Notes on Northern Ireland (June 15-18, 2026)
On this island, but not in this country.
June 15 (Monday). Aberystwyth to Birkenhead. The first 100+ miles of my journey proceeded through Machynlleth, passed Cadair Idris and Rhug Farm (where I bought a wonderful sausage and Bramley apple roll for lunch), and, then, diagonally up through Wales towards Cheshire, England, and a notable outlet mall in that area. I’m not a shopper; I buy only what I need. If I see something that fits the bill in the first shop I come to (as happened today), I buy it. I don’t visit all similar types of shop in the vicinity to compare prices and merchandise. Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Come on Eileen’ (1982) was piped onto the walkways through speakers on the shop walls.
I took sustenance at another mall, somewhere else close by. Burgers had shrunken alarmingly at this food outlet. But not the prices, of course. The ‘restaurant’ was forlorn and almost empty. Delivery persons – who seem to represent its principal customers these days — arrived, waited, and departed. The experience was a far cry from Wimpy bars in the 1970s. There and then you were served by uniformed waitresses. And with no takeaway option.
8.00 pm: I waited in line at the quayside to board the ferry at Birkenhead, looked through the fence across the Mersey towards the Royal Liver Building, and marvelled at all the great music that had come out of Liverpool in the 1960s. 10.00 pm: The ferry turned on its axis, and began the journey towards Belfast. The engine’s vibrations set-off several car alarms on the upper-hold. (Would I sleep tonight?, I wondered.) Inside the ship, there’s a ‘Trucker’s Lounge’ to be assiduously avoided. Drivers are burly and very territorial, I’m told. Before me lay an 8-hour journey across the north Irish Sea. ‘Calm sea and prosperous voyage’.
June 16 (Tuesday). Birkenhead to Larne. 5.30 am. I was woken by a dragging of chains, the clanking of metal, and the sunrise projecting the shadow of the deck’s stairs onto the frosted glass of my cabin door. 6.15 am: Bags repacked, car reloaded, I left the ship’s hold and headed down the clanky ramp and out onto the streets of Larne, Northern Ireland. Destination: the Giant’s Causeway, and the north coast of County Antrim. However, I consider that I’ve only properly arrived at a place when I hear the local accent and engage someone in conversation.
I passed road signs pointing to places, the names of which were familiar from TV news reports during the so-called Troubles in the 1970s and 80: Antrim, Armagh, Coleraine, Newry, and Warrenpoint, among others. Places where there’d been bombs, murders, arrests, shootings, and disappearances. The landscape looked not unlike the agricultural belt of West Wales … but permeated, still, with the memories of shady politics, infractions, confrontations, treachery, executions, and, finally, peace and agreement.
8.00 am: Arrived. It would be another hour before the National Trust opened its gate to the causeway, so I headed to Bushmills close-by for a small, full-Irish breakfast and hot chocolate. They don’t stint on marshmallows in these parts. 8.45 am: I was among the first to arrive at the Welcome Centre.
The weather was anti-photographic — casting a flat, grey, low-contrast light over the landscape. The basalt columns are smaller than I’d anticipated, but no less fascinating. The photographs I’d seen, were taken in dramatic chiaroscuro, and gave no sense of scale. The Staffa examples of the same type of formation are far superior. By 10.00 am, hoards of tourists had arrived. They looked like ants crawling over sugar granules. It’s an immensely popular attraction. Which made me wonder why the exhibition area in the Welcome Centre was so tired, unfocussed, and unable to give a specific account of the geological structures.
From there to the Dark Hedges. (As seen in the Game of Thrones (which I’ve never watched).) It’s an 18th century avenue of beech trees planted by the Stuarts. (I prefer the Dark Mile in Scotland, for mood.) There were too many tourists here today — posing in pairs and families, framed by the trees’ arched-clasp, and with their phones perched precariously on the floor, pointing upwards. A solitary encounter with this area would yield a more meaningful experience.
