Walking the Falls: Dark tourism and the significance of movement on the political tour of West Belfast

Introduction – walking the Falls

‘I like him but, oh my God, he tried to kill people’. The flame-haired, mature student repeated this exclamation to her friends throughout the tour we were on. ‘I like him but, oh my God, he tried to kill people’. We were walking the Falls, taking a walking political tour of West Belfast along the Nationalist Falls Road led by a Republican ex-prisoner. Liam is a zealous Republican and lay historian and public educator. His mission is to use political tourism to educate and promote the Republican ideology. He does this as a tour guide of West Belfast from the Divis Tower, a once militarised block of flats with listening posts on the top two floors, up to Milltown Cemetery, taking in the wall murals, the Peace Wall, Republican places of struggle, protest and violence on the streets - the clashes between members of the Irish Republican Army and either the British Army or the Loyalist paramilitaries from the Shankill Road nearby.

Liam is a self-styled tour guide of West Belfast, a professional ‘pathfinder’ (Cohen, 1985: 7) who spins a tale of struggle from pre-1920 partition of north and south, through particularly vicious Troubles from the end of the 1960s to the end of Margaret Thatcher’s Prime Ministership in 1990, and on into the 1990s and the new Millennium of Peace Agreements and slow and haltering attempts at reconciliation. But Liam is no detached ‘coach fella’, the bus driver and tour destination narrator as found in the South (Costa, 2009). Through the historical narrative of his walking political tour, Liam himself has gone from Irish Republican Army (IRA) supporter to IRA prisoner to IRA explainer, narrating the Republican cause in different forms and to different audiences. Liam is implicated, quite literally, in the tour and its subject matter. Liam is a well-known figure in West Belfast, an ex-prisoner from Long Kesh gaol, and now a successful tour guide. He sustains a diatribe against the British state’s control of Northern Ireland. He has no contention against the British public, any English resident of Northern Ireland or visitor. Very well read, Liam was an ideal choice of tour guide for my second and third year Anthropology of Tourism class at Queen’s University Belfast, comprising a lively mix of local, mature and international students.

What started out as a deliberately challenging escorted tour workshop with these students soon became a working study in dark tourism, embodiment and the walking tour. It led to my uneasy interview over coffee with Liam several weeks later, a debriefing, where I felt very self-conscious about my Englishness. My national background made me uneasy about greeting and working with a former terrorist, that is, to shake his hand or not, to subordinate my political views or not, to acknowledge my sources at work or in my publications or not. The interview started with me hastily swapping around my note-taking pen, a freebee from a local student recruitment fair with ‘British Commando – 99.9% need not apply’ emblazoned across it. Liam was settled, relaxed and at ease, putting me at ease too during the interview by starting with a disorientating question: ‘Would it matter to you who the tour guide is, whether it’s a local, somebody from England, somebody from Dublin or somebody who hasn’t been connected with the conflict?’

Authenticity underpinned the interview with Liam as well as his dark tour. The students found themselves drawn to this friendly and charismatic tour guide who talked with them casually, who bantered and shared stories like friends catching up with each other. I liked Liam for his candour and his very well articulated convictions. They liked him for his smile, his banter, the guide’s ‘schtick’ (Feldman, 2007), his ‘engaging tactics talks’ (Bras and Dahles, 1999: 128) and ‘phatic chit-chat’ (Fine and Speer, 1985: 77). But we all had an ‘Oh my God’ moment with him. Here was someone before us ‘who had taken the bullet’ and who had given the bullet. Here was a martyr. Here was an ally. Here was an enemy. Here was a tour guide with a difference: an intimacy, a passion, a personal connection, a living history with the subject of his work. As a tour, this was not to be a scripted history. This was a tour of enlivened memories and ambivalent feelings for potential pilgrims entering a charged political environment. Liam had been there. Stay close, listen carefully and you will pick up extra snippets of his story.

‘Walking Politics’ and the politics of walking

Walking is a habituating spatio-temporal practice. It is ‘time inbetween’ (Solnit, 2002: xiii). This way of moving is fundamentally liminal as the means to a place – unless we are considering it as the tourists’ or pilgrims’ pleasure. Amongst the latter, walking narrates and gives a continuity of and between sights and places unlike the sudden passenger arrival by car, coach or plane. As normative as it is liberating, walking – and marching (Bryan, 2000) – has long been associated with resistance, social protest (Gooch, 2008) and occupation (Katz, 1985). This bipedal ambulism equalises and creates solidarity in all. It resists new technologies of Modernity. Collectively, it is a weapon of the weak, collective and intimate at the same time, ‘a resistance by moving feet’ (Gooch, 2008: 79). It is also therapeutic in its rhythms: healing by walking has long been the pilgrim’s route (Egan, 2012), inner orientation through orienteering. Walking forces an engagement of the senses, binocular viewing at head height – a sense of fluidity with parallax vision and physical perceptions of the environment from the breeze on the face to the texture of the ground and the interactions with the people and environment around one, the smells, the touches or brushes past one another.

The tourists on the political tour are having their imaginations shaped and dictated by the tour guide and fabulist. The tour guide uses urban alchemy to sell versions of the public to the public for Katz (2010: 27), writing out of Los Angeles. In New York, Wynn (2011) refers to guides as ‘the ground troops of the travel industry’ (p. 6). They use low-tech blended learning techniques to focus the visitor, locating them with their ‘mobile stories’, ‘re-enchanting’ neighbourhoods with their ‘magical urbanism’. In short, they are a ‘small-scale counterpoint to the perceived “Disneyfication” of cities’ (Wynn, 2011: 7). Engaging flâneurs with purpose, the guide ‘facilitates’ and ‘encapsulates’ (Pond, 1993). The walking tour is an example of applied heritage in a natural setting in India: the guide as broker, the walk as ‘manifestation of the creative and cultural industry’ (Jafa, 2012: xxiii). It is a living experience, part improvised in the negotiation of life around the tourist, part structured as the guide finds the path for everyone as the group filters through the streets. There is a tension and risk (Lysaght, 1995) in such activity, an impulsion and repulsion through the streets of West Belfast as cosmopolitan thoroughfare takes on dark imaginative import as patrols, ambushes and shootouts are conveyed to the guide’s eager audience. This is the unholy alliance or ‘odd conjunction’ between death and tourism (see Seaton, 2012: 521) found in this leisure activity and form of entertainment. It is edge-leisure as opposed to edgework (Lyng, 1990) in a modern, risk-free society, an opportunity to connect and feel alive through imaginative glimpses into the dead of the past.

Thomas Widlok (2008: 59) makes the point that walking a route or trail, opening a path, is not necessarily an expansive act. Opening a space is also a closing of space. Thus, we might say that Liam’s tour constructions select routes for the tourist’s gaze (Urry, 1994) and deselect other possible routes or destinations. They are deliberately ‘Republican’ in their leanings. He hands over to a Protestant tour guide operation at the cross-over gate between the two territories. They are often asked to shake hands and to pose with the dark tourists. The tour guides decline the handshake but will pose for the tourist pictures. That was up to 6 months ago. Now, with some recent dissident paramilitary action, there has been a heightened tension in and between the two communities such that they no longer meet each other or exchange tourists from one tour to another. These tensions increase the interest in the dark tours, as though they are a part of a Cold War living history.

On the political tour, the bodies grouped, bunched, shivered, shook, darted up the Falls Road and, if time and bookings allowed, down the Shankill. Walking the Falls leg of the road, the tour guide brings to life the regulated sterility of a familiar modern urban street. However, the Falls is not the typical pacified, streamlined and efficient movement space or urban ‘deodorised blandscape’ in the words of Drobnick (2002: 34). It is a territory politicised and interpreted by the tour guide and a place of ominous expectation for tourists – some of whom are former combatants in the Troubles revisiting locations of struggle where the debris has been cleared but for the traumatised mind. Former soldiers, more often than former paramilitaries – those nostalgic for the Falls of their service years – relive a circumstance more as revenants than pilgrims. Walking the Falls, the tourists practise a mediated gazing-in-walking (Larsen, 2001: 87), stopping, starting and recording their visit with an image of each Black Spot (Rojek, 1993). The tour guide gives them a feeling of safety during this Troubles Tourism as noted by Daily Mail columnist Frank Barrett (2007): ‘I’m not sure I’d have felt comfortable wandering around here on my own taking photographs. A guide, however, provided an instant entrée into Falls Road life.’ That entrée has its exits in the relief shown on the relaxed faces, in the more open, swinging gait and in the casual chatter of tourists and students, many of whom are leaving a part of Belfast they had never visited and, like myself, would not think to walk around unattended.

In a Turnerian scheme of things, the tourists are like liminal pilgrims in the ritual social drama of the tour (Turner and Turner, 1978). Indeed, most are committed to viewing the Republican martyrs’ graves as they ascend the Nationalist road. Yet, as we shall see, the tourists’ Belfast Falls Road guide is neither just a Republican apostle leading a congregation of visiting tourists nor just a post-conflict Troubles apologist working with peace and reconciliation students. He is a complex living character appreciated for his candour, his experiences and skills and for not having developed a ‘commodified persona’ (Bunten, 2008) for the tourists’ edutainment. He is in part a small-scale local entrepreneur hustling and marshalling his visitors, working an experience for the tourist composed of special stops he has ‘sacralized’ and interprets; with him, an unassuming street becomes transformed into a socially important historical sight (cf. Fine and Speer, 1985; MacCannell, 1976). While not a religious experience, walking the Falls is nevertheless sacred in its distinction from the mundane as the walks’ stops are framed and ‘elevated’ for consumption. There is a reverence for the guide’s local knowledge and firsthand experience of the Troubles and general subordination to his stewardship, as we shall see. Here follows Liam’s walking tour of the Falls.

Liam’s dark Turais

This will be a political tour and it will be from a Republican, Irish Republican perspective because I am an Irish Republican … Are you familiar with the IRA? I myself was in the IRA. I spent 15 years in prison, so when we’re doing these tours it will be from a Republican perspective. Now the tour will take one and a half hours: it’s a short walk, but we will be stopping at different sites to talk about things, talking about murals and talking about sites of interest that I think are interesting. … It is coming from my own experiences of having lived here, and still living here, and also my view of the world, not only of Ireland, but I have an opinion on different places in the world … So. Am I speaking slowly enough? Can you understand?

Walking the Falls varies just as it does with the impartial Blue Badge tour of HMP Maze/Long Kesh (Skinner, 2014) or the sanitised and Troubles-free visit to Crumlin Road Gaol. The experience is dependent upon the guide, the tourist group (their knowledge of the Troubles; politics, motivations and expectations; size, age and language), the time given to the walk, ongoing sectarian tensions – and the weather of course. In all, six tours were made with Liam and several tours were made with other guides working up the Falls and Black Cab Taxi Tours for contrast. Tours were studied by participants, audio recorded and digitally filmed, assessed individually and as a group and written about by students exploring and assessing the experience. They were also examined by a dancer/choreographer to fully appreciate the group dynamics of the tour and the ‘structured movement system’ (Kaeppler, 2000) utilised by the guide. In short, the research was both comprehensive and partial. It highlighted different understandings, different interests and very different reactions to the tour guide and his narrative, as well as to the nature of the tour itself.

The tour begins below the bottom of the Falls Road at the Divis Tower on Divis Street that segues into the Falls. Recently, the walls along the road leading to this first point beyond the city centre have been painted with community group slogans and West Belfast tourism promotions for taxi and walking tours. They cue the visitor into the experience. It is an ideal rendezvous point and tour start point as a distinctive tower block, area next to parking, and an historical marker of the Troubles where nine-year old child resident Patrick Rooney was accidentally shot by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Until 2005, the top two floors were used as a British Army observation post, helicoptering in relief and supplies rather than brave the Republican streets. Here, the guide must quickly establish themselves and the nature and tone of the tour. The audience must be swept up on board, put at their ease as to their safety but not as to the challenges they might be faced with. This is not a neutral event where the guide interprets both sides of the Troubles. Right from the start, Liam establishes that he is ‘not an apologist’. He has a healthy regard for his clientele but he will argue with them if they challenge him. He has no complaints with the British in his audience, only with the British state. As the tour group coalesces, he tests them with Irish Gaelic to see if and how they reply. With a group of local students, he jokes with them telling them that some of the regions in the city where they come from are not really the Belfast that is around them. And with a warning about traffic and dog shit, we are off.

St Comgall’s Primary School is the first stop along a busy road. Abandoned barring some community wall murals, it is a relic to the Troubles, pockmarked with some bullet holes dating back to some of the first Loyalist attacks in the early 1970s. The juxtaposition between bustling urban present and reminders of a past of despair remind me of the bullet holes in the Orthodox Cathedral and above the McDonalds in Timisoara following the Autumn of Nations uprisings in December 1989. More locally, the imagination is cast back to the 70s decade of my youth and to television relayed images of running battles and machine gun assaults in the streets linking the two communities. This imagination of the Troubles is facilitated by Liam who accounts for IRA actions within a narrative of defence and saving a religio-national community from ethnic cleansing. This is a sharp entry point to the Falls Road where the political environment still crackles.

The pavement widens as the party moves on to the International Wall at the top of Divis Street. This is the iconic tourist attraction in West Belfast. Where the pavement opens out, there is, on the other side of the road, a series of wall murals that commemorate and communicate to the passing viewers. It is a junction point where traffic stops, where Black Cabs pull over, and where guides stand, point and explain the various panels: a local take on Picasso’s La Guernica; a political map showing support for Basque nationalism; images of prominent Republicans incarcerated and seeking POW status; images of West Belfast black taxis that have provided transport to the community throughout the Troubles – and continue to do so; faces betraying sectarian and racist harassment from Arkansas ’57, South Belfast ’09, Ardoyne 2001; a Joe Sacco-like version of Nick Ut’s iconic girl running from napalm image from the Vietnam War transposed to bloodied children fleeing Israeli ground troops occupying Gaza – an image growing in dimension by locals adding tea lights in solidarity. Liam stops us on the corner with the Falls Road. There, the corner picture is of a large face of recently deceased Republican Brendan Hughes in front of painted posters of his blanket protest and hunger strike protests in the ‘H-block’ (Maze/Long Kesh).

At this point in the tour, an explanation point for the murals, Liam naturally brings the group together on the other side of the road and uses the mural to talk about the experience of the Troubles from a Republican activist’s perspective. It is here that the authenticity of the tour-teller comes to the fore. In video analyses, we observed that the group that had previously straggled along Divis Street, some failing to catch up and ‘dandering’ along, congregated around him. They went from a line of tourists looking at the murals he was pointing at, externally, to a close circle around him listening to his own account of his time ‘on the blanket’ as a Republican prisoner in ‘the Kesh’ demanding special status. We are intoxicated by his first-person narrative accompanied by the physical movements of him recalling how he wrapped his blanket around his naked body. His hands go up; he shivers; he draws the blanket over his shoulders and wraps it tight around his chest:

Have you any questions … Are you still cold? Just a little bit about myself, and how I ended up in gaol: when I was … 18, I was arrested and I was taken to a police station and I made a statement admitting to … and when I was sentenced to gaol, I was on protest with other men. At this stage, there were 14 of us. We refused to wear prison uniform, so we just wore a blanket, and the day … It was January 197x, and I was smaller. I was very thin and it was a really cold day and I had no clothes, so we just wrapped the blanket around you, with no socks … The cells we were in were very cold, so that was known as the blanket protest.

He passes this memory on into our tourist imaginations and our own bodies start to grow cold and tremble. Tourist mouths are open. The circle around the guide closes as if to warm him. Then comes the flaming question: ‘What were you there for? Did you kill someone?’ This question arrives when there has been a rapport built up with the tour group. Liam gives these tours, sometimes up to five times a week. He finds them engaging rather than a chore. He is wary and has to be careful with what he says, and aware of whom he might be talking to. Indeed, the tours started five years previously after a tourist was listening in to his explanations to friends along the Falls. She drew the personal out of his account and suggested that he was in a position to develop his story and integrate it into the story of the Falls. This began with diffidence and some reticence, fully aware that the ‘terrorist’ category can be just as off-putting as it can be alluring.

*****

Coming towards the end of the tour, this woman says in my ear, ‘do you mind telling me about it?’ And I was really taken about because it was in the context of what I was talking about. She was, just, she had obviously been thinking about it. … I’d built up a rapport with the group over a two hour period and maybe she felt she could comfortably ask the question. And her friend, before I could say anything, her friend snapped, ‘you don’t ask anybody any questions like that’. And I said, ‘no I didn’t’. … I had no problem with her asking it. … (V)ery often people would say, ‘where did you keep the guns?’ and ‘how did you know how to use that?’ And they ask questions like that. And that’s maybe a local person. You don’t ask questions like that, you know. There’s things that I would maybe ask anybody, but I would be really curious.

*****

Sometimes the tour guide gets criