It was a sunny Saturday morning, warm for early spring, and the city was bustling with life. Families pushing strollers. Earnest cyclers on the back of their bikes. Smiling couples walking together, stride for stride, perhaps heading into the center of the city for some shopping and a bit of brunch.
But as we cruised along in his black taxi, Mark Neil remembered a different time—when these same streets were a war zone. And it wasn’t so long ago. Bombings and shootings were an everyday, routine occurrence. “Downtown was a neutral zone. But just to get here, you might be searched 20, even 30 times,” he said, his voice steady, his searching eyes telling me that they have certainly seen many, many things.
Today, Belfast is a safe, peaceful city. The capital of Northern Ireland—which remains part of the United Kingdom—it is filled with all those things that charm visitors to the Emerald Isle, from rollicking pubs to welcoming locals. But this city of some 650,000 has, for centuries, been in the middle of a seemingly intractable struggle between Catholic and Protestant, Irish and English. I was here to learn more on a tour with Neil’s NI Black Taxi Tours.
As we rolled toward the Shankill Road, Neil unpacked the rather complicated history for me in simple terms. The city was built on industry, especially the linen trade and shipbuilding. Protestants and Catholics alike moved to Belfast, but they kept to their own. Catholics, mostly Irish, bucked against Protestant, British rule. “This conflict has been going on for 400 years,” said Neil.
In 1922, after the Irish War of Independence, most of the island became the Irish Free State, but the six northernmost counties remained under British control. The simmer became a boil during The Troubles, a sort of civil war fought from 1960s to the late 1990s. Belfast sat in the hottest part of the fire. Part of the problem was proximity. The whole city is a patchwork of Protestant and Catholic.
Neil showed me some of the “two-up, two-down” row houses that form the heart of blue-collar neighborhoods, basic dwellings that often lacked modern conveniences, but brought people together. “They created strong communities,” he said. “Nobody had nothing—but we were all close.”
A Protestant himself, Neil grew up right near the barricades that still separate the two sides. Some of his earliest memories are bloody ones. During the Troubles, he drove a black taxi on the Shankill Road. “There was no bus service, because they’d burn them and use them as barricades,” he remembered.
So black taxis were the main transportation from the city center into the hottest neighborhoods. “It was a very dangerous occupation. We had different plate numbers, so they could easily identify you as Protestant or Catholic,” he said. “You were easy prey. You never knew which journey would be your last one.”
Today, he drives tourists around in his taxi and can’t quite believe it. “If you’d told me 25 years ago I’d be driving around and giving tours of these areas, I would’ve laughed at you,” he said, with a slightly woeful smile. Just north of downtown, two main streets—the Falls Road, and the Shankill Road—curve in toward each other. The former was packed with Catholics, the latter with Protestants. It was a tinderbox that combusted during the Troubles.
As he steered us onto the Falls Road, Neil explained that about two-thirds of those killed during those three decades of conflict were slain within a five-mile radius of here. The walls here on the Catholic side remain colorful, still splashed with big murals. Some relive major events such as the burning of Bombay Street in 1969. Others air ongoing grievances. And the most famous features the smiling visage of Bobby Sands. An imprisoned IRA member, he ran for a seat in the British Parliament—and won—while incarcerated. He remains a hero to many on the Catholic side; in 1981 he was the first of a series of men who went on a hunger strike and died for the cause. While many of the murals are periodically repainted, Neil said that this famous one will always remain.
We saw Divis Tower, a 20-story residential building where the British Army set up a two-floor observation post. Nearby, in 1980, a “peace wall” was constructed to separate the Falls and the Shankill. “It just kept getting higher and higher” over the years, remembered Neil. It remains today, graffiti scrawled on both sides on the reinforced concrete. Also on both sides, fenced cages enclose gardens to protect from debris that’s sometimes still hurled over the top. “We call that a Belfast conservatory,” Neil said.
The Troubles were formally resolved with the Good Friday Agreement, signed on April 10, 1998. While the six counties would remain a part of the United Kingdom, the accord brought about greater power-sharing and self-governance to Northern Ireland. The hostilities have ended, but tensions remain. With so many murdered—fathers, sisters, uncles, friends—the loss lingers, mingled with residual anger. “Some people are still raw, embittered,” said Neil.
And the barricades persist, the entrances in the wall still closed and locked every night. Paramilitary groups also remain, just without a significant following from the general public. I asked if he hopeful that, someday, this will all be over. Neil said yes. “Extremists still exist on both sides,” he said. But the majority want peace and prosperity. “I hope that people don’t want their kids to experience what we did.”
