I got back late on Friday night from Belfast, where I missed the eclipse. At half nine in the morning the clouds had cleared and we were all staring at the sun and joking with strangers about how they’d said on the radio you weren’t supposed to do that. Then I went into the hairdresser’s and was told “just put your wee head back into the wee basin” and it must have all happened while I had my eyes closed wondering if the purple spots would go away and what it would take to stop northerners saying “wee” all the time. “Just put your wee pin number in there.” “Would you like a wee bag?” Once I was even asked on turning up for an appointment: “What’s your wee name?” It stops at the border.
I live about two hours south of Belfast, half an hour beyond the beautiful suspension bridge over the Boyne which is lit up at night in blues and purples and looks like a glamorous grasshopper with flashing red eyes. When I used to drive home after reporting on political murders I’d feel guilty about how glad I was to escape across the border to the Republic, where people didn’t even talk about the Troubles.
Then the southern property bubble burst, and the economy collapsed. The north had peace and peace money to shore it up. For a while Belfast seemed almost normal compared with Dublin, where people were wild-eyed with worry, and had to learn a whole ugly new vocabulary: negative equity, subordinated bondholders, toxic assets, the troika. Austerity.
Now everyone in the north is preoccupied with cuts. There’s a major ongoing row over what the DUP and Sinn Fein agreed over welfare cuts, but in the meantime, other ministers in the Stormont executive are scything away. Cuts to services, cuts to hospitals, cuts to home helps, cuts to special needs assistants for schools. Cuts to development groups that hold together communities still traumatised by the years of conflict, cuts to the artists and creative workers who have boldly encouraged the imaginative transformation from war to peace.
I produced a documentary last year (made by Fine Point Films) about the late great trade unionist Inez McCormack. At a discussion following a showing of the film in Belfast, Patricia McKeown, who would the next day lead a strike by her big public service union, Unison, spoke with passionate anger about what was being done, despite the promises of equality and fairness in the Good Friday Agreement.
“The politicians have betrayed us,” she said.
Where dreams are dashed
Our house is beside the sea and looks north to the mountains of Mourne. Many years ago there was a holiday camp here, and Horslips and Thin Lizzy and the Miami Showband came to play.
A few miles up the coast, the old Butlin’s camp is now a “direct provision” centre where African asylum seekers wait out long years in chalets for their applications for refugee status to be assessed. The state pays them the equivalent of less than £15 a week. They aren’t allowed to work.
A Kenyan friend and her husband got their status a couple of years ago and found jobs and a house to rent. They have just been made homeless because the Irish landlord went bankrupt and his house is being repossessed by the bank.
Dulux dogs and Celtic Tigers
I watch from my window as the lobster boatman hauls in his pots, then take the dog for a walk on the beach in the spring sunshine. She is all the colours of Atlantic clouds, and people say she is “a Dulux”. A man leans down to his little boy: “Say dayday to the wawa,” he instructs. The child frowns.
I see a man I know who used to run a business. He used to say it was impossible to tire out his Irish setter. He lost his job and now the dog looks exhausted and the man looks like he is on antidepressants as they walk and walk. Not everyone went bust – a gigantic new house has just been built where the old hotel used to be.
A throwback to the Celtic Tiger style, it looks like a car showroom. But I think it will be better than living next door to Shag’s Niteclub.
Susan McKay is a journalist and author. Her books include Bear in Mind These Dead (Faber)
