Chapter 4 Assignments « Lisa123y’s Weblog

Chapter 4 Assignments

September 18, 2008

Assignment 1: Poor Headlines and Revisions Headline: Dozens Questioned Over Tainted Baby Milk Problem: Awkward, implies people being questioned while drinking bad milk.

Solution: China: Employees Questioned about Tainted Baby Milk

Source: CNN.com, September 13, 2008

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/09/13/china.formula/index.html

Headline: Service Changes People’s Character

Problem: Ambiguous: What service? Military?

Solution: Community Service Builds Character

Source: Newsweek.com, September 13, 2008

http://www.newsweek.com/id/157424

Headline: Exhausted Jolie struggles with twin demands

Problem: Pun impedes clarity: Which “twin demands”- Her twin babies or the demands of family and career?

Solution: Jolie ‘Exhausted’ After Birth of Twins

Source: msnbc.com

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26612583/

Assignment 2: Web Article Revision

Original Article: Paris

http://wikitravel.org/en/Paris

Events

It seems like there’s almost always something happening in Paris, with the possible exceptions of the school holidays in August and February, when about half of Parisians are to be found not in Paris, but in the Alps or the South of France respectively. The busiest season is probably the fall, from a week or so after la rentrée scholaire or “back to school” to around Noël (Christmas) theatres, cinemas and concert halls book their fullest schedule of the year.

Even so, there are a couple of annual events in the winter, starting with a furniture and interior decorating trade fair called Maison & Object [35] in January.

In February le Nouvel An Chinois (Chinese New Year) is celebrated in Paris as it is in every city with a significant Chinese population. There are parades in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, and especially in Chinatown in the 13th south of Place d’Italie. Also in February is the Six Nations Rugby Tournament [36] which brings together France, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Italy.

The first of two Fashion weeks occurs in March: Spring Fashion Week [37], giving designers a platform to present women’s Prêt-à-Porter (ready to wear) collections for the following winter.

The French Tennis Open [38] in which the world’s top players battle it out on a clay court runs during two weeks starting on the last Sunday in May. By the time it’s done in June, a whole range of festivities start up. Rendez-vous au Jardin is an open house for many Parisian gardens, giving you a chance to meet real Parisian gardeners and see their creations. The Fête de la Musique [39] celebrates the summer solstice (21st June) with this city-wide free musical knees-up. Finally on the 30th of June is the Gay Pride [40] parade, featuring probably the most sincere participation by the mayor’s office of any such parade on the globe.

The French national holiday Bastille Day on the 14th of July celebrates the storming of the infamous Bastille during the July Revolution. Paris hosts several spectacular events that day of which the best known is the Bastille Parade which is held on the Champs-Élysées at 10am and broadcast to pretty much the rest of Europe by television. The entire street will be crowded with spectators so arrive early. The Bastille Day Fireworks is an exceptional treat for travelers lucky enough to be in town on Bastille Day. The Office du Tourisme et des Congress de Paris recommends gathering in or around the champs du Mars, the gardens of the Eiffel Tower.

Also in July, Cinema en Plein Air [41] is the annual outdoor cinema event that takes place at the Parc de la Villette, in the 9th on Europe’s largest inflatable screen. For most of the months of July and August, parts of both banks of the Seine are converted from expressway into an artificial beach for Paris Plage [42]. Also in July the cycling race le Tour de France both starts and ends in Paris. Its route varies annually, however it always finishes on the last Sunday of July under the Arc de Triomphe.

On the last full weekend in August, a world-class music festival Rock en Seine [43] draws international rock and pop stars to barges on the Seine near moored off of the 8th.

During mid-September DJs and (usually young) fans from across Europe converge on Paris for five or six days of dancing etc. culminating in the Techno parade – a parade whose route traces roughly from Pl. de Bastille to the Sorbonne, and around the same time the festival Jazz à la Villette [44] brings some of the biggest names in contemporary jazz from around the world.

The Nuit Blanche [45] transforms most of central Paris into a moonlit theme-park for an artsy all-nighter on the first Saturday of October, and Fashion Week [46] returns shortly thereafter showing off Women’s Prêt-à-Porter collections for the following summer; as we’ve noted winter collections are presented in March.

Revised Article: Paris

http://wikitravel.org/en/Paris

Events

Annual Parisian Events

· January: Maison & Objet Furniture Fair

· February: Le Novel Au Chinois , Six Nations Rugby Tournament.

· March: Spring Fashion Week

· May: French Tennis Open

· June: Rendez-vous au Jardin, Fete de la Musique, Gay Pride

· July: Bastille Day , Cinema en Plein Air, Le Tour de France

· August: Rock en Seine

· September: Techno Parade, Jazz a la Villette

· October: Nuit Blanche, Fashion Week

Even so, there are a couple of annual events in the winter, starting with a furniture and interior decorating trade fair called Maison & Object [35] in January.

The first of two Fashion weeks occurs in March: Spring Fashion Week [37], giving designers a platform to present women’s Prêt-à-Porter (ready to wear) collections for the following winter.

On the last full weekend in August, a world-class music festival Rock en Seine [43] draws international rock and pop stars to barges on the Seine near moored off of the 8th.

Assignment 3: Rewrite Chapter 1 Headline

Original: A Man of Few Words

Revised: A Man of Few Words: Remembering My Father

Assignment 4: Three Different Headlines

1. China Bans U.S. Meat Imports: Cites Contamination

2. China Bans “Unsafe” U.S. Meat Imports

3. China Bans “Unsafe” U.S. Meat Imports: Chinese Fight Back on Import Safety Issue

Assignment 5: Capstone Assignment

TRAVELBEAT.net: FOCUS ON NORTHERN IRELAND

By Gerry McGuiness

Visiting “Peaceful” Ireland
A New Political Era
Belfast: “A Modern MIracle”
Belfast: A Vacation Destination with Historical Merit
Belfast’s City Centre: The Ultimate Pub, Entertainment and Shopping
“The Troubles” Historical Sites
Northern Ireland’’s Parliament at Stormont
From Belfast to Derry: Getting There is Half the Fun
Derry: Roots of Bloody Sunday and Contemporary Irish History
Starting Anew: Bridging the Gap in Northern Ireland
The Total Experience: More Resources

Visiting “Peaceful” Ireland

Great Victoria Street, Belfast

At “half seven” on a misty Saturday night in June, the elegant Grand Opera House in Belfast’s city center glimmered and glowed on its corner of Great Victoria Street. The theater enveloped a sellout crowd into its velveted, gilded interiors for a production of “Dial M for Murder.” Most big cities take nights like this for granted, but not Belfast. In Northern Ireland, a quiet evening at the theater has at times been an impossibility.

“We’re savoring the peace,” said one native Belfaster, settling in for the production. “We’re at the theater, aren’t we?”

On and off for decades, sectarian strife made going out at night a risky proposition. Bombings forced businesses and dramatic venues, including the Grand Opera House, to shut down. Cabbies designated “no-go” areas throughout the city. Hotels began frisking their guests.

Today, however, this ancient capital is again a bustling European city, and normality has meant the return of cultural and economic vitality, civic pride and an almost palpable optimism. Northern Ireland is indeed savoring the peace, and the irony is that some Belfasters now are fearful of visiting London, which has become a favorite target for jihadist terrorists, when for so long Londoners avoided bomb-scarred Belfast.

A New Political Era

Paisley and Ahern

When Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley shook hands last April with Ireland’s prime minister, or taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, the two unlikely partners ushered in what increasingly bears the earmarks of a new era. The handshake seemed to ratify the fatigue-induced peace and, perhaps more importantly, re-started power-sharing between Protestants and Catholics, unionists and nationalists, loyalists and republicans. Whether this peace will end violently and tragically is a question seemingly everyone is asking in the six counties of Northern Ireland, where the task of finding a way to officially remember the more than 3,600 who died or were killed during the Troubles has only just begun, where even what and whether to remember are nettlesome questions.

Belfast: ”A Modern Miracle”

New Construction, Belfast

“There’s a whole new atmosphere in Belfast,” said Ann Monahan, a native of the city now living in Galway, Ireland. “It’s much lighter. Everyone is so tired of all of the fighting. For so long no one wanted to invest in Northern Ireland. Now I can’t believe all of the cranes you see throughout the city.”

Indeed, construction apparatus are so numerous in Belfast that local residents have begun calling the crane the new national bird. The many cranes – I could get as many as seven into one frame of my camera – are emblematic of what one Belfaster calls “a modern miracle.”

“A lot of investment is coming in from the Republic, which is quite a turnaround from the not too distant past when the Republic was essentially a third-world country,” explained Irish News columnist Chris Murphy. “Now, Dublin real estate is astronomical, so investment has shifted to Northern Ireland. Peace has made that possible.”

Belfast: A Vacation Destination with Historical Merit

Grand Opera House

Peace has made a lot of things possible, re-defining daily life and making the North once again an appealing vacation destination, particularly for those interested in how conflict is resolved or managed. Few Belfasters even 15 years ago could have imagined, for example, that the recently restored Grand Opera House would operate again as Northern Ireland’s premier playhouse. Damaged and closed in the early 1990s, the 113-year-old theater has reasserted itself by blending politically current, topical productions, such as “The Interrogation of Abrose Fogarty,” with more commercial fare, like “Annie” and “The Lion King.” That the venue is open again is a triumph, and this is not lost on the city’s residents.

“This wasn’t possible 10 years ago,” said one theater-goer, attending “Dial M for Murder” with her husband. “I can’t tell you how much it means, just a night at the play.”

A visit to the restored Europa hotel next door, which isn’t a bad idea before or after the Opera House, also underlines just how comprehensive Belfast’s comeback has been. Only Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn was bombed more often than the four-star Europa, which once again glitters on Great Victoria Street. Bombed more than 30 times, the modern Europa was a frequent IRA target in the 1970s, then again in the early and mid-1990s, emblem as it is of Unionist luxury, privilege and capitalist muscle. The bombings, which began almost as soon as the hotel opened in 1971, led to drastic security measures, including searching luggage and deliveries, and building security walls along the front of the hotel. Not surprisingly, tourists stopped checking in, at least in numbers, but the resilient hotel staff made sure the hotel never closed.

Europa Hotel

Sipping a pint in the Europa Hotel’s ground floor bar, looking out over a lobby alive with the energy of Belfast’s resurgent tourism and business sectors, it is difficult to picture the destruction of Europa’s kitchen and restaurant, which was wrought by a bomb attack in 1971, or of the bombing in 1993 that led to an $18 million restoration project. Regardless of Northern Ireland’s prospects for long-term peace, the odds of a bomb attack at the Europa now are remote. Ahern stays here when he visits, just as Bill Clinton did twice in the late 1990s. (Ask for the 10th floor “Clinton Suite.”)

Belfast’s City Centre: The Ultimate Pub, Entertainment, Shopping

City Centre

City Centre includes the Crown pub, Waterfront and Odyssey concert halls, City Hall and plenty of good shopping, including an open air market running Fridays and Saturdays. The Crown, built in 1826 but extensively refurbished in summer 2007, is a quintessentially English pub, and it is just across Great Victoria from the Europa and the opera house. With its assault of colors and textures, the Crown is worth a visit even for non-drinkers. A primrose yellow, gold and ripe red ceiling, gold feather motifs on Corinthian columns, brocaded walls, a Balmoral red granite-topped bar, richly painted and etched glass, and floors of tiled mosaics make the Crown one of the more visually interesting buildings in the whole of Ireland. As afternoon turns to evening and noise in the “gin palace” appreciates considerably, a premium is placed on the ten private “snugs,” or elaborately carved wood booths that ring the bar. The painted glass, ornate carved woodwork, and confessional-like intimacy of the snugs make refuge in one an experience not unlike church, which shouldn’t surprise, because Italian craftsmen working on churches in Northern Ireland in the late 19th century were coaxed into helping with the Crown, as well.

Mother England is prominent around the corner at City Hall, as well. A statue of Queen Victoria (1839-1901) stands sentry outside the renaissance-style, copper domed complex built in 1906 and around which the city center whirls. Free tours are offered, and some time appreciating the Portland stone building from its lawns and walking its perimeter is very satisfying, as well.

Waterfront Hall

Waterfront Hall, a performance venue, and the Odyssey Pavilion, where the 5-year-old Belfast Giants hockey team plays, are new additions to the harbor where the Lagan River slices into Belfast, an area completely revitalized since the IRA ceasefire in the late 1990s. Importantly, Protestants and Catholics alike cheer on the Giants, one of the few sporting teams in Ireland that unite rather than divide. Perhaps no vista in the city more quickly communicates how far Northern Ireland has come in the last decade, and how eager it is to move ahead, than that offered by the inner harbor, showcasing as it does forward-thinking modern architecture and steel-and-glass structures that hug the Lagan’s banks.

Cross the city, passing along the way beautiful Queens University and its lush lawns and gardens, to see the Lyric Theatre, which serves as a sort of living monument to the Troubles. The Lyric provides a steady diet of Irish drama, including contemporary Irish productions. Opening at its current location in October 1968, just as the civil rights movement was mobilizing, the playhouse has not shied away from controversial productions, even during times of crisis. In 1971, the year before Bloody Sunday and the worst year of sectarian strife, the theater premiered “The Flats,” a play by Irish writer John Boyd that was the first production in Northern Ireland to center on the Troubles. Even during the most turbulent times, the Lyric refused to close.

Lyric Theatre

“Coming to the theater became an act of defiance,” said Susan Phelan, the Lyric’s marketing director, during a popular run in summer 2007 of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” written by leading Irish playwright Brian Friel. The Troubles indeed kept many away, she said, but closing down would have been an act of surrender.

Today, the theater is thriving, and Belfast’s hard-won peace is a big reason why. “It’s a different attitude now,” Phelan said. “Everyone is so happy to call normal ‘normal’ again, and you can see that in the audiences here.” So optimistic is the Lyric that its board is planning a new, $24 million, multi-stage theater complex to be built on the present site.

“The Troubles” Historical Sites: Catholic Falls Road, Protestant Shankill Neighborhoods

To appreciate the Troubles and the residues of conflict they left behind, visitors to Belfast should tour the Catholic Falls Road and Protestant Shankill neighborhoods, replete as they are with propagandistic wall murals, which, as a collection, provide a sort of narrative or history of the conflict. Shankill Road takes you through the middle of a Protestant working-class neighborhood that is punctuated by murals celebrating Protestant and loyalist victories dating back to the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, one of the principal battles commemorated during the annual marching season.

Orange Order March

The Orange Order marches are staged each July 12, a national holiday in the North called The Twelfth and commemorating the victory of King William of Orange over James II, the Catholic king William removed from the English throne to reassert English Protestant rule over Ireland. Not surprisingly the marches are viewed by many Catholics as provocation, and violence has more often marked the day than has peaceful remembrance. Notably, in July 2007, march season passed nearly without incident, even though tens of thousands of Protestants marched in Belfast and in Derry.

The Murals

When touring the murals, take with you a scorecard or directory of all of the various paramilitaries and political groups, most of which are represented in some way in the art. To know the difference between the RIRA and the RUC or UDA, for example, is to begin to appreciate the loyalties the murals demand. (The acronyms, respectively, signify the Real IRA, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Association.) Throughout the Shankill, bright murals commemorate the many loyalist paramilitaries, such as the UDA and Ulster Freedom Fighters. One mural in particular, portraying a UFF sniper, is chilling in how the hooded gunman’s eyes follow you around the Shankill green space bordered by apartment houses. Clearly intimidation was the artist’s goal.

