They were jumbled and in need to be categorized by exhibition. Previously, someone working in the office had organized the exhibition reviews into a scrapbook, showing the accomplishments and press coverage of the shows at Belfast Exposed. 
Nina and I were to look through old newspapers and magazines that had been saved to find the snippets that mentioned Belfast Exposed to then be added to new scrapbooks. The information that we had only dated back to 2005, but even for only three years there have been many exhibition reviews and general information published in local media. 
When we came across full newspapers we had to look through the entire publication in order to find a small advertisement for Belfast Exposed. I found myself stopping at almost every page because of the eye catching headlines that read something like “Loyalist rules out arms move after Real IRA threat”, “The hole truth about 1916". The one that particularly caught my eye was entitled “Cannot trust disbandment” and was supported by a photo of machine guns and a label saying “terrorist weapons”.
This article stated that Justice Minister of the time, Michael McDowell, did not believe that the IRA had given up their weapons even though they were decommissioned, but there really was no way to know for sure. The IRA should still be considered a threat to the community. He went on to deny that Sinn Fein, the political party of the IRA, was a legitimate and legal part of the government. These topics are directly related to the information we have been learning about for the past three weeks and still remain controversial. In the next paper I looked in, The News Letter from Monday, August 29, 2005, I found a full page article about an Indian cultural festival in the botanic gardens in Belfast. On the opposite page was a huge headline “IRA members will end up in police-ford” talking about the concerns that the community had about allowing IRA members into the police force. This was a bit shocking to me to find these stories right next to each other because it made the happenings of the IRA, a known paramilitary group, seem like ordinary news. This festival was a celebration of the Indian community in Northern Ireland and I guess that I just assumed it would be separated from the intense political news stories. This also shows that news about paramilitaries are very common in the daily news. After thirty years of violence, these types of stories may be old hat, but that it was placed next to a fun and celebratory story made the other stories of violence, murder, terrorism, etc. seem just as if they were on common and expected.
This was a feeling that I have gotten from talking to many people while in Northern Ireland. On a taxi ride into Belfast my driver commented on the small gypsy population that lives in trailers on the outskirts of the city.
He told a very interesting story going something like this: He and an old girlfriend were out at a bar during the height of the troubles. On the way home they walked right into the midst of some IRA members hijacking a bus and bombing it. There was open fire and explosions in the street, so the taxi driver and his girlfriend ducked behind a car to avoid the crossfire. In the midst of this outbreak, the gypsies came out to rummage though the bus parts. I agree that it was crazy for the gypsies to run into the middle of fighting for bus parts, but the driver told the story as if getting trapped in gunfire was something like that happened everyday. I cannot imagine becoming so used to that kind of violence that I could talk about it as a normal and frequent experience.A writer who lectured the Bucknell in Northern Ireland group this week, Arthur Higgins told us of his travel to Florida a few years back. He said that him and a friend wanted to go to the Virgin Records Megastore in Miami.
There were not able to enter the store because a car had been blown up in front of the entrance. He told his friend that it was not a big deal and they would simply have to wait 45 minutes before they could enter the store. In the US, an occurrence like that would take much longer to clear up and have a huge effect on the public, but because he was so used to these kinds of things happening that he was able to downplay the significance of it. Later in that trip, he and a friend wanted to take a hike so he said that they were going to hike a mountain. This mountain turned out to be much more like a small hill, but it was so much easier for him to exaggerate the size of a mountain than accept the significance of a car bomb. This shows that the people of Northern Ireland are so accustomed to bombs and violence that they do not want to accept them as important and terrifying. Everyone that I have met here who has talked about their involvement in the conflict, portrays the events as ordinary and insignificant, even though most of the time the things they have experienced were scary and dangerous. The location and frequency of conflict related stories in the newspapers, personal accounts of run ins with violence and the inability for people in general to accept the magnitude of this violence seems to be just a part of living in Northern Ireland. I feel that living through these kinds of experiences would force one to downplay their importance just in order to accept that those kinds of things actually happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment