It’s now my third day in Ireland, and there’s a lot to reflect on about the places we’ve visited. This start of the Ireland section of the Haller Global Fellowship Program is focused on exploring Irish culture before we fully begin our consulting project in Carrigart. So, I wanted to look back on three of the tourist destinations we’ve already seen and how their stories are expanded upon by the people who tell them and their relations to the community.

Going chronologically, we first went to two of the Peace Walls of Belfast on the 28th. I don’t want to step on the toes of my previous post too much, so you can go read that one for more context on my feelings about the walls if you want. The International Wall tells a story about both the past and present by drawing comparisons between the events of the Troubles and current events that the Catholic/Republican community of Belfast feels are similar. The Cupar Way Peace Wall similarly tells a story with two facets, with one side being covered in messages of peace and another being a stark reminder of lingering tensions. We actually wouldn’t’ve seen the other side of this wall if we had gone on one of the standard “Black Taxi” tours of Belfast. In this way, our own guide showed us a more complete look at the history of this Peace Wall than is typically given to tourists. The fact that this is commonly omitted was strange to me initially, but made sense when I thought about it. The average tourist does not want to be challenged by the presence of political unrest and division; they want to see a Peace Wall, something obsolete that now represents the opposite of what it had been built for, despite the original purpose of the walls still very much remaining. 

On the other hand, on the 29th we went to the Giant’s Causeway, a fully natural landmark despite the sculpted appearance of its iconic hexagonal basalt columns. In a way, the Causeway also has two stories: the scientific background of how the columns came to be, and the ancient Gaelic myth that Erin told us about how the old people of Ireland believed the Causeway was created and where it gets its name. On the science side of things, the columns formed in the way they did due to heavy volcanic activity back when much of Europe was still a large connected plateau. When the tectonic plates shifted, much of the columns broke away, but left behind the columns in Northern Ireland and some parts of Scotland. This led to the formation of the myth that the columns were the result of a mythological Gaelic hero giant named Fionn mac Cumhaill(often called Finn McCool) building the Causeway by throwing great stones over to Scotland, where another giant named Benandonner had challenged him to a fight. However, once Finn sees that Benandonner is much larger than him, he runs back to Ireland and is disguised as a child in the basket by his wife, Sadhbh(or Una). Benandonner sees the size of the supposed baby and realizes that if this is the size of Finn’s child, Finn himself must be much larger than he is, so he runs away and destroys the Causeway behind him, leaving behind the remnants in both Ireland and Scotland. This myth is an interesting way that a natural phenomenon can build a community around it, with ancient peoples creating stories to explain what we can only now understand. Hearing this story made me feel more connected to Irish culture, as I was already amazed by the sight.

In the afternoon of the 29th of July we stopped in Derry, another city in Northern Ireland but one incredibly different from Belfast. Derry has a similarly rich history that is deeply intertwined with the Troubles, but only one Peace Wall remains: a thin wall with a high green fence separating the essentially exclusively Loyalist Fountain Estate area from the rest of Derry, which is incredibly Republican. Similarly, the area across the Derry Peace Bridge is known as a Loyalist area, but the reasons why differ based on who you ask: Protestants will say they were driven out by the Catholic majority and forced to cross the river, while Catholics maintain that the Protestants’ exodus was of their own accord due to not wanting to be near the Catholics. So, the bridge is much more representative of peace than the walls are to me, as it serves to connect the two communities rather than separate them. 

Obviously, the difference between the Giant’s Causeway and the cities is clear. The Causeway has no political baggage; it offers natural beauty and a look into old Irish culture from before the ages-long conflict for Ireland. The curators of this area work to preserve its natural state while allowing people to partake of it. The walls are, in a way, unnatural, representing a great divide between people where there should be unity. For this reason, those who typically present landmarks such as these focus on what has changed, rather than what has stayed the same. Walls for separating communities are now called Peace Walls, covered in messages of hope for the future, when in an ideal future, the walls will be taken down. Still, I feel these are places worth seeing. The stories they tell by themselves and how they are changed by the communities around them into something unique make them incredibly special, and I’m glad to have had the pleasure of seeing them.