Photo Essay: Belfast Black Taxi Tours
By Jarrett Brown
Written on 11 August 2008
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The Belfast Black Taxi Tours in Northern Ireland showed the amazing political murals of the Troubles between the Protestants and Catholics including the "Peace Wall" separating the two groups. Tours now walk the streets where tanks once rolled.
Belfast Black Taxi Tours
The Belfast Black Taxi Tours in Northern Ireland showed the amazing political murals of the Troubles between the Protestants and Catholics including the "Peace Wall" separating the two groups. It symbolizes that Belfast is indeed open for business after many years of troubling times.
Northern Ireland is packed with political murals from the times of the Troubles when the Protestants and Catholics battled over leadership and rights. Belfast, as well as the rest of Northern Ireland, has hundreds of murals depicting the struggles of each side. The Black Taxi Tours of Belfast take people around the areas to see the murals. The Catholic murals show many freedom fighters such as Bobby Sands who died for Catholic rights in Northern Ireland. The Protestant murals show the British and Belfast heritage such as the Union Jack and Oliver Cromwell to muster support for tradition. In the middle of the two neighborhoods runs the "Peace Wall", a wall designed to protect both sides from one another. They still close the gates at night to this day. The Black Taxi Tours provide a wonderful and historical account of the entire struggle.
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18 August 2008, george clake said:
The hard hitting facts. We all seen Belfast’s troubled past on our TV screens and now 1000’s of people want to see for themselves what was going on.
www.belfastattractions.co.uk
A war torn city is how Belfast could be described with the bombs, the bullets and the riots taking hold of the city. The heart felt images that were broadcast around the world have all but gone, but the key sites and history remains to be told
20 August 2008, george clake said:
I also studied what was quickly named The Troubles in Northern Ireland at school, as part of History GCSE. What I am trying to tell you is that many of these images that people in Northern Ireland see every day, I saw on the news after school, and looked at in books during the day.
http://www.belfastblacktaxitours.com
I wanted to take one of the Black Taxi Tours to BOTH sides of the Peace Wall divide (you have to look for a taxi with a yellow sticker on the front, white or green stickered taxis can only stay on one side, thus you only get half the story according to our man in the taxi) and our driver promised to try and get us all through the political history tour in one hour 30 minutes (pounds sterling are used in Northern Ireland. In Eire, or Southern Ireland, it's Euros) and as he was an official guide, I thought it was something of a bargain