We had heard about the “Black Cab Tours” that show the history of the “troubles” between the Protestants (Unionists) and the Catholics (Nationalists). Our hostess at the B&B booked a tour for us to pick us up at the B&B at 10am. Right on schedule, the cab arrived and was indeed a black taxi. Then off we went on a two-hour cab tour of the city.

In an effort to quell the violence that erupted in 1969 (primarily bombs going off around town, as many as 5 a day), the British Army began building a wall between the Catholic communities and the Protestant communities. Obviously that only heightened the tension and in reality exacerbated the problem. Rather than actually address the underlying issues, Britain went about trying to put bandages on the festering wounds.

We drove along the wall on both sides, went through the gates which even today close at 6pm until 6am. There are hundreds of murals painted on the sides of buildings on both sides of the wall. All of these troubles exploded into the public view at the same time as the civil rights movement in the US had proven to be a successful tactic, which didn’t go unnoticed by the Catholics who began adopting many of those tactics. Some of the murals:

Along the way we stopped at the Sinn Feín center (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_F%C3%A9in), the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. There I picked up a book titled “A Short History of The Troubles” by Brian Feeney. I’ve started reading the book. It’s well written and quite persuasive, so far. Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when the “troubles” in Northern Ireland were in the headlines, I sympathized with the Catholics but at the same time was very much at odds with what the IRA was up to. I doubt the book will change my mind much on the IRA, but it definitely has reinforced my thoughts regarding the Protestant’s oppression of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.

We had the taxi driver (he’s featured in one of the mural pictures above) drop us at St. Anne’s Cathedral in downtown Belfast, in the so-called “Grey Zone”, which is neither Catholic nor Protestant. The driver was clearly and unambiguously a Nationalist but tried very hard to be fair in his tour.

St. Anne’s Cathedral is an Anglican (Church of Ireland) cathedral. St. Anne is the mother of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The mother of Jesus is not mentioned in the conical writings (the New Testament in particular), but is mentioned in apocryphal writings, the Gospel of St. James (written about 150AD) in particular. Anne was also the name of the architect who designed the original wooden church that stood on this spot. So, that was certainly a suitable name

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The sanctuary was very impressive. There was a series of three paintings that really caught my attention:

The painting on the left is titled “Dinner at Emmaus”, the middle “The Taking of Jesus”, and the right is “The Incredulity of St. Thomas”. I particularly was taken by the middle painting:

These paintings by a Italian artist Caravagio were lost for more than 200 years before being discovered and restored a few years ago.

The cathedral also has Irelands second largest pipe organ:

From the cathedral we walked down to City Hall. This is the most elaborate City Hall I’ve ever seen. It takes up an entire block and is incredibly ornate inside and out.

We had lunch in a small coffee shop in City Hall and then took a tour of the building. Nina took lots of pictures. I didn’t. I mostly just wanted to sit down.

Shortly after we arrived in Dublin I saw a billboard advertising the “Titanic Experience” in Belfast. I looked it up and discovered that the Titanic and her sister ship the Olympic were built in the shipyard in Belfast. Further, the shipyard was bombed by the Germans during the Blitz in the early stages of WWII. At least 140 naval vessels were built in Belfast during WWII. Shipbuilding continues to this day.

So after City Hall we got on a bus (1 pound 10 pence each) to the dockyards and the Titanic Experience, a 4-story building put together to tell the story of the building of the Titanic. That tour was definitely a highlight. I’d never thought about how a ship the size of the Titanic would have been built back in the early 1900’s. The Titanic was to be the first of a whole new class of ocean liners which stressed comfort and safety and the customer experience. The company building the Titanic built it and the sister ship side by side. They would build on the sister ship first, then take what they learned and apply it to the Titanic. They employed a photographic firm to document the entire building process, another first.

Just watching how the riveting was done was mind boggling. They didn’t have the automatic tools we use today. Instead the rivet was heated white hot in a portable hearth, tossed to the setter, pounded into the pre-drilled hole, and held there while a team on the opposite side hammered the rivet flat. Each rivet took a five-man team and the best teams had, on the other side of the rivet, a right-handed and a left-handed rivet-pounder who would alternate their blows to flatten out the head of the rivet. More than 4,000,000 rivets were set that way. Incredible.

The Titanic Experience didn’t lend itself to taking pictures. It was quite dark with a lot of projected black and white images. It was also very informative. Harland and Wolff, the company which built the Titanic continued in the ship building business very successfully until the early 2000’s when they shifted from ship building (the docks weren’t big enough to handle the much larger tankers and container ships) to building wind turbines.

We took the bus back to the city center and decided to have dinner as it was about 6pm. We looked at a couple of pubs but didn’t see anything interesting on the menu. We were both tired of walking, so we went into Burger King and had dinner there followed by an ice cream cone. After a 5 pound 20 pence taxi ride, we were back to the B&B and ready to relax … and catch up on British politics.

This was a day of high drama here in Northern Ireland. Most folks over here are not Boris Johnson (the current Prime Minister) fans. The lady running the Sinn Fein store asked me if I knew who Boris Johnson was. I told her that I did. She wanted to know what I thought of him. I told her that I thought he was an “ass”. She howled with laughter and I made a friend for life, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, the British Supreme Court of 11 highly respected jurists ruled unanimously today that the Prime Minister had lied to the Queen and to the public when he suspended parliament until the 14th of October. They ruled it was illegal. The only thing on TV this evening on almost every channel is people discussing what today’s ruling means. The opinions are quite varied depending on the political position of the commenter. Even Donald Trump’s address at the UN got almost no attention today, which is very unusual.

Tomorrow we’ll drive down the coast to County Down. Should be fun!