Belfast or Derry

There's a group called EPIC in Woodvale Road in the Shankill area of Belfast composed of ex-loyalist paramilitaries, this group. If you can, try and get a tour with them. I was part of a group and every one of us were moved by it.

Our tour guide was William 'Plum' Smith, whom many here will remember from tv in the 1990s. None of these guys have done nice things in their past. That's the first thing to be very clear about. Yet, there was a very deep sincerity about the tour (that he was ill and died shortly afterwards was undoubtedly related to his reflections). He brought us on a tour around the old factories and mills of the area to see the desolation of the place now and he gave a refreshing social history of the area, how the mills were erected along Abhainn na Feirste/River Farset (from which Béal Feirste/Belfast gets its name) and the rise and decline of the entire area. How the rise of industry led to rise in skills, trades and apprentices and how the decline of the same led to a community which remains uprooted and lacks an academic/professional tradition which would be more useful now. Some really insightful reflections. His discussion of the meaning of the placename in Irish smashed through many prejudices (he had learnt Irish in prison to understand the Unrepentant ones). The ruination of so much of that area two decades after the ceasefire really was shocking. How about a Regeneration West Belfast? He then brought us along the 'Peace Wall' and explained how it has got higher and higher since the 1994 ceasefire, and families have moved further and further back from it so that there's yet more wasteland. We went into a loyalist estate and he explained how he would never have entered it during the Troubles as it was ruled by a rival loyalist group (the UDA). He was passionately pissed off with establishment unionism for neglecting poorer areas. And so on. No gloating, no tribal bollocksology and an avoidance insofar as possible of the them versus us dichotomy. He was down-to-earth, straightforward yet funny at the same time and it was explicitly a very personal tour of the area. He had travelled a journey in life, and you could feel the sincerity of it. Well worth getting that perspective and humanising things.