Thereafter, I travelled to see old friends from Aberystwyth who’ve been living in Northern Ireland for the past 20 years. Times remembered. They are both in their 80s. Would this prove to be our last farewell? Due to health problems, they rarely return to the mainland. From there to Belfast, where I’d be staying for the next two days.
June 17 (Wednesday). Belfast. 9.30 am: The beginning of a day of immersive Northern-Irish history, beginning at 10.30 am with a walking tour that lasted over two and a half hours. Our guide had studied History and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. Personable, funny, and on top of his subject – he had what it takes to hold a crowd. While we didn’t travel far, geographically, we were taken many miles down, historically. Throughout the morning, the group toured the sites of IRA bombs, and were given a distilled and an enlightening account of the history of the Troubles, as well as thumbnail sketches of villains and victims, offset by advice about which city pubs offered the best-tasting Guinness.
On route, I passed a non-sectarian memorial to some of the victims of the ‘Troubles’. The work, made by Robert Ballagh, is titled Forgotten: the 1,500 Victims Memorial. The terracotta mosaic comprises tiles, each contributing to a number between 1 to 1,500. I warmed to it, not only because it individuated the victims (a preoccupation of my own, presently), but also because the memorial was as visible as it was ignorable. Discrete and discreet.
The return to my hotel took in the splendid Crown Liquor Saloon. The building dates back to the 1880s. (But, then again, so does my house.) It’s worth visiting just to see the original fittings. The saloon, that is.
3.00 am: More of the same, but through a different pair of eyes. The guide drove me in a black cab through those parts of the city where the Troubles had begun and IRA operations had been organised: the Divis Flats (long demolished), the Shankill Road, the incongruously named Bombay Street, and the Crumlin Road Gaol. We passed in-and-out of still gated Catholic and Protestant areas that were, to the outsider, indistinguishable from one another, save for the murals painted on the pine ends of houses – honouring the ‘noble’ dead on either side of the argument.
There were many other taxis and their driver-guides parked along the roadsides, bearing witness to the awfulness that had once characterised these otherwise benign council-house estates. Faded flags of allegiance still flew from many windows. Here, the Union Jack signifies not right-wing, white suprematist English nationalism (as it often does on the mainland these days) but, rather, historic loyalty to the Crown and Union. This was certainly not a Troubles theme park. The area still felt dangerous, and at odds with itself. The many extant walls that divide the two religious communities were a blunt reminder.
18 June (Thursday). Belfast to Sligo. 9.30 am: I left the hotel — conscious that there were many other places I’d have liked to visit in Belfast — and travelled to the border of the Republic of Ireland. My last port of call in Northern Ireland was Enniskillen. Part of me has been actively seeking out communities that had suffered appalling tragedies during the Troubles. I wanted to discover how these events had been memorialised, and how survivors and the subsequent generation continued to acknowledge the past while, at the same time, looked to the future, optimistically. As at Aberfan, the locals cannot simply ‘move on’.
I paid my respects at the town’s cenotaph where, on Remembrance Sunday, November 8, 1987 (on the site where The Clinton Centre is now situated), an IRA bomb killed 12 people and injured 63 others. I remember the BBC TV footage vividly, and the father who’d lost his daughter but had a heart to forgive her murderers. The atrocity was a turning point in the history of the Troubles, and the beginning of a transition from violence to political dialogue that concluded in the Good Friday Agreement.
At the local museum there was a collection of William Scott’s paintings, among the work of several other artists of quality from Northern Ireland, whose names were unknown to me. Perhaps their reputations have never extended beyond the island. (Nothing wrong with that.) Scott was a figurative-abstract and proto-minimalist artist in my books. A master of understatement. On, then, to Sligo in the Republic of Ireland.
Notes on the Republic of Ireland I (June 18-28, 2026)
Notes on the Republic of Ireland II (June 29-July 2, 2016)
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice