Divided island in the rain

Richard West

A few weeks ago I became one of the 8,000 tourists who, it is estimated, will visit Northern Ireland this year; choosing the Antrim coast, perhaps the most beautiful on the whole island. It also looks peaceful, not just when compared with Belfast or Newry, but even compared with the countryside of South Armagh or County Down, where the few Protestants hang out Union Jacks the size of sheets, on their farmhouses and even on trees. Except for a wave of fire-bombing two years ago, the Antrim seaside towns have experienced little trouble, and even this was attributed to outsiders. Nevertheless the tourists stay away in their hundreds of thousands.

At Ballycastle, a girl in the main hotel recounted almost with awe that 'we had a French couple at lunch last week' -although even these turned out to have been not proper tourists but participants at a nearby seminar on the problems of Ulster. At another hotel, a rather arrogant Dutchman was singled out for courtesies in spite of his failure to see a joke against his own country: 'The last Dutchman who came here caused nothing but trouble'. Mho was that? William of Orange? But he was not the last Dutchman. He came hundreds of years ago . .'.) Even the British are rare enough to be treated with special favour, so that at one crowded pub in the small hours of the morning, the local 'peeler' accorded to me the privilege he already enjoyed himself of getting free drinks whenever anyone bought a round.

The decline of Northern Ireland's tourism is starkly revealed by last year's figures for Portrush, the main Antrim seaside town that might be compared with Ramsgate or Morecambe, and used to live almost entirely off visitors. Last year Portrush received half a million people on day trips and 150,000 on short trips, almost all of whom were from Northern Ireland itself. Of the 90,000 people who stayed there on long holidays, only 10,000 came from outside the Province, of whom at least half were from the Republic of Ireland. Yet until 1969, at least 60 per cent of visitors to Portrush came from southern Scotland alone, most of them families who returned each year by the short boat trip to Lame. In Antrim this year, I heard not a single Scottish voice.

At Sunday lunch in the Northern Counties Hotel, a cascade of water was pouring out of the high ceiling into two plastic buckets, yet nevertheless the steak and kidney pie and abundant fresh vegetables were excellent. The price of the wine can s'carcely have been increased since 1969 and if the service was slow (though friendly) it may be because the staff here and in all Antrim seaside hotels are schoolchildren or university students working through their vacations. This is a pleasant change from England, where most students decline such vacation work, and the staff of the seaside hotels is composed of surly Mediterranean immigrants.

Ten years of troubles may have preserved the Northern Counties Hotel from the ghastly refurbishing that has spoiled so many hotels in England, and Ireland south of the border. High-backed chairs line the walls of the lounge whose central glory consists of a large fireplace with four wooden pillars supporting a dome, on which is the metal statuette of a lady holding a sheaf of flowers and sitting on a globe, in turn set in a marble block on which is written La Science Eclairant le Monde. Beaux Arts 1897. A silver samovar on a laquered chest, two big Chinese bowls, a grandfather clock, vases of ferns, a brass coal scuttle and two chandeliers complete the ornamentation.

Portrush, indeed all the North Antrim coast, is pleasingly old-fashioned, ,There is an absence of motor-bike Hell's Angels, mods, teds, punks and above all those pestilential continental youngsters who now visit the southern English seaside towns on the pretekt of learning English. However the 'young idea' is catered for by plenty of discotheques and, still more popular here, the 'dance bands', that have no parallel in Britain but flourish all over Ireland. There is good golf and fishing, a glorious countryside and an abundance of boardinghouses, geared to family groups, where you may hear at five thirty each evening the gong going for high tea. Portrush offers the sort of holiday that the Scots and English used to enjoy before they were led to believe that they really wanted a scorching sun, paella and rot-gut brandy.

'We're busiest during the twelfth fortnight' somebody said, and I paused for a moment before it occurred to me that this did not refer to 12 August, when people in Britain start to shoot grouse, but 12 July, when the Ulster Protestants, if they do not actually start to shoot Papishers, at least try to annoy them by banging drums and yelling intemperate marching songs. Only once did I hear somebody start one of these songs — 'On the green, grassy slopes of the Boyne' — but he was immediately hushed by his soberer companions, perhaps out of regard for a stranger's presence. Most of the Antrim seaside is Protestant, yet it is thought bad form to voice in public the old sectarian certainties, whatever is said in the privacy of the home or the Orange Lodge. This is becoming so, I have heard, even in Derry, where Ulster's most recent spell of hatred began almost exactly ten years ago. (The relative detente between Protestants and Catholics has not yet been paralleled in Belfast, Newry or the turbulent country districts of southern Down and Armagh). Indeed late at night, after hours of talk about reconciliation, peace, a new spirit, a plague on both their houses and so on, one could be lulled into imagining that Northern Irish people have changed at heart. That they have not, or that many have not, was rudely brought home to me by the statement of one plump, placid, elderly lady, who had been asked how she would feel about joining in a united Ireland. She smiled like an angel before she replied: 'I'd rather eat mice.

