At Easter I was drinking in the famous Crown Bar, a popular tourist spot in Belfast city centre. Waiting for my drinks, I got chatting to the guy next to me, who like most of the people in the bar, was not a local. He was from Tralee, in the south-west of Ireland. Despite being the wrong side of forty, it was his first visit to our country's second city. He commented, as most first-timers do, on the freindliness of the people and on how much he was enjoying his visit.
I've always been surprised at how positive tourists are about Belfast. I don't think this is because my hometown is so wonderful, but rather because it is the beneficiary of very low expectations. Visitors to Belfast may expect to find a broken city full of the wreckage of conflict, a sort of Baghdad with Guinness if you will. When they see that Belfast isn't so bad after all, they say it's wonderful. After all, if you're expecting a kick in the balls, a slap in the face isn't so bad.
I don't love my hometown and neither do I hate it. Perhaps the most salient fact is that I no longer live there. Yes, Belfast in particular and Northern Ireland (NI) in general have their problems: unemployment, sectarianism, paramilitarism and general small-mindedness. But, as visitors soon discover, there are also a lot of good things about NI too.
The people are friendly, especially to tourists. Compared to British cities of a similar size, Belfast has a low crime rate. The city has less of a problem with homelessness and drug abuse than Dublin. Most of all, NI impresses one with its determined "normality", maintained through the maelstrom of the Troubles.
People in NI are sometimes guilty of exaggeration, making out that the Troubles were on a par with the wars in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia. Things were never that bad in NI, but they weren't that great either. 3 800 deaths and thousands of injured is a hell of a lot for a place of less than 2 million people to deal with. At times, especially in the early 1970s, NI stood right on the brink of a truly horrible civil war.
Yet through it all, children went to school, adults went to work and the post got delivered. People walked their dogs in the park, played the pools and got pissed in the pub on Friday night. In an abnormal situation, normal life went on defiantly. This in itself was a striking achievemnet, demonstrating the innate toughness of NI society and its people.
One need only look at the hysteria generated by a few bombs in England to see that not every western European society could have endured what NI endured. Such stoicism would be admirable, were it not for the fact that the same society which endured the suffeing so well was, of course, the one which was inflicting it in the first place.
But there is something admirable about the fact that people in NI are not so tough that they can't be shocked by violence. Terrible things were done in the past, but the population was never fully de-sensitised to violence. In NI when an old person is beaten and robbed, as sometimes happens, there is genuine outrage. It is the lead story on the local news and sometimes a collection is organised to help the pensioner in question.
It's great that, in spite of the toughness engendered by the Trouble, there is still a capacity in NI for outrage at the kind of savage and idiotic attacks on the most vulnerable members of society which are all too common in cities across the world.
Tough, but not too tough: my wee Ulster.