A farewell to arms

Spending the last few days in and around Belfast has proved to be a real eye-opener.

To my eyes the Northern Irish countryside, though undeniably beautiful, does not resemble the postcard-perfect verdant idyll used to sell thousands of pints of Guinness to dumb Americans who claim to have traced their ancestry back to Irish lords of the Middle Ages - the sort we found cluttering up the shop at Giant's Causeway in search of authentic Irish toffee and ginger-haired dolls. Neither, though, do the cities and towns resemble the grim warzone images to which I was exposed by the mass media throughout childhood.

Belfast is a city crawling its way slowly and steadily away from the past. Though the streets are not scarred and disfigured by ubiquitous McDonalds, Starbucks and branches of Gap (not yet, at least - the land of giants is yet to be conquered by the corporate ogres, it seems), there is a modernity and vitality about the city centre, and the huge number of new homes in the suburbs testifies to the vast sums that have been invested and ploughed into redeveloping and regenerating the city.

And yet it is still inextricably bound to what it is trying to leave behind. The past is there in the almost absurdly fortified police stations. It's there in the incredible gable-end murals, which continue to appear overnight - sentimental depictions of "heroes" and "martyrs" in Republican areas, chilling representations of paramilitary might in Loyalist areas. It's even there in the famous Crown Liquor Saloon, in the sign at the bar prohibiting the wearing of football shirts - here, your allegiance could be a matter of life and death.

The lines are still drawn, the territories marked out with mesh fences and flags and bunting and painted kerbstones: it still matters which side of the lines you're standing on. To the English visitor, used to political stability and a secular society where religion matters very little, Belfast can seem an unsettling place.

But things are changing. We spot a car with Republic plates on the Shankhill Road. "You wouldn't have seen that five years ago", we're told, "they would have had their windows put out." Two days later we go up to Flagstaff Point near Newry to admire the view of the mountains. Unfortunately the mist is so thick we can barely see five metres in any direction, but we later learn that "that was a place best avoided during the Troubles". Just being able to be there was what mattered - the freedom of movement, the freedom from fear.