Simona said that all the excursions were operated by the same local. “It’s always in the back of your mind who these people are,” he said, “and not just that they’re the head of military forces.”ĪP National Writer Adam Geller is on assignment in the United Kingdom covering the queen’s death.Farm frenzy_ all aboard 2015 (pc) foxy games key bord. She was, after all, someone’s grandmother. He won’t change his mind about that, he said, but even with a bitter past, he’s become more willing to see the queen, who was 96, as more than a foe. On the Falls Road of 25 or 30 years ago, the queen was vilified as a symbol of British oppression, said Walker, who is confident the two Irelands will eventually be united. Residents of Belfast will be watching closely, regardless of their allegiances. In Wales, too, some people bridle at being kept under London’s control. In Scotland, where a referendum on independence from Britain was narrowly defeated in 2014, rhetoric remains heated and officials are pushing for a follow-up vote. But it could offer valuable lessons – at least in what not to do – for the new monarch. But all these years later, the Falls Road and the Shankill remain divided from one another by a “Peace Line” - high walls with steel gates that are still closed each evening.Ĭharles, unwanted by some here and unproven to others, will have to thread his way carefully through the volatility.
The Troubles finally ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In 1979, the IRA assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the queen and mentor to Charles, detonating a bomb planted aboard his fishing boat. The royal family was not immune to the violence. Others on both sides also moved to be near those like them, and the city became even more divided.
After joining the British-allied military she received death threats from the Irish National Liberation Army, forcing a move to the loyalist neighborhood where she has lived ever since.
Over on the Shankill, Humphries, now a housing assistance counselor, recalled that when The Troubles started she was living in an area mixed with both Protestants and Catholics. The Sinn Fein bookstore onsite sells posters with a portrait of Sands over the slogan: “England Get Out of Ireland.” “Once you saw the Brits, once you saw the police, you went running the other way because you were guilty before you innocent,” said Damian Burns, a postal worker, walking to work past the offices of Sinn Fein, the political party long affiliated with the IRA that is now the largest in Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government. Not half a mile away on the Falls Road - the nationalist stronghold that served as base for the Irish Republican Army and its decades-long guerrilla campaign against British rule - those heading to work Tuesday brushed off any suggestion that Charles’ visit could validate the crown’s claim to Northern Ireland. “I think Charles will do just as good a job. “We swore our allegiance to the queen and she stuck by us,” said Jacqueline Humphries, 58, once a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment, established by the British Army to police Northern Ireland during the decades of sectarian violence known as The Troubles. At the foot of a giant mural of a young Elizabeth II proclaiming her “the people’s monarch,” many proud to be her subjects came bearing flowers and notes of emotional farewell. On the street residents call The Shankill - center of a Protestant neighborhood with a long history of loyalty to the crown - British flags fluttered over shops and from light poles. BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) - It’s less than ten minutes walk from the Falls Road to the Shankill Road in Northern Ireland’s capital, where Catholics and Protestants still live in segregated enclaves.īut to hear people in these adjoining neighborhoods explain their almost diametrically opposite views of the British monarchy, it might as well be 1,000 miles.Īnd so as King Charles III arrived in Northern Ireland for the first visit since his mother’s death elevated him to the throne, the voices of Belfast offered a sharp reminder of the country’s persistent, complicated and, at times, bloody political realities.
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