Review: Black Taxi Tour, Belfast

By Christina Morin

After having lived in Belfast for a couple of months, I reckoned I’d lost my newcomer tourist rights and would therefore have to wait for visitors to take a Black Taxi Tour. Accordingly, when guests from the US arrived a couple of weeks ago, I jumped at the chance to show them around Belfast via one of these much-celebrated taxi tours.

Available from a seemingly endless array of companies, black taxi tours are essentially exactly what it says on the tin – a tour of the city from the (dis)comfort of a (not always) black taxi.  The history of these tours apparently stems from twinned tourist interest in but anxiety about wandering around on foot in certain areas of Belfast – the Falls Rd., the Shankill, the ever-changing display of murals around these areas, peace lines, etc. Although I imagine the tourist industry would be quick to deny any current threat to tourists taking in the sights on a walk through the city, a black taxi tour is, as advertised by the companies themselves, a pretty much guaranteed way of getting a safe and comfortable tour from a very knowledgeable guide with an incredible familiarity with the streets of Belfast and their sights.

Review: If Lynch had invaded

Contributed by Brian Hanley

If Lynch had invaded? RTÉ 1, 1 September 2009

Time and word count are limted, so I’ll get to the point: a terrible waste of talent and production values, with no need at all for the final half an hour of sub Saving Private Ryan dramatics. If you are making a documentary on Brian Boru I can see why you may feel that reconstructions are neccesary. However there was a wealth of excellent archival footage and a wide range of interviewees (the ex-Irish soldiers were the best); why not stick to that? Presenter Tom Clonan in his army landrover driving around Newry was particularly ill-judged. All so that the programme could conclude that Lynch got it right (again) and weren’t we lucky to avoid some terrible bloodshed. At least Des O’Malley noted that actually 3,500 plus people died in a slow-drip civil war over the next 30 years. Admidst the neccesary hype to grab viewers the impression was given that the ‘invasion’ plan was news. In fact the key documents have been available to researchers since 2001 and have been written about on several occasions. (See the Cedar Lounge Revolution blog.)

While the idea of serried ranks of Irish troops crossing the border in Panhard armoured cars may cause hearts to quiver in the post-Articles 2 & 3 era, in fact there is nothing at all surprising in the Irish government contemplating this, given that they regarded the six counties as Irish territory (a revelation that they planned incursions into, say, Wales, would have been truly shocking) and that almost the entire southern establishment had at various stages sworn to end partition.