Guns and Guinness
How’s this for a day of contrasts: a visit to the brand behemoth known as Guinness Storehouse, and a cab tour of Belfast’s former trouble spots.
The former in Dublin is a really slick operation: costing over £45M to set up, it now attracts over 1M visitors a year and plays a central role in Dublin’s tourist offer. And curious fact (but important for Diageo, Guinness’ owners): over 20% of visitors taste their first pint of the black stuff here. Here’s another one while we're on a roll - it apparently takes 2 pints to convert you to the taste, and a third of the Storehouse visitors get to pour their own Guinness while touring round. Great customer service, good mix of technology and participation - no wonder it’s a success.
But this blog’s about simple experiences that deliver superbly. The power of first person storytelling to do all that in spades is nowhere better evidenced than on this cab tour.
The 30 year Troubles, bookended by a civil rights march in Londonderry in October 1968 and culminating in the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998, cost an estimated 3,600 lives and 50,000 maimed or injured (source: BBC).
On this tour, Brendan, our cab driver, a Catholic local yet admirably neutral in his recounting of the major events of the time, took us to either side of the conflict lines. Naively, I was shocked to see the communities were still physically demarcated by so-called peace walls, and the brightly coloured murals, whilst a fascinating reminder of individuals still held aloft by their respective sides as heros (above, Bobby Sands, the hunger striker and MP), also naggingly felt like an open sore still visible 17 years on.
But there was no doubting the power of being on the ground in Catholic and Protestant districts demarcated by the Falls (republican) and Shankill (loyalist) roads. As Denis Murray, BBC Ireland correspondent and Belfast native wrote in 2013, the Belfast working classes still today prefer the safety behind the peace walls to the uncertainty of mixed living, and as such, “the veneer of normality is thin”.