A Legen-Derry Weekend

This weekend I headed to Northern Ireland on another trip with the International Students' Society. We visited Derry and Belfast, and although this trip wasn't as much fun as the previous two trips I've taken, I learned so much about Irish history and I'm really glad that I went.

Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe

On our way to Derry, we stopped at Lifford Country Jail, which was a jail during Medieval times. When we arrived there was a woman dressed as a guard who "arrested" all of us for different crimes. She called everyone up in groups of two or three, took our fingerprints, and told us what crime we had committed and what type of sentence we received. Two of my friends and I told her our names were Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel (she didn't catch the Friends reference), and we were fittingly arrested for causing a riot.

The slogan on this wall was modeled after the "You are Now Entering free Berkeley" slogan that protesters at Cal used during the Civil Rights movement. The paint on this wall changes throughout the year to coincide with different political movements and contemporary issues.

Bloody Sunday memorial

After the tour, we arrived in Derry, or as the Protestants who live there call it, Londonderry. Northern Ireland is considered part of the United Kingdom, but there is great division between the people who live there if it should really be so. The Catholics want Northern Ireland to be part of the Republic of Ireland, while the Protestants want Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK. So, the Catholics call Derry "Derry," and the Protestants call it "Londonderry." From the moment we crossed the border, we could see evidence of this tension because the prefix "London" had been scribbled out on many street signs. We took a walking tour of Derry and learned about Bloody Sunday, which was a massacre in 1972 when the British army killed 26 civil rights protesters. Our tour guide was Catholic and very involved in peace protests in Northern Ireland. When he was growing up, his family's house was raided and bombed on multiple occasions, and when he was seventeen, he was sent to jail for fourteen years for his involvement in the civil rights movement. I didn't know much about the conflicts in Northern Ireland before this trip, and I was so surprised to see that the divisions between the Catholics and Protestants are so prominent. I had heard about the tensions between the Catholics and Protestants before, but I thought they mostly went away when Ireland gained independence from Great Britain in 1922. As the weekend went on though, I realized that this is far from the truth.

Derry 

Derry Peace Bridge

Friday night we went on a "Legen-Derry pub crawl" to a few different pubs in downtown Derry, and then slept in one of the grossest hostels I have ever seen (there was a cat in our room when we checked in... Need I say more?) So, needless to say I was very ready to check out on Saturday morning and continue to head north.

No Irish weekend trip would be complete without a visit to a castle, so the first thing we did on Saturday morning was go to Dunluce Castle, which is on the North Antrim coast of Northern Ireland. This was one of the least well-preserved castles I've seen so far, but it was in one of my favorite locations. Dunluce Castle is right on the water, and in the 1800s, part of the castle's kitchen fell into the ocean.

After Dunluce Castle, we went to Giant's Causeway, which was my favorite part of the trip. Giant's Causeway is considered the fourth Natural Wonder of the United Kingdom, and it's easy to see why. 40,000 interlocking basalt columns that resulted from a volcanic eruption make up Giant's Causeway, and like Mizen Head, I could have spent hours there exploring and looking at the beautiful scenery. Once again, these pictures don't really capture how awesome the Giant's Causeway is, but here are some of the coolest ones I took:

The Titanic's Dry Dock is the largest dry dock ever constructed 

We got to Belfast Saturday evening, and after some free time downtown, we spent the night in Vagabonds Hostel, which was way nicer than the previous night's hostel. This hostel was clean, the people who worked there were friendly, and, best of all, it was cat-free! We had to get up bright and early again on Sunday morning to experience two of Belfast's most famous attractions: the Titanic's Dock and Pump House and a Black Taxi Tour. Seeing the dock where the Titanic was built was my second favorite part of the trip. I always knew the ship was big, but seeing where it was built made me realize how big it actually was. The coolest part was that nothing had changed about the dock since 1912 - nothing has been rebuilt, and the wooden panels the workers used to support the Titanic while they painted the bottom of it are still there. Even though the Titanic is famous for sinking, our tour guide was quick to remind us that the ship sunk in Cork and that "it was okay when it left Belfast!"



While seeing the dock was one of the highlights of the trip, going on the Black Taxi tour was one of the scariest parts. When we got into the taxi, the driver told us that we would be going into the most dangerous parts of the city and that if we wanted to change our minds and not do the tour, that was okay. First, we drove through the Protestant part of the city and got to see a series of murals painted on the sides of houses. Most of these murals commemorate battles and hunger strikes or pay tribute to the UDA (Ulster Defense Association). One of the murals had a portrait of a soldier holding a gun that looks like it follows you when you walk by. We were told we could take pictures, but I didn't take any because these murals are on the sides of people's houses. There is a preschool right next to some of them, and there were little children playing in the street. It made me so sad that these young kids have to be exposed to such violent pictures everyday, and I didn't want to take a picture because the violence there is so real. I didn't want to turn something that is actually dangerous and concerning into a tourist attraction; I didn't want to make a spectacle of these people's lives. Separating the Protestant part of Belfast from the Catholic part is a giant wall, often referred to as the Berlin Belfast Wall. It was so weird to see the Berlin Wall and the Berlin Belfast Wall just a week apart and to compare the things that they symbolize. Seeing the wall in Belfast was much different though, because it's still standing and serving as a barrier between two groups of people. When the other half of our trip was looking at the wall (we split up and went on tours in shifts), people on one side were throwing rocks onto the other side. I couldn't believe that this happened. I always thought that Ireland was such a safe country, and even though I knew there were some political problems in Northern Ireland, I had no idea how pervasive these problems were into the everyday lives of the people who live there.

Belfast City Hall

When it was finally time to get back on the bus to UCD, I couldn't have been more excited. This weekend was great, don't get me wrong, but I have no desire to ever go back to Derry or Belfast. I am grateful for the opportunity to go there and learn about everything that I did, but I much prefer the safe, friendly, atmosphere of places like Dublin and Cork.