The Belfast 'peace women' and others in search of reconciliation appeal to the southern Irish to spend their holidays in the north; nevertheless most of the tourist traffic flows in the other direction. In Connemara, in County Galway, where I spent the second leg of this short Irish holiday, I was told by a friend: 'You see, masses of northern number-plates, and the Orange songs are on the repertory of all the bands down here. They were playing 'The Flute' the other night at Claddhaduff. There was a northern couple lboking embarrassed but we don't take it too seriously, and they're good songs. But mind you a lot of those Unionists can get very cheeky. They come down and criticise and tear the balls off this country, what a terrible man Jack Lynch is, what a different weak lot the southern Protestants are, and so on. The three RUC men who were ambushed after a fishing contest in Westport — although praise be to God, as the saying goes, after waiting all night in an ambush, no-one was hurt — they'd been saying the most dreadful things in the pub about this country.'

This friend, although a diehard republican, said that nevertheless northern Unionists were second most popular of the tourists after, of all people, the English. Not the Ames jeans? No, in the past Connemara looked to the United States, and many a local church was founded out of collections made in Brooklyn and Pittsburg, but now local people look towards London. Whereas thirty years ago, the overwhelming majority of the mail to a village like Cleggan came from America, now it is mostly from England.

Of course the visiting Englishman must not believe all the nice things he hears of his country, like the remarks I heard from a former London policeman: 'It's the only country worth looking at, and the only one I respect. What a pity it's been ruined by the wogs. I'm telling you, this country would have been three times better off if we'd stayed with England. We were doing fine in 1913 . . . I want to go back to London another time. I want to die there.'

Whatever one thinks of such sentiments, it is patently untrue that Ireland would have been better off if it were tied to the present British economy. By almost any yardstick, the people in Connemara are prospering when an acre of rocky grazing land or even bog sells at two thousand pounds an acre, or more than the arable land in the English midlands. Much of Ireland's prosperity is indeed derived from exploiting the indolence and fecklessness of the old oppressor, the British. The teenage Connemara lads who go to work on the London building sites expect to earn at the minimum £.150 a week, while the building companies will not employ British young men because they are work-shy and troublesome.

Until this year, the English tended to stay away from Connemara because of fear of the IRA but they are now coming back and are generally well received. Although not as numerous as the Germans and French, the English spend more, especially on drink, and they 'enjoy a crack', a joke or a conversation. But after the English and Northern Irish, the most popular tourists are without doubt the Germans. Most of them take an interest in the country to an extent that the Irish find rather disturbing; over the fishing, for instance. The Germans are critical of the local fishing industry and one of them went so far as to say on Dublin tele vision that he would like to be a haddock off Connemara and live for ever. Last year there stayed in my boarding house two young German couples who went out fish ing each morning, sold the catch in Clifden market, and left after ten days with hundreds of pounds profit as well as having paid for their fares and expenses.

One evening in Cleggan, a fiddler and accordionist were wheezing away at some jigs and reels, when they were joined, indeed drowned out by three bearded German musicians playing the same tunes better. The Germans, one of them wearing a kaftan, another with left-wing slogans stuck on his instrument case, went on to play folk-songs from all over Europe — all this for not so much as the price of a drink.

The Irish are less fond of the Dutch, who have bought much property on the west coast and behave as though they owned it, (if I may coin an Irishism). A friend in Kerry says that a local Dutchman called the police when locals entered his land to blackberry; even the English a hundred years ago would not have been as fussy as that.

The French are the least popular tourists, largely because of their thriftiness in regard to drink. At first I could not believe a publican's tale that six Frenchmen had sat for two hours in his pub round a glass of Guinness; then, in a Clifden pub, I encountered a Frenchman who seemed to have difficulty with his order. When I offered to help, he replied in French that: 'The barman does not understand. I want one coca-cola, one tonic water and six carafes of water. . . '; he indicated his seven companions.

Apart from the French, most of the tour ists come to Ireland with some kind of interest in the country and not just because it is fashionable. Some are scholars of Ireland's history and language. 'Most of the Scandinavians seem to be Irish-speakers or alcoholics and often both', I was told in Cleggan.

There are signs that southern Ireland may be in danger of sacrificing some of its charm to the 'tourist industry' of package trips, Jumbo Jets and computer-programmed chains of hotels. Central Dublin already is much less agreeable than it was five or ten years ago. The fine old hotels have become as characterless as the new ones, while people who used to 'enjoy a crack' in the old city bars, have gone to the inner suburbs, where tourists will not follow them. And what is the point of Ireland if not the conversation?

The Scots used to go to Portrush because they found the place and the people familiar and agreeable. Foreigners went to the south either to visit the place of their ancestors (in the case of many American tourists) or to enjoy this unique and always amazing people. Where else in the world could it happen to one (as happened to me) to have two nuns insist on driving one to a party at a pub at half past twelve in the morning? The North may not be so zany but it, too, has charm, and should get more visitors from the South and from Britain — if only to demonstrate that we do not intend to be bullied by maniacs of the IRA.