Is Mise....

It's tough to get tourists to visit Belfast. When you think of travelling to Ireland, you might picture green fields and thatched roof cottages, with cows and sheep grazing in the meadows. Maybe you picture bustling Dublin, the pubs and walking tours of Merrion Square. Admit it, never once did you say to yourself, I'd love to see Belfast and take in...hmmm. Take in what sites?

The unionists thought they had a brilliant scheme to get people to visit and spend some cash. Turn the twelfth of July celebrations into a festival, they suggested. Rather like Carnival in Brazil, a sort of Mardi Gras for the whole family. Good thing that didn't happen this year, or things might have gone awry.

Tourist: My, that's a large bonfire.

Unionist: That it is.

Tourist: That effigy that's on top, up there, I was wondering. Why is there a big sign on it that says "Fuck Micky-bo"?

Unionist: Oh, we're celebrating the murder of that Catholic scum in Ballymena. Beaten to death, the fucker, and would that we massacred more of them.

Tourist: (insert sound of stunned silence)

Unionist: He was able to walk home to his mother before he collapsed. Died in hospital, with all his family around when they pulled the plug on the life-support system. And they call us heartless.

Tourist:(insert sound of person fleeing in terror)

Needless to say, the unionists who wanted to make the twelfth of July a big tourist attraction were laughed out of the room. The whole notion seems to have died of shame and embarassment.

Enter the nationalists from the Falls Road, also hoping to entice the visitor's euro into north of Ireland pockets. The Belfast City Council has recently approved a Sinn Fein idea to make a large section of the nationalist Falls Road a Gaeltacht area. What that means is, people who live there speak Irish. It's as Irish an area as one could hope to find, not unlike the Gaeltacht areas in Kerry and Donegal, where you have to be Irish-speaking if you want to move in. The Republic of Ireland promotes the areas as tourist attractions, full of cead mile failte and slain agus etc. etc., and they have found some success. A Gaeltacht area is super-Irish, concentrated into its essence.

Of course the unionists are furious about it. Nelson McCausland, one of Ian Paisley's followers, doesn't like it at all. Thinks it's just the Shinners, trying to promote their nationalist agenda in Belfast. Well, after the Mardi Gras mockery, one might suppose that the loyalists are a bit touchy and they're ready to snap at anyone. Here they were hoping to attract tourists to a celebration of sectarian hatred, and the Shinners get the Council to approve an extremely Irish area in a corner of Her Majesty's empire. This isn't Ireland, the loyalists complain, and to make the Falls Road blatantly Irish is beyond the Pale.

Well, frankly, it is beyond the Pale. Anything past the city limits of old Dublin was beyond the Pale. A bit of Irish history for you, no extra charge. But there might be an extra charge to the Royal Purse when the residents of the Falls Road Gaeltacht demand translation services. Legally entitled to speak only Irish, according to the Belfast City Council, and won't that frost the loyalists a bit more.