Last July I moved to Belfast to work on placement at the Irish News. It broke my heart leaving my desk three months later and returning to Dublin.
Heading north was a scary experience. I had spent the previous year doing a graduate diploma in journalism at Dublin Institute of Technology in Aungier Street - a daunting undertaking at the age of 47.
To add to the complexity of it all, I am also a Dominican priest. Until last year I had spent most of my time teaching German. But the journalism thing had been in my head for a long time, and eventually I got the break and took my place at DIT with a class of 12 very fine people, all much younger than I. Sometimes I would scratch my head and say to myself: "What sort of eejit are you back at school at this stage in life?" But the bad thought went away fast and I got on with it. It was great to be studying again and travelling through Ireland on a student card.
So, here I was, middle-aged, sort of middle-class, bored by the North for the past 20 years, moving to a city I had never been in and going to the nationalist Irish News. Asked now what it was like, I just have one short sentence: It was the experience of a lifetime.
Another perspective
Sometimes I get scared by how three months changed me. It worries me to think how easily I have been influenced by another perspective. It is that simple to "manipulate" someone, or is it just me? I belong to that go-with-the-flow-generation which hasn't got passionate about anything in over 20 years. And then I went to Belfast, saw British army foot patrols and met Gerry Adams. And everything is changed.
No, I have not come back to Dublin a rabid republican. I am as opposed to violence now as I was before my trip north. But now I have had a glimpse into the lives of people who have had over 30 years of terrible turmoil.
Before I went to Belfast I had never seen a foot patrol. So, cycling to work one of my first mornings there, I was gobsmacked when I saw soldiers all dressed up in battle gear with guns at the ready. I just looked at them in disbelief and one young soldier shouted at me, "Eh, baby." I could not believe my ears. I got off the bike and told him very politely but firmly that I did not want to be addressed in such a fashion. His officer immediately came over, agreed with me that such a comment was not appropriate, and suggested I make a compliant to the RUC.
It was only a joke experience, but it did give me a feeling of something. I don't like British army foot patrols in Belfast. Nor do I like the sound or look of helicopters parked in the sky.
Every time I encountered a foot patrol I had this terrible urge to stare menacingly into the eyes of these battle-dressed soldiers. But of course they were and are just doing their job. It's the way things are in Northern Ireland. How could the likes of me ever understand the mind-set of those who have had to live in such an environment for what is now a lifetime?
Living in Clonard
Gerry Adams invited a number of journalists for a chat one afternoon and I was brought along by a colleague from the Irish News. This was a very different Gerry Adams to the man I had seen and listened to on television. He was not the monster I had been told about. He was a man with immediate charisma. He was witty and could laugh.
I lived with the Redemptorists in Clonard who opened their house to me. At times I felt I was being ghettoised. Cycling up the Falls Road every evening after work I'd hum the graffiti on the wall which read: "Use your brain, vote Sinn Fein."
I listened to people telling their stories: men, now in their 50s, who were discriminated against because of their names and addresses. Stories about entire streets being burned out of existence.
And then there is the phenomenon of flags and painted kerbs. On my first weekend back in Dublin I spotted redwhite-and-blue flags on a petrol station at the bottom of Rathgar Road. Suddenly, innocuous advertising bunting took on a whole new meaning.
Walking in downtown Belfast in late October I saw a young man wearing a poppy. I immediately said to myself that he must be a unionist. I could hear the words drum out through my head: "He is on the other side."
Flags and colours
My elderly father thought Mary McAleese should have worn a poppy at the Remembrance Day service. Whatever I might have thought before, after just three months in Belfast I was quite happy to see our President-elect minus the poppy. I could never wear a poppy. What would I be saying to those who have been discriminated against, to those who have always felt marginalised? Flags and colours mean so much in Northern Ireland.
When the new Enterprise rail service was launched last month, I was part of the press crew who were dined and wined in Dundalk, where the Belfast train met the Dublin train. The NIO minister Lord Dubs and our own transport Minister, Mary O'Rourke, enjoyed a great railway occasion. The following day's edition of the News Letter carried sneering remarks about the name of the Irish railway company and spoke of the grime and dirt on the train from "Eire".
Maybe because of such remarks and other glimpses I got while in Northern Ireland, I returned to Dublin repeating to myself more graffiti, this time those which refer to the failed statelet.
And all that after just three short months. What would a lifetime have done, in conditions and situations unimaginably different from the present state of play?