The Shankill area is separated from the Catholic Falls Road neighborhood by only a “peace wall,” a euphemistically named combination of wire and concrete barriers designed to repel rocks and explosives, and to keep Catholics and Protestants from coming into contact with one another. Along Falls Road, the experience is a bit different. Where loyalist murals occupy residential walls, or the end panels of apartment buildings in most cases, those in the Falls area are located more often in purely public areas. Their abundance and public-ness underscore how The Troubles were, and to some extent remain, a state of mind as well as a state of civil unrest, and how this mindset is bequeathed from one generation to the next. Graffiti, too, is used to appropriate otherwise public spaces, to communicate identity and affiliation, and to exclude, to say who is not welcome. “No Pope Here” and “Fuck the IRA” in the Shankill; “Brits Out” and “Sinn Fein!” along Falls Road (Sinn Fein is Gaelic for “Ourselves Alone” and the name of the Republican political party in Northern Ireland).

Sein Fein Headquarters, Mural of Bobby Sands

Along Falls Road you will see Sinn Fein headquarters. It is impossible to miss, emblazoned as it is with a three-story mural of Bobby Sands, perhaps the best known of the martyred hunger strikers who died at the infamous Maze prison at Longkesh. (Plans are afoot to turn the Maze into a complex of athletic fields.) The building provided the backdrop for the many Sinn Fein press conferences in the mid- and late-1990s, and it is situated just across the street from the IRA’s Garden of Remembrance. A memorial to the “soldiers” who died in the “war” for independence, the Garden and its political references reinforce claims that The Troubles were much more about sovereignty and land rights than religious differences. Directly opposite the Garden is the largest collection of murals in Belfast, including several that comment on U.S. politics in Iraq and elsewhere. Perhaps the most poignant of these depicts President George Bush siphoning oil from the Middle East by sucking a plastic tube and ingesting the petroleum.

Northern Ireland’s Parliament at Stormont

Parliment At Stormont

Charged with knitting some sort of national fabric from the many disparate cloths and cleavages in Northern Ireland is the country’s recently re-convened Parliament, which works at Stormont. Built from stone representing all 32 Irish counties, Stormont was built in 1932 as a sort of “thank you” to Northern Ireland from England for the partition of the island, the political act that divided the island into two nations. Welcoming visitors is a statue of Edward Carson, founder of the UVF in 1912 and a broker of the partitioning agreement. (“Welcoming” might not be the appropriate word choice; Carson, postured in an aggressive lunge, appears to be haranguing visitors as they approach.) It is worth a visit for its grandeur, for the beautiful “Mile” road leading up to its dramatic entrance and for the opportunity of imagining the building covered completely in manure during World War II. Insert your favorite politics-and-bullshit joke here. (They did it to camouflage the building from German bombers, and it took years to sandblast back off.)

From Belfast to Derry: Getting there is Half the Fun

Giant's Causeway

Visitors to Ireland seeking to understand The Troubles, including their legacies and residues, must also visit Derry. There are a few very different, entertaining and enriching ways to get to Derry from Belfast. The Coastal option, while longer than a direct route, offers a feast for the eyes, and quite a bit of the island’s history, as well. Highlights along the way include Giant’s Causeway, a mass of 40,000 hexagonal basalt stone columns that form steps from the foot of the cliff into the sea. Irish legend attributes the unique formations to Finn McCool, commander of the King’s armies, but the stone gallery really is the product of volcanic activity 6,000 millennia ago. A nature walk through and around Giant’s Causeway is woth a day’s activities, or it can be sampled as briefly as time allows Also on this route is the Carrick-a-Rede-rope bridge, which is not for those afraid of heights. The bridge affords stunning sea views to those who are not, however. Also on this route is the Bushmills whiskey distillery, the breathtaking scenery of the Nine Glens of Antrim and the 14th century Dunluce Castle, which teeters on a cliff’s edge and is described by many as the most picturesque in Ireland.

Church of Ireland Cathedral

The southern route would enable stops in Armagh City, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland and the burial place of legendary Irish clan king, Brian Boru. Saint Patrick built Ireland’s first stone church in Armagh City, which is now home to the sky-reaching Church of Ireland Cathedral. This route also goes through Omagh, site of the horrific RIRA bombing on the city’s main shopping lane in August 1998.

Following the A2, you would enter Derry from the north, traveling parallel with the river Foyle that divides the city and is Catholic and Protestant residents. Even the city’s name is emblematic of the competing claims that confuse identity in the North. Republicans refer to the city as Derry, while Unionists call it Londonderry. Designations that double the city’s identifications on signage, maps and histories. Derry was the epicenter of the most recent phase of the strife, or the modern-day Troubles, that began in the late 1960’s, and it was the site of the Bloody Sunday massacre 35 years ago.

“Derry”: Roots of Bloody Sunday and Contemporary Irish History

Stroke City

On January 30, 1972, a civil rights march in “Stroke City” culminated in a deadly confrontation between some of the more than 10,000 marchers and British army paratroopers. In just 15 minutes, 13 marchers were dead and another critically wounded. No British soldiers were killed, but an official inquiry implausibly declared that the soldiers had merely returned fire on armed marchers. We still do not know any of the names of the soldiers involved, though some of their superior officers, who have been identified, have been decorated by the Queen. Reminders of the fateful, fatal day seemingly are everywhere in Derry, from the Free Derry section of the Catholic Bogside neighborhood, to Guildhall, where the British Widgery and Saville inquiries have been conducted, to the Free Derry Museum and Bloody Sunday Archive, a must-see for anyone genuinely interested in comprehending contemporary Irish history. Talk to anyone in Derry’s city center, which is marked by the inner stone wall that has defined Londonderry since it was established in the early 17th century, and rapidly you will discover some direct link to Bloody Sunday.

Derry resident Carol Lynn Toland was 17 years old on Bloody Sunday, and she was dating a member of the IRA at the time. She says the memories are as fresh today as they were 35 years ago, which is part of the problem. Fortunately not all of what Toland remembers is sorrowful. Saturday night at the riots, for example.

“We used to ask each other on Friday, ‘What time are you going to the riots?’” said Toland, looking out over Bogside, the nearly entirely Catholic neighborhood in which most of Bloody Sunday took place, and where her father grew up. “We would tell our parents we were going babysitting.” One night at the riots, on Derry’s William Street, Toland, which connects Bogside with the city center, she and a friend walked into a rock-throwing attack on the RUC, or British police. The Catholic boys called a temporary ceasefire to let the ladies pass. “We walked safely through, and they started throwing rocks again,” she said. “We didn’t even think about it.”

Free Derry Wall

William Street, or Sraid Liam, is a main thoroughfare in the city center, and it is where the British army erected a barricade on Bloody Sunday, on the edge of Bogside leading into Sorrow Square, named in tribute to Ireland’s famine victims. Another barricade was placed where today a large, white “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” wall has been erected, in Free Derry Corner. From this vantage point, visitors can easily imagine the bedlam of Bloody Sunday, and in minutes they can walk to the Bogside Inn or the Free Derry Museum, both of which are essential stops on any tour of Derry or even of Northern Ireland.

The Bogside Inn was, and perhaps still is, a sort of de facto headquarters for the IRA, including for then-IRA leader Martin McGuinness, a native of Derry. Inside is one of the best, most comprehensive photo collections of Bloody Sunday’s people and events anywhere, and it is a great place to down a pint with Derry’s working class Catholics. The pub also serves as official headquarters for the “Free Derry Celtic Supporters Club,” making it the place to watch any televised Celtics soccer match. The Celtics of Galway are the team of choice for Northern Irish Catholics, whose wardrobes heavily rely on the team’s green and white. Galway’s Rangers are embraced by Northern Ireland’s Protestants, so people do not wear Celtic colors across the river, where Protestants are concentrated, nor would a person wear Ranger blue in Bogside. Color and language are cultural weapons in Northern Ireland, as even a casual observer quickly notes. (Restaurants commonly forbid patrons wearing team colors or emblems.) Ireland’s tri-color flag waves atop the Bogside Inn, while “No RUC” graffiti shouts from across the street.

Free Derry Museum

The Free Derry Museum, just a block from the pub, is simply unforgettable. Combining video, audio and displays of artifacts from the Troubles, including clothing worn by the victims on Bloody Sunday and original newspaper accounts, the museum and archive confronts visitors with the chaos and cruelty of the day, and the lack of justice since. Jean Hegarty co-founded the museum to pay tribute to Bloody Sunday’s dead, who include her brother, Kevin McIlhenny. Just 17 the day of the marches, McIlhenny was shot trying to crawl to safety.

“I was away, living in Canada, at the time of my little brother’s death,” said Hegarty, who moved back to Derry in 1995. “I think my guilt kicked in, so I got involved.”

Hegarty said she believes investigations like the Saville Inquiry, a $350 million fiasco that so far has yielded little new information, are a waste of time and taxpayer money, that a truly independent, impartial investigation will never come. “But what people want has largely been accomplished,” said Hegarty, who was 23 years old on Bloody Sunday. “We know the 14 were innocent. Their reputations have been restored.”

Derry: Guildhall’s Famous Stained Glass and 18th Century Pipe Organ

Guildhall, Derry

Abutting Waterloo Place off the end of William Street is Derry’s most visually arresting site, the neo-gothic style Guildhall built in 1887. Destroyed by fire in 1908 and rebuilt over the next four years, the city hall offers visitors impressive interiors, including more than two dozen of Ireland’s finer stained glass windows that together offer a sort of visual fugue about most of the more important episode’s in the city’s history going back four centuries. Also dramatic is the floor-to-ceiling, 3,100-pipe organ in the main council hall. Guildhall serves as an important symbol of the Troubles, embodying as it does the ties to London and to the Crown. Witnesses of the events of Bloody Sunday were interviewed in Guildhall as part of the British-run Widgery Tribunal, an official coverup memorialized in Brien Friel’s unforgettable play, “The Freedom of the City,” which visitors to Derry are encouraged to read. (Depending on the mayor’s agenda, you can visit the mayor’s parlor in which most of Friel’s play takes place.) The Saville Inquiry of recent years, which seeks in part to correct the wrongs of the Widgery Tribunal, also conducted interviews in Guildhall, which towers over the Foyle and punctuates Derry’s landscape from all directions. The building geographically marks the Catholic-Protestant divide, perched as it is on the river next to the connecting bridge. More than 95% of the population on the Guildhall side are Catholic, but the majority swings the other way when crossing the bridge and onto higher elevations.

Starting Anew: Bridging the Gap in Northern Ireland

Children in Galway

Derry native Clionagh Boyle recommends talking with residents on both sides of the river. “If you peel back the layers, there are all sorts of backgrounds and influences,” said Boyle, who is a director at Derry’s Women’s Centre responsible for the Children’s Commission located just off Sorrow Square near Guildhall. “We have a Children’s Commission because we felt we needed to be an intermediary much sooner in n people’s lives. By the time you are in your thirties, so much damage to self-esteem has already been done.”

Boyle said she was 19 years old before she met her first Protestant friend, and she had to go to Dublin to do it.

“The irony was that she was from Derry, too,” Boyle said. “It shouldn’t be that way, of course, and many are working toward creating safe places and spaces for both Catholics and Protestants to interact.” The challenge is getting Catholics and Protestants even to want their lives to intersect because division and strict separation is what both sides wanted, and have carefully built.

“In this world there are only two tragedies,” wrote Ireland’s rascally playwright Oscar Wilde, in the very funny “Lady Windermere’s Fan. “One is not getting what one wants; the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.”

THE TOTAL EXPERIENCE: More Resources

To learn more about Northern Ireland and its recent history prior to traveling, here are some resources abstracted to help you.

BOOKS AND FILM

The Lie of the Land, Irish Identities (1997). Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole explores how Ireland constantly builds and rebuilds its identity, providing along the way rich portraits of the Irish people and the divisions that prevent consensus on just what it means to be Irish.
“Something to Write Home About,” from Finder’s Keepers (2003), by Seamus Heaney, in which the Nobel poet explores identity. A native of Derry in Northern Ireland, but Irish Catholic, Heaney looks at how part of who we are is determined or at least influenced by “the other.”
Eureka Street, Ballantine Books (1996). In Robert McLiam Wilson’s tale of love and loss, Belfast is as much a character as the two unlikely friends on whose fortunes the book’s narrative turns. The time is a cease-fire in the mid-1990s, a breath between the bombings that have punctuated life in several Northern Ireland cities since the late 1960s.
“Bloody Sunday.” While it cannot provide truth, Paul Greengrass’s docudrama does deliver verisimilitude, taking viewers into the heart of Derry as one of the 10,000 for that fateful Sunday in January 1972.
“Omagh.” A feature film shot documentary-style that recounts the bombing of a crowded street in Omagh, N.I., in August 1998, and, in its aftermath, the pursuit by city’s grieving families for truth. 106 minutes. Like “Bloody Sunday,” this film stars Gerard McSorley, a native of Omagh.

POETRY & DRAMA

“Butcher’s Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery,” a poem by Thomas Kinsella, available: http://www.usm.maine.edu/~mcgrath/poems/butchrs.htm.
“The Freedom in the City,” a play by Brien Friel set in Derry’s Guildhall during The Troubles.
“Neither an elegy nor a manifesto,” a poem by Ireland’s John Hewitt that contemplates the difficulty of dealing with the dead.

PRESS COVERAGE

The Guardian newspaper’s exquisite archive of press coverage of The Troubles, up to the present: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/0,,446746,00.html. Includes several excellent Flash movies that summarize The Troubles: http://www.guardian.couk/Northern Ireland/flash/0

PUBLIC RECORDS

“The Bloody Sunday Inquiry,” http://www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org.uk. Ten years and more than $350 million in costs since its launch, the Saville Inquiry, or Bloody Sunday Inquiry, has yet to publish or announce its findings. Only the lawyers are happy.

PEOPLE AND PLACES

St. Columb’s Cathedral, on London Street in Derry, is the city’s oldest building, finished in 1633. Inside are marble monuments, stained glass, carved stone likenesses and the cannon ball hurled at the church that carried inside the request for surrender during Londonderry’s siege in 1688-89.

The walls of Derry, which is the last completely walled city in Ireland. Built in the early 17th century, the walls can be walked in less than an hour, and they offer spectacular vistas of the Foyle River, the surrounding countryside, Bogside and the city’s center.

Derry’s murals in Bogside and the Fountain area offer a sort of history of The Troubles, including tributes to the hunger strikers, the victims of Bloody Sunday, the practices of the British paratroopers and the combatants, including the IRA and RUC.

CLASSES, WORKSHOPS

Language classes at the Foyle Language School in Derry, including lessons in Gaelic.

EXHIBITS

Guildhall stained glass windows, unveiled in 1912 after the structure’s rebuilding. There are groupings of them in the Vestibule, the Entrance Hall, the Mayor’s Parlour, Top Corridor and, for the largest collection, the Council Chamber.

Free Derry Museum and National Civil Rights Archive. Established in the heart of Derry’s Catholic Bogside by the Bloody Sunday Trust, the museum tells the story of the civil rights movement from the Republican perspective. Open M-F year-round, 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., 1-4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. http://www.museumoffreederry.org.

PHOTOGRAPHY

The Bogside Inn, a pub in Bogside, also boasts one of the most comprehensive collections of Troubles photography anywhere. At any moment, the pub’s denizens might join you as a sort of docent, explaining the context or import of one of the photos.

Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in County Down can be visited en route to Derry from Belfast. In addition to one of the better Titanic exhibitions, the museum has more than 300,000 still images representing Northern Ireland’s ways of life over time. Buildings on the property include houses, mills, shops, schools and churches that recreate life in the early 1900s.

Revision Note: You may recall, I completed the original assignment. You had no comments or revisions for me. (To wit, I was most grateful)

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