You're Safe With a Yankee Drawl

Let me begin by stating flat-out that Belfast is not a war-torn, urban wasteland. There are bistros and McDonalds, university students and yuppies, beautiful buildings and historic landmarks. One can hear British, Irish, Australian, French, German and American accents just by wandering down University Road any Friday evening. And since the entire city sits surrounded by a ring of hills, on misty days it is magical to look out over the horizon to see these amazingly green hills fading in and out of the fog.

I've been to Belfast, and I've been to New Haven, and there's about ten million times more romance and mystery about the former. The average citizen's chance of being shot is better in New Haven. Belfast has one of the lowest O.D.C. rates in Western Europe (O.D.C. being an acronym for "ordinary, decent crime," as distinguished from political violence by the people here). Assuming you're not out on the streets draped in a Union Jack or the Irish tri-colors, or running guns for the IRA, the average American tourist is probably about as safe here as anywhere else.

Indeed, Belfast is hardly as grim and unpleasant as most Americans think. I've been over here for about a month now, working for the U.S. State Department and have had the chance to explore the city from a unique perspective.

On the one hand, I'm an outsider, an innocent abroad, so I'm somewhat removed from the deep-seated resentment between Catholics and Protestants that drives so much of the politics in Northern Ireland. On the other hand, I'm surrounded at the consulate by people who have spent years studying the politics here, so I can talk to them and get even the thorniest of questions answered. In a very real sense, I get the best of both worlds.

Which doesn't mean I really understand the politics. Trying to grasp what I read in the papers each morning is a bit like trying to solve a Rubik's cube in the dark on a ship sinking in the ocean in the middle of a storm. Trying to sort out the betrayals and the counter-betrayals and the deepseated animosities between the two groups is a task I believe to be beyond anyone lacking advanced degrees in theology, political science, sociology and counter-terrorism. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone--native or otherwise--who claims to understand politics here. To paraphrase Churchill's opinion of the USSR, "It's an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a code." I don't quite get it, but I take comfort in the fact that nobody else seems to, either.

Take, for example, the six daily local papers read by a population of just over a million people. Each paper caters to the viewpoint of one of the factions--the moderate Catholics, for example, or the extreme Protestants--and so one can immediately determine a person's political attitudes based primarily on the paper to which he or she subscribes.

Likewise, there are no fewer than eight single issue political parties distinguished from one another solely by where each stands on the question of whether Northern Ireland should remain a part of Protestant Great Britain or become a part of the Catholic Republic of Ireland.

The same goes for schools (Catholics and Protestants by and large go to segregated schools), pubs (also largely segregated) and neighborhoods (where to be a Catholic living in a Protestant area can put you in actual physical danger). The segregated Old American South, simply put, has nothing on present-day Belfast, and although there is hope that things will change in the months and years to come (especially with the implementation of the Good Friday Peace Agreement), one can hardly wipe away several centuries of animosity in the space of a mere decade.

All politics aside, however, Belfast is a pretty nifty place for the 20-something American college student (myself, for example). There are gobs of cosmopolitan student pubs at the center of town, serving up truly amazing amounts of alcohol seven days a week. There's a ten-screen megaplex just down the road offering unlimited movies all summer for the ridiculous price of $35.00. There's an internet cafe, great Indian food and the BBC broadcasting commercial-free 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Best of all, the American accent immediately renders you a neutral observer on virtually all touchy issues and questions, making it largely unnecessary to spend all your time worrying about offending anyone (I tend to spend merely a significant minority of my time worrying about that). Thus far, I've found no war-torn urban wasteland here, no sir. Just a really interesting place to spend my summer vacation. John F. Coyle '01, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. He is spending the summer working for the U.S. State Department in Northern Ireland.