Northern Ireland - how do you perceive it?

[TheBelleOfBelfastCity]

Genuinely just curious. I was born and raised in NI, opinions on MN seem to vary wildly from no go zone to friendly and welcoming. Trying to got a sense of what the most common thoughts are.

Have you visited? Maybe even thought about doing so? What was your opinion?

I’ve been to Belfast many times & always felt welcome and enjoyed my time in the city. My husband worked in Belfast for a while so my son & I would go with him. My son was around 11-15 at the time and we had a fab time doing all the tourist stuff by ourselves. We would often be asked where we were from but people were very friendly.

Most of my great grandparents & grandparents were from NI or ROI so I enjoy the history and the link between the stories they told me growing up and the places I visited. I perceive it as a complex but beautiful country.

fantastic pubs also 👌

As an Irish person I have also been shocked by the flags in NI. I knew they existed but I think seeing them in reality and seeing the extent of them felt very intimidating

Presuming you don't feel intimidated by your own country's flag (which makes up quite a proportion of the flags put up in NI!), I presume you mean the Union Jacks or Ulster flags?.

What exactly intimidates you about seeing the flag of the actual country you're visiting?

It's part of the UK.

People in the areas it's up in, put it up because they feel threatened with not being part of the UK and desperately want to stay in the UK.

Or do you mean the other random flags, like Orange Order/Palestine/Israel etc?

(Random fact; the Irish Tricolour represents the Green of Ireland, the Orange of Orangeism and white for peace. It was intended to be a representative, uniting flag. Which is pretty sad in retrospect).

The fledgling Irish government did not want a partition. It happened because the British government insisted on it.

No, it happened because the majority of people in those counties (gerry mandering is a separate thread, I don't know how much difference it would have made) did not want to become citizens of the new Irish state, and wanted to stay British citizens.
To the extent of being prepared to enter armed conflict over it.

That is why anyone would take issue with that poster coming on this thread and shouting about "the Brits" taking the 6 counties from us".

It's nonsense.

The "Brits" would probably have been quite happy to wash their hands of the island entirely.
That became a million times more the case when the Troubles began and it became a colossal financial drain and their soldiers were being killed on a daily basis.

But I'm accused to taking part in a bun fight, just be pointing out the fallacies of that posters very extreme (and totally inaccurate).opinions.

The most common misconception I encounter from people from everywhere - England, the US, Spain ... Is that NI was taken/kept by the "British" and should be "freed".

The total & utter ignorance about, and dismissal of, the millions of people whose ancestors settled here centuries ago (often before the US was colonised, before Australia was colonised etc) and who did not want ... and still do not want to be citizens of the Irish state, and desperately want to continue to be British citizens ... Is beyond frustrating.

@HazelPlayer most people from the south would interpret the union jack as meaning they aren't particularly welcome in that area. Especially when flown alongside paramilitary or paratrooper flags. Justifiably.

Moving to NI has also changed my feelings around the tricolour. Irish me and my Irish named daughter may be welcomed and safe where it's flown but my friends may not be and so while they don't make me feel nervous I don't feel at ease either. My home town in Dublin flies a large tricolour at the end of the pier and while I used to barely notice it and feel vaguely positive towards it, these days I don't like to see it at all, even though I know an official tricolour in Dublin is a very different thing to one on a lamppost in Belfast.

The flags aren't just flown to celebrate an identity, they're flown to intimidate others and it's disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

I had a particularly nasty experience during the flags protests that only cemented my feelings.

That’s a bit disingenuous, @HazelPlayer. Can’t you imagine any reason why an Irish person with an accent from the opposite end of the island might have legitimate reason to feel intimidated by an area making its sectarian affiliation very plain? I’ve certainly had dog’s abuse in such areas in the past. But the last time I was in NI was a couple of days before the Omagh bomb.

most people from the south would interpret the union jack as meaning they aren't particularly welcome in that area. Especially when flown alongside paramilitary or paratrooper flags. Justifiably.

Yes, that's understandable.

But it's important to remember that people vary hugely within communicaties in NI, just like they do everywhere.

There are unionists who are not knuckle daggers.

If people within a community would be aggressive or unpleasant towards visitors from Ireland or perpetrate criminal acts on people visiting from Ireland, for example,; then they are the worst type of stupid, ignorant, rough, aggressive, criminal people within a society.... And they'd be like that in any society. No matter what their Identity was.

No-one decent, unionist or not, would ever be nasty to someone from Ireland, just cause they're from Ireland.

The other important thing to remember is that extreme nationalist or unionist areas are only one small part of the country. There are the extreme areas. There are rough areas in England, there are areas dominated by particular ethnicities and cultures. Are people from other counties supposed to judge the entire country on them? Are they supposed to complain about them online (that would actually probably attract accusations of racism)?

It's not if it's just union jacks.

I understand it if it's paramilitary flags.

But while we're on the subject...how do you think I feel, as a protestant, when I (in my own country) go through areas bedecked with tricolours and republican paramilitary flags???

I’ve certainly had dog’s abuse in such areas in the past

And?

My uncle, as a young boy, was trapped under an overturned supermarket trolley and PISSED on by boys for being a "Prod' ....before all the protestants moved out of the main residential areas of Derry/Londonderry, for their own safety.

He said he went home and asked his parents what a Prod was and why it was so bad.

As I outlined early on in this thread, I've been called a Prod and a Hun in Derry more times than I can remember, simply for existing and having a "protestant" name, while trying to be being friendly & sociable to everyone.

As Jane Doe said upthread, it's apparently doesn't qualify as sectarianism, when it's against protestants.

I imagine you’re not distinguishable by your accent, though. Mine made me stand out as ‘not from around here’ in NI, and back in the ‘checkpoints all over’ days, my name couldn’t have been more obviously Catholic if I’d been called Catholic McSouthernCatholic. Ironically, or not so ironically, I was most often in NI visiting a friend who used to come and stay with DH and I in Oxford to avoid the height of the marching season. She left for England, and her parents for Dublin, which is why I have been in so long. I’d like to go back to NI.

I’d been called Catholic McSouthernCatholic

Lol.

Is it Sorcha O'Mahoney?

I imagine you’re not distinguishable by your accent, though

To the contrary, the time I was questioned by the young man in a pub in Derry and then pointed at from above while shouting "she"s a Hun, we have a Hun here!" was because of my accent.

He said "you're not from Derry". I said"I am". He then asked where, I then answered him saying a small (mostly unionist) village on the edge of Derry, he then started shouting about me being a "Hun".

Also, if you had any real convo with someone they'd ask your name and that is usually identifying.

Every country has bigots. I don't know why it's necessary to spend pages and pages focusing on NI's when there is so much else worth talking about. Jenny from Essex isn't likely to accidentally end up walking around Ardoyne wearing her Union Jack dress is she.

I don't particularly care which flag is flown in truth @HazelPlayer . The correlation between flegs on lampposts and knuckle draggers (in your words) is so high it's practically 1.

This! The first few pages were so positive, now it’s the usual debates..

That's incredibly simplistic.

Loads of decent people live in areas with flags flown.

Do you think they go around every door with a nice little survey and politely ask if they agree to flags being put up in their area.

The only way you definitively know that someone, personally, wants a flag up, is when they install a flag pole on their own house, and put one (or more) up. (Which you do see).

Anyway, if it's only knuckle draggers, then it's knuckle draggers on both sides of the conflict.

Interesting how MN posters oy ever seen to comment on unionist flags.

You started the debate around sectarianism.by stating that young people in NI now don't care about religion or community ..... I answered, as did several others, that that was not my experience, at all.

Also, if a poster comes on and states that the "Brits" stole the 6 counties from them, and conveniently "forgets" that millions of people in the region did not want to become citizens of the then new Irish state, and still don't, you can't seriously expect everyone to just leave it standing.

Loads of decent people live in areas with flags flown.

And often their wish to not have flags flown in their area or outside their houses are met with intimidation and aggression.

I would imagine they rarely express such a wish.

For obvious reasons.

But anyway, it's important to acknowledge that that would be in both unionist and nationalist/republican communities.

I'm from Glasgow and have a lot of NI family, as is fairly common here.

Family live near Larne, so spent a lot of time there in the late 90s/early 00s on holiday.

Recently visited Belfast for a work conference for the first time in about 15 years and was SUPER impressed: town centre looks amazing and lots of cool shops and restaurants etc.

I'm very fond of the place and I think it's a shame that people allow their preconceptions to put them off visiting, especially Belfast (which IMO is much better and considerably more affordable than Dublin!).

I loved Belfast and found the various museums really interesting (and sobering). To be fair I'm English and 40 - things like the attempted assassination in 1991 happened when I was only 7 and I don't remember much news before the Good Friday Agreement.

It's not just the big Belfast grammars that are mixed. I went to a rural one over 40 years ago and it had a decent mix even then.

I think it's more of a thing in the controlled sector rather than CCMS schools.

I have no issues with people living in areas that fly flags of any variety. I have great sympathy for most of them as they're frequently stuck in economic traps and don't actually want the flag on the lamppost outside their house but they don't have a choice in the matter.

I have little time for anyone who chooses to fly the flags or thinks they're in any way benign. We both know they aren't.

I avoid areas with flags flying because of the higher likelihood of coming across the kind of lowlife I prefer to avoid, and because I'm privileged enough to be able to avoid said areas.

My dad is from NI, so we visited most years in the 80s. My family all lived in very quiet suburban areas- certainly no flags or murals or anything, apart from the accents you wouldn’t have known you weren’t in England. And they very much distanced themselves from the Troubles. It wasn’t talked about all that much, and if it was someone would quickly say “aye, well, what can ye do” and change the subject. Obviously we were very aware of the heavy security at the airports, but we were never taken into Belfast centre so didn’t see roadblocks or anything.

I dislike all the flags equally. I think they are so tacky. Thankfully putting flags out on people's houses seems to have reduced quite significantly. There's not a single one where I live any more.

I just think they're a bit like a dog marking its territory!