TUESDAY, JULY 30
Belfast hasn’t exactly captured our imagination, but we wanted to learn about it. The Ulster Museum is the number one must-see on visitor lists, after the Titanic Museum, which was of no interest to us. But the Ulster Museum, we realized after some research, is mostly a natural history museum and we like social and political histories and art. We decided to go to the slightly obscure Eileen Hickey Irish Republican Museum.
The museum is located in a warehouse in an area of West Belfast that is predominantly Catholic. Where we are staying, in East Belfast, it’s mostly Protestant. The warehouse, which is renovated and has offices and a nice, popular restaurant, is surrounded by row houses, some rundown and empty commercial buildings and murals. Murals depict IRA images and the independence wall shows Irish Catholic solidarity with other oppressed peoples’ worldwide.
The museum is humble, and consists of a hallway, off of which is one small room modelled as a replica of a women’s prison cell where independence fighters, including Hickey, were imprisoned, and a main room. Eileen Hickey’s sister greeted us, as she does all visitors (Eileen died of cancer in 2006), and showed us through the “prison room” then led us to the exhibition room. The rooms are dank and smells of mold. Posters, made by Eileen and other volunteers who carried out her wish for a museum to education the public and young people, were DIY, the fonts old fashioned, the designs amateur. But the dedication and heart behind this small museum is huge. Glass covered cabinets and frames contained paraphernalia from those who lost loved ones or engaged in the fights for independence. Manikins dressed as Loyalist soldiers or Unionist fighters stood around the room. The story begins in the 1600s, with an emphasis on the years between 1969 and 1998, and ends with the dissolution of the IRA.
It’s all very sad and left us with a sense of the Catholic people’s defeat here in Northern Ireland.
From there we walked into the center of the city, ate and caught the bus back to the apartment. It was to be a big packing day, particularly for me as I had to switch suitcases.
