Ireland Plans

I put up the link to the surprisingly dangerous places because friends just returned from Ireland and said that they felt unsafe in Belfast and Londonderry and recommended against staying there. Well, those were the two places we were going to stay the most nights on our counter-clockwise tour from Dublin to Aran/Limerick in May. (You can make suggestions what we should see, but the itinerary is already overcrowded and we are at the point of cutting back ruthlessly before making sleeping reservations.  We would be more interested in what you found overrated than in "overlooked gems of Ireland."  We are swimming in those, frankly. Which provokes another line of thought...) The amount of barriers and camera surveillance bothered them, but there was also a sense of ancient hatreds still being nursed rather than strangled. Even reading the tourist information I had the sense that the museums and the public displays were still Troubles-focused, as if nothing else of importance had every occurred there. (Yay, prehistory!  Yay, geology! Yay, landscapes! Some things force their way through our resentments.) 

I recalled something similar from the other side when I was in Shannon airport over a decade ago, and the bookstore had an unusual preponderance of memoirs of oppression and biographies of IRA martyrs. Can you just DROP it? I kept muttering. And now I have the same feeling in Northern Ireland Can you just drop it? Neither will, because the other won't. Yet underneath it is a phenomenon we have seen in America as well, which Chuck Klosterman, Bethany, and I have related to the Tim Tebow Effect.  Everyone believes that their side of the issue has not been heard. 

It is easy to find repeated evidence for this if you are on the scene and care about these things.  Tourists come in and don't know about the basic layout of British rule, the Scots-Irish, property ownership, jobs, and the like. Worse, they get things backwards, vaguely thinking that Michael Collins was an Ulster martyr or that Derry and Londonderry are different cities. Tourists get everyone's history everywhere wrong.  You're not special in this.  Get over it.  I saw the same thing in Romania and Hungary, where whenever I mentioned Oradea to a Hungarian they would say "Nagyvarad.  We used to own that." Just drop it, will you? Robert Kaplan mentions that every intellectual in the Balkans seems to have alternate maps in a drawer of their studies, showing the boundaries of Greater Serbia or whatever. Wars attract historical memories, so that Americans are more focused on 1770-1790 or 1850-1870 than other years. But y'know, the people who lived in 1740 or 1920 were just as important. War isn't the only thing that ever happened.

So these are in some sense low-crime areas, yet one still feels nervous. Add in the apparently growing problem of antisocial drunks and perhaps the evening especially are not the carefree times we would think.

I was a touched surprised at the other entries on the list, the northern European cities we think of as safe. Well, the nations are largely safe. Amsterdam and Rotterdam may have crime pouring in, but it's pretty quiet outside the cities.  Part of that is shear numbers. With identical crime rates, a million people are going to have a thousand times more crimes than a thousand people. But there is also the issue of who lives in these places.  People go to cities to make money, and the criminals go there to make money as well.  Going to rural places might be a great place to go to avoid the law, but you aren't going there to make your fortune breaking the law. So too in America. Grim is fond of pointing out that there are large areas in America that have zero homicide rates. Part of that is the numbers of density, sure, but some of it is who is there. 

Immigrants come to make money, and they start out in cities, unless they are specifically agricultural. The social contract is different for them.  Many become hyper-American, distancing themselves from the places they left as thoroughly as possible.  Others still retain ties to other countries to an extent that their loyalty could fairly be questioned.  The people bringing all those drugs into Rotterdam who were born in other places and still go their frequently?  What does "being Dutch" mean to them, exactly? Are they going to care about the schools, or took take a Grim favorite again, join the volunteer fire department? 

So we're figuring there won't be a lot of crime or intimidation at the Hill of Tara or Craggaunowen folk park and are doubling down on those places at the expense of the cities. Bangor has a castle, the Dark Hedges, and a museum that look like fun. We may give the Bogside Murals a glance, but the Sky Road and the Aran Islands are likely worth more of a look.  We'll catch CS Lewis Square in Belfast on the fly.  Photo op.