting wasn’t entirely in the past, especially when it involved recent conflicts — and in Europe “recent” could encompass anything from a few years to a few centuries. Encountering low-simmering divisions between groups that looked indistinguishable to an oblivious outsider became a recurring theme in my travels.

In Berlin, I visited the tourist pastiche of Checkpoint Charlie, a well-known crossing point through the Berlin Wall that had been manned by the Americans during the Cold War. Its cartoonish reconstruction, complete with a fake soldier in period costume posing for photos, made the Cold War feel like ancient history, a ridiculous folly to be laughed at, despite having ended only fourteen years earlier. But as I travelled around the city I could see the blank spaces left by the recently vanished wall, and I noticed how they still demarcated distinct districts. Different attitudes lingered in the former East and West. People on each side snarked about those on the other side, and their supposedly-joking stereotypes didn’t seem particularly funny. In 2024, some 35 years after the wall opened, voting patterns in a recent German election still crisply reflected the old East-West divide, even though many voters are now too young to remember the Cold War.

Remnant of the Berlin Wall, Berlin, 2003.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, I saw the evidence of another brutal conflict. In the town of Mostar, the dividing line was not a wall but the Neretva River, with Muslim Bosniaks living on one side, and Croats on the other. I stayed on the Muslim side, in the home of a university professor named Omer Lakiše who’d converted his house into a small backpacker hostel to make ends meet. Bullet-riddled and destroyed buildings still lined the streets of the town. Stari Most, the arched stone bridge that had connected both banks the river for over 400 years, had been pointlessly destroyed in 1993 and was being rebuilt. Today, the bridge has been beautifully reconstructed in gleaming new limestone, but Bosnia’s government of reluctant compromise remains fragile, and not everyone is convinced that the peace negotiated in 1995 will last forever.

Former front line, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2003.

Stari Most bridge reconstruction, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2003.

At the end of my trip in 2003, still in contact with some of my fellow Ireland tourmates as I rambled through southern Europe, a scan of an Irish Times news article was shared around the email chain. “Three tourist buses burn in Belfast” was the headline, above a large photo of the familiar shamrock buses, blackened and charred. They had been left parked overnight on the wrong Belfast street. At the time, I’d been led to believe this bus burning had just occurred, but I’ve since discovered that the incident actually happened in 2000 — three years before my trip. In 2008, however, another Paddywagon bus parked outside a hostel in Belfast was also burned. So, had my seemingly paranoid shamrock-fearing bus driver been vindicated? It seems so.

But I’ve belatedly come to learn about Cathal O'Connell, the very determined man who founded Paddywagon Tours in 1996. At the time, many others questioned whether focusing on younger tourists would be a wise strategy. Described by Forbes magazine as possessing a “public-opinion-be-damned” attitude, O’Connell dismissed the naysayers. “They’re just sorry they didn’t come up with the idea,” he said.

O’Connell went all in on his leprechaun buses, and found himself on the ground floor of Ireland’s resurgent tourist trade. His business has grown steadily since 1996. But in a 2018 interview, O’Connell admitted that the path was not always easy. “In the early days going up the north was a bit of a challenge with the leprechaun and the green bus,” he said. “It didn't represent both sides of the community and I paid dearly — I had four buses torched up there, so I then decided to paint two of them orange.”

But O’Connell also suggested he deserves “a certain amount of credit” for helping to kickstart tourism in Northern Ireland. “When I started off nobody would go across the border, and they were scared. And there was no one at the Giant's Causeway, and there was no one in Belfast. You can't get a room in Belfast today.”

In the long run, O’Connell’s risk-taking seems to have paid off: by 2017 his company had a fleet of 170 buses and was earning €1.1 million in annual profits. The tourists kept coming after the pandemic, and the Troubles continue to fall further into the distance. Ominous predictions of a Brexit-triggered relapse into violence failed to materialize.

In 2022, when war suddenly returned to Europe after a two-decade hiatus, O’Connell was in the news again. He accompanied five of his company’s buses on a 5,000 km round trip to Poland, delivered aid destined for the front line, and brought over 100 Ukrainian refugees to Ireland where the government had implemented temporary measures to accommodate them in the early chaotic days of that war.

Whether any of us will live long enough to enjoy a safe bus or taxi tour of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict zone is an open question. At the moment, it seems just as likely that the rest of the world will be drawn into the war, one that has been justified in Russia by an opportune and convoluted reading of historical events that date back over 1,000 years. Once again, history has refused to remain in the past. But, that doesn’t mean we are all doomed to repeat our worst mistakes.

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