"A little bit of peace" and "Belfast, capital of Northern Ireland is slowly finding its way back to a forgotten normality". These are the headings to an article by Wolfrem Runkel in the Hamburg weekly newspaper Die Zeit, which is hardly borne out in the text. However, first a bit of philosophising. The man in the plane seat next to our reporter says that Northern Ireland today is the Irish Republic of yesterday. In the North you find what the south has lost: naturalness, originality, simplicity, modesty, naivety, spontaneity and originality. It is the Ireland of 30 years ago of which Heinrich Boll wrote. With this, he vanishes. Our reporter is soon into the nitty-gritty of life. He finds it stimulating if baffling. At a reception at Queen's University, among a mixed crowd of what he calls High Society, laughing and drinking and all jolly, everyone knows who is Catholic and who is Protestant. "Everyone here except myself knows this." It is said, he writes, that Belfast schoolchildren recognise with 90 per cent certainty the religion of their fellow citizens.
But Belfast enjoys itself. Drama in the Churches even. Murder in the Cathedral at St Anne's and in Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church the play Northern Star by Stewart Parker about Henry Joy McCracken, with a noose hanging over the altar. The pubs, of course, get a good show. In one (a former church), a group of three chaps and two girls offer him a drink. "Cheers," not "Slainte". The two girls, one Catholic, one Protestant, go home at weekends to the same up-country town. There they do not socialise. They drink each in their own pub. (A lot about pubs isn't there?) There they have to be secret friends, the reporter writes. He takes to the idea of "Trouble Tours" (Trouble he writes, is "an Irish understatement for the 30-year civil war"). He sees the barbed wire, the gigantic paintings of the martial figures, the martyrs. Unchristian curses. Agitprop. Children playing - with plastic guns. But he does see signs of peace. Shankill meets Falls. Andrews' Flour Mill, where Catholics and Protestants work side by side, with separate access each from their own safe street.
There is a big picture with huge, dominating letters spelling out LIFE. The caption reads: "Belfast's children dream of a future without war." So do many other people, and in spite of our friend's pessimism, it is surely coming.