A couple of weeks ago I made a surprising discovery: there are now bars in Belfast city centre which I have not been in. Not because I am scared to go into them, or otherwise disinclined, but simply because there are too many of them to get round.
In any other city of a comparable size, I realise, this would hardly be a startling claim. The bombing campaigns of the 1970s, however, meant that scarcely a week passed without another bar closing or being obliterated. Belfast, I reckon, came out of that most damaging decade of our Troubles with something under half the bars, clubs and hotels it went in with.
The revival, until recent times, was slow and uneven. Well into the 1980s, I remember standing in the Crown Bar in a group of writers which included Martin Amis (sorry, on the edge of a group of writers which included Martin Amis), who had just finished a reading in a nearby arts centre. The conversation turned at one stage to the Crown's magnificent stained glass windows, and how on earth they had survived the repeated bomb attacks on the Europa Hotel immediately across the road.
Later that night, Robinson's bar, adjoining the Crown, and like the Crown dating from the turn of the century, was gutted by an incendiary device, planted perhaps, at the very time when we were in the Crown talking about bomb-blasts past. Robinson's was in time rebuilt and has again become one of Belfast's most popular bars, or rather bar complexes, ranging over three floors. Indeed, one recent addition to the city's nightlife is its refurbished basement bar, named for the city centre's postcode, BT1. BT1 is relatively rare among the new generation of Belfast bars in the adventurousness of its design. (A few years back we had a spate of retro "spirit grocers", and "general merchants". The theme here seemed to be an uncontentious past, when Guinness was good for you and a pound of sugar was a pound of sugar in anybody's language.)
BT1 also features Belfast's first unisex toilets, a ploy perhaps to shame Belfast men into doing more than running a bit of cold water over three fingers of their right hand when they have finished peeing. I like BT1 a lot. It had been in my mind to devote an entire article to the bar. And then, at the end of last month, I received an invitation to the opening of another bar, in Donegall Street, on the northern side of the city centre. Originally laid out at the turn of the 18th century, Donegall Street was badly mauled by the bombers. In March 1972 seven people died in an explosion outside the offices of the News Letter, one of two Belfast morning papers then based on the street.
There were, furthermore, several sectarian murders in the surrounding streets. Some scars take longer to fade than others. For years, this part of town gave me the creeps. Donegall Street, however, is also home to Belfast's Church of Ireland cathedral and is set to become the main thoroughfare in a proposed "Cathedral Quarter", a mix of affordable apartments, artists' studios, cafes and shops, intended to emulate Dublin's Temple Bar. So, the arrival of any new bar on the street would be significant. It is arguable though that there will not, for a good many years, be a more important newcomer anywhere in the city than the bar which was officially opened on the last Saturday night in February.
Nor one with a more unlikely name. The John Hewitt is named for one of Belfast's most highly regarded poets, who died, aged 79, in 1987. According to Edna Longley, Professor of English at Queen's University Belfast, Hewitt's "cross-sectarian ideal of Regionalism" was the well-spring for the upsurge in cultural activity in post-war Belfast and had a profound influence on the generation of poets which emerged in the 1960s, among them Edna Longley's own husband, Michael. Michael Longley, who along with four other of the city's leading poets read Hewitt's verse at the opening and who, with Hewitt's niece, unveiled a commemorative plaque, remembered what it was like going out for a drink with Hewitt: the elderly poet would always order a half of Bass to Michael's pint and if Michael were to suggest a second drink, would ask rather sternly if it wasn't time they were going. Naming a bar after John Hewitt, joked Longley, was a little like naming a massage parlour after Mother Theresa. In fact, despite talk of locating a Writers' Square close to the bar, Hewitt's reputation as a poet only partly explains the choice of the name. Just as important is that "cross-sectarian ideal" Edna Longley refers to.
John Hewitt was a socialist, whose politics probably prevented him being appointed Director of the Ulster Museum, where he was for many years keeper of the fine art collection. Protestant by birth, he was a direct political descendant of the Belfast Presbyterians who, at the end of the 18th century, were the prime movers in the founding of the Society of United Irishmen. He represented a strand of radical humanism that was squeezed from both sides by the extremism which fuelled three decades of violence. Squeezed but never completely crushed. Next door to the bar that bears his name is the Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, opened by Hewitt on May Day 1985. It is the BURC which owns and manages the John Hewitt bar. To my knowledge, this is a unique venture for an organisation such as the BURC. The brainchild of the Resource Centre's Sean Macken, the bar has been six years in the planning. After overheads have been met, all profits from the John Hewitt will be directed towards projects to help the disadvantaged and unemployed.
This is reason enough to go there, but on the bar's opening night, Sean Macken spoke passionately about his desire to see created in the city centre an environment where people could go not to avoid talking politics, but to talk politics, art, whatever else they felt like - free from fear.
For the sad truth is that, down the years, bars and clubs have repeatedly been targeted by terrorists. Often the mere choice of where you spend your nights out is taken as an indication of your religious or political beliefs. Only the week before the John Hewitt opened, two teenagers were picked up as they left a nightclub in the Co Armagh town of Tandragee and were brutally murdered in an incident thought to have been connected to a loyalist feud. (A feud, which police insist, neither of the teenagers had any part in.) A society that cannot provide its citizens with opportunities to socialise in safety is unlikely to remain healthy for long.
On the last Saturday night in February, I was reminded how noble a thing is a public house. Fond as I am of BT1 - beautiful and all as the Crown is - I think the John Hewitt could be the finest public house I have ever been in.