19 strange things about the train between Dublin and Belfast

It’s a beautiful journey. I’m enjoying the scenery right now. But the Belfast-Dublin train has more than a few quirks and flaws.

1. The train is not called the ‘Belfast-Dublin train’ but ‘Enterprise’, the name of a spaceship.
2. You can book on two different websites, the Northern one and Southern one. But the websites know where you are.
3. In the North, when you book online you get a QR code which then has to be scanned on arrival at the station in Belfast. Then you get a printed ticket, which you take elsewhere to get a little hole punched in it. Then you can get on the train.
4. In the South, when you book online you get a number which you put into to a machine which then prints your ticket.
5. You can’t select seats if you book from the North, but you can if you book from the South.
6. You get a big reduction if you book online 72 hours in advance.
7. When you get on in Belfast, lots of seats have red lights, meaning they are booked. But there is no one around looking for them, and you don’t know if you can sit on them.
8. Sometimes the Enterprise is not the Enterprise, but a Northern Ireland Railways train.
9. If this happens, there is no first class, so someone goes around handing out little paper forms which people fill in to claim their refund.
10. The window seats have a protruding section at the floor meaning you can’t sit with your legs straight.
11. Often there are not enough seats, so you stand.
12. Wifi comes and goes.
13. The train slows down here and there for no apparent reason.
14. The train takes at least two hours and ten minutes to go ninety miles.
15. There are only eight trains a day.
16. The coffee cups from the trolley come with these weird plastic filters.   
17. If you want to take a different train back from Dublin to the one you booked, you have to pay a penalty except you might not have to.
18. Arriving to depart in Dublin, you can’t just get on the train, but you are sent into a dedicated waiting room where you sit or stand until close to the departure time, at which point the crowd surges onto the platform.
19. In this waiting room, birds fly.

Politicians on poetry

In the town I grew up in, there was a local character called Martin Ford who would hand-write long poems of four-line verses. He’d photocopy them, give them to people on the street, and put them up in shop windows.

They were not ‘good’ poems. Lines were bludgeoned until they rhymed. Even in the pre-online world, it was a slightly crazy thing to do. But I get now what he was doing. He captured the voice of a lot of people on local and international issues, and he did it in a way that anyone could understand.

I remembered Martin Ford after this event last night – Poetry and Politics, part of the Imagine Festival. Moderated by the BBC’s William Crawley, Emma Little-Pengelly (DUP), Kate Nicholl (Alliance), Claire Hanna (SDLP), and Deirdre Hargey (Sinn Féin) read three favourite poems and talked about the role of poetry and language in politics and life. Doug Beattie (UUP) couldn’t make it.  

Thirty-minutes in, I was getting a little worried. We’d had Sinn Féin recite Bobby Sands, the DUP eulogise Paisley’s, and the King James Bible’s, ways with words, and the Alliance Party express concern for refugees. Maybe this format was just going to prove that we all really do live in separate cultural silos in Northern Ireland. But that’s not at all where we ended up.

Most of the discussion had little to do with ‘cultural traditions’ or politics, even in the broadest sense, nor anything as Northern-Irishly predictable as how ‘art bring can us together’ (which it can). It was about poetry!

The fact that these were politicians turned out to be incidental. What mattered was that they were non-poetry types, showing us the everyday value of accessible, plain poetry. The poems we heard (CS Lewis, Hollie McNish, Derek Mahon, Maya Angelou and others) were all comprehensible. I mean, you actually knew what they were on about. The first time.

We surely need more events like this. They would help give people permission to like poetry, something, the panel noted, many people feel they don’t have.  

One man in the audience commented it’s hard to actually find poetry these days. It’s on social media, although even then you must look for it, or be chosen by an algorithm. William Crawley mentioned how some people read a poem a day, and wondered what this might do for our imaginations. Emma Little-Pengelly said we all need more beauty in our lives. There was audible emotion in some of the readings, and it’s pretty amazing how a poem can do this – within seconds, even when we know what’s coming.  

Heaney, apparently, was banned by the organisers, presumably because he’s a little too easy for Irish people to reach for. But William Crawley wasn’t having it and read a killer one, The Skylight.

Add in a lot of banter and anecdotes, and a great night was had by all, as they say.

I’m away to track down a photocopier.

Another ordinary extraordinary event about the peace process

Last night I gambled the blizzard on the Sydenham Bypass to make it to Holywood Methodist Church. Brian Rowan – a ‘veteran journalist’ if ever there was one – was in conversation with another well-known colleague, Mervyn Jess. The event was organised with the Centre for Cross Border Studies and was part of the Creative Holywood Festival.

As a fan of significant and old bits of paper, the concept of the event appealed to me. It involved 25 documents from Rowan’s personal collection which charted the last thirty years of peace processing in Northern Ireland. It traced media history too: they ranged from paragraphs written on a typewriter, scribbles on a taxi voucher, to tweets.

It felt like half the peace process was in the church. Maybe, if there’d been no snow, the other half would have been there also. As Rowan discussed the documents, he called on various conflict/peace figures from all sides to add their thoughts on the moments he was discussing. It was a remarkable event format, as if people were walking out of history for cameos in a reconstruction, directed by a participant-chronicler of that history.   

There were quite a few factual nuggets which were new to me, like the Ulster Unionists apparently knowing nothing about prisoner releases (one of the most difficult aspects of the Agreement for unionists) until the day before Good Friday. But always on the lookout for ‘the themes’, this is what I noted down:

• In the early 1990s, there were all kinds of un-coordinated conversations going on between church leaders, politicians, paramilitaries, and governments. Rowan called this ‘spaghetti junction’. In the cameo contributions, it was clear that no actor had the full picture at any one time. All a nightmare for historians, then.

• The peace process was not inevitable. The IRA ceasefire was not expected, and no one knew what it meant. The Agreement talks could easily have collapsed in the final days.

• There was also some interesting stuff about journalism in a peace process. Rowan recalled a time in 2000 when he felt compelled to report what he was being told – that the IRA was not going to decommission – even though he knew it would be bad for the peace process because it would spook unionists.

• There was, as is common, a certain amount of nostalgia for the political leadership of the 1990s. Progressive loyalist leader David Ervine, especially, appeared to have a great grasp of the role he had to play in 1998 in supporting Trimble. Rowan said that subsequently, amid the feuds of the early 2000s, ‘the peace process did not abandon loyalism, loyalism abandoned the peace process’.

Later in the event, we watched video interviews with young people about their hopes for Northern Ireland. I can reveal that those hopes did not involve violence, or more Orange-Green politics. They were probably in nappies for the DUP-Sinn Féin deal in 2007, never mind about 1998, and it occurred to me that if all you’d ever known were stop-start devolution and lots of conflict legacy controversies, without having experienced how we got here, you really would be befuddled. Or maybe not? What young people might really struggle to grasp is how extraordinary an event like this is – a conversation, a warm one even, between old foes. But we all get blasé about that kind of thing.

We had a closing word from Rev. Harold Good, another witness to much of this history. He jokingly denied it was a churchy ‘epilogue’, but that’s pretty much what it was, and it’s what was appropriate. With clerical gravitas, he noted the remarkable journeys of some of the people in the audience, and pointed out that there are still plenty of people in Northern Ireland who need to go on a journey. ‘Gratitude for the past, and trust in the future’, was his final message.

At the end, I ran in to a previous student of mine who, it turns out, is now working in an impressive field related to his course. Perhaps I should leave the house more often.

It was all being filmed, so if this event ends up on NVTV or somewhere, it’s worth a watch.