The Troubles Tours have become a big moneymaker in Belfast. Why stop only at the renovated Grand Opera House when you can get your picture taken next to the former fish shop on Shankill Road where a Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb killed 10 people in 1993? Or at the Europa, once known as the most-bombed hotel in Europe?
“We see massive potential here. And who better to deliver those tours than the people who lived the conflict?” said Caoimhin Mac Giolla Mhin, a guide for a group of former republican prisoners who drive visitors through the old war zones of West Belfast, now filled with tidy new brick duplexes and corner cafes.
However, once the tour reaches the Shankill …
“We’re working on a project with a loyalist ex-prisoners group to do joint tours on a daily basis, because I personally don’t want to go over there and talk about their background, their history,” Mac Giolla Mhin says.
Nor, frankly, does he want to go “over there” at all.
“We work with them,” he said. “But that’s work. If I went over into that area and had a pint with that guy? I might not come out of it alive.”
Northern Ireland’s Troubles now a tourist draw (Los Angeles Times)