New years - Shankill Rd Belfast

You have probably been wondering what I have been up to and where I have been. Well I went to Belfast over the new years period. My friend Melissa from QLD and I jumped on a expressway bus and headed for Belfast city. 2.5 hours later we were walking the streets of Belfast. It was about 10pm. At first I felt the tension in the air. The street shops where closed and had roller doors down and most with barbed wire fences. Each street corner has police cameras watching your every move. The more cameras in one confined space the more dangerous the corner was. Being Irelands second largest city and quite frankly much more modern in architecture then Dublin, Belfast was to me a little scary.


When you here about this city, you tend to conjure the words IRA and voilence. Infact Belfast in the mid 1970 was one of the worlds most notorious cities. Rebels would bomb shops and hotels. The first place I retrieved some money (pounds) was at Europa Hotel. The Europa hotel is the most bombed hotel in the world, over 40 times. The Grand Opera House next door, which suffered heavy damage from the IRA bombing in 1991 and 1993, due to it's proximity to the Europa. The hotel is very modern perhaps because it had needed rebuild so many times.


We walked to our hostel from there and I saw black taxis. They stop and ask if we need a lift. We settled in and went out for a few drinks with the people that work at the hostel. Melissa works at the hostel I live in so we were welcome. The music at this bar/club was all dance and 90s. I loved it. Oh and I could have a cigarette inside!



The next day we walked to the city which is about 20 mins from the hostel. We noticed that the city was filthy. Underground toilets where flooded and there was a lot of exposed garbage. Once in the city however it was a little different. The major attraction here is the City Hall. What a gorgeous building this was.

Across the road from City Hall is the Northern Bank. Carried out by a large, proficient group on 20 December 2004, the gang seized 26.5 million in pounds sterling, making it one of the biggest bank robberies in British history. The police and the British and Irish governments claimed the IRA was responsible. This occurred in broad daylight in the middle of the city. You can see the N sign in the picture.


We had been giving advice to visit the Castlecourt mall. This is the only major shopping centre in Belfast. The people in there where very much varied. Negros, Irish elderly and rough as guts teenage girls with excessive bling bling. Gee they need a good ‘slapping’. I spent 2 hours in T.K Maxx. This store has designer labels at 90% off. I got a pair of Lee jeans for about 40 aussie dollars. Sweet!

New Years eve!!

It is now time to party and celebrate New years. I put on my bunny ears and venture to the Palour bar. Cost us $25.00 aussie to get in. It was worth it and we danced to Dirty Dancing soundtrack, Bon Jovi, Kylie and Madonna. Belfast is a big party-hard influence.

On New years day we went to the city again and walked the streets of the city, except today it was very quiet. It was raining and we got drenched. We brought a change of clothes to party in as we didn’t want to walk all the way back to the hostel. We were heading for the gay bar. Union street bar is very hip and very gay. I loved it. We started drinking there at 5pm. Cocktail where two for one and so we were a little happy by 8pm.

Then the party really started. Transvestites started to drop in and a lot of gay men. I met some Italian gay men and they were really hot. One drag queen gave me a pink glitter cowboy hat and I was rocking all night to tunes such as ‘I need a hero’, ‘working 9 to 5’ and my favourite ‘Buttercup build me up’. We played bingo and I had a ball. On the way home we got kebabs and unfortunately as we walked out of the shop we saw a rat scream past us at one hundred kms an hour. Haha I was still able to eat though.

The Shankill and Crumlin road tour.

On Monday the 2nd we took a tour bus around the city to see what I have to describe as the most interesting part of Ireland. The rebel district.

I saw the "Peace Line", a 6 meter high steel, concrete wall separating the Shankill Rd District (Loyalist/Protestant) from the Falls Road district (Republican/Catholic). Shankill Road is a predominantly Protestant working-class area of Belfast. It stretches for approximately 1.5 miles from downtown Belfast and is mainly a shopping area. Most of the shops are closed and include fish and chips, credit unions and pizza shops.

There is one place open most of the time and that is KFC. Now that is not a place I would work ever in my life. The residents live in the many streets which branch off the main road. There is an uninviting ambience about the place. The children play with soccer balls and thrown small things at the buses. Its like Thomastown but 8 more times worse.


Along this area is the newly constructed "Solidarity Wall", a series of painted murals that express Republican sympathies from people in the South of Ireland, the Palestinians and the Kurds. I saw the red brick headquarters of Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein is the IRA political department. On this buildings wall is a famous mural of a smiling Bobby Sands, elected as MP for West Belfast, just before he died while on a hunger strike in 1981. His quote "Our revenge will be the laughter of our children." Sinn Fein is the IRA political department.



The most amazing mural is the ones with the masked men of the UVF and UDA - The Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defense Army. Ulster is the county in Northern Ireland. Similar to the state of Victoria. The UVF has committed more killings than any other loyalist paramilitary organisation. UVF was responsible for 426 killings during the 1960-1990s. 358 of its victims were civilians, 41 were loyalist paramilitaries (including 29 members of the UVF itself), 6 were British army or police and just 21 were Irish republican paramilitaries. They are a group of rebels who are so determined to keep the English in Northern Ireland they have become Loyalists. So Belfast ‘troubles’ were and are about religious torn communities trying to live in Northern Ireland (England) in peace.

I also visited the Titanic quarter. This area is where the Titanic was built in 1911. There are two massive ship cranes that remain a national trust and will never be demolished. H W stands for Harland and Wolff. They were the biggest shipyard in England at the time. These cranes are part of the city's skyline.
Without Harland and Wolff and a shipbuilding industry, Belfast was nothing. Once ranked as the biggest shipyard in the world with more than 35,000 men on its books. The Titanic took 2 years to build. It left the city of Belfast destined for New York. We all know how the story proceeds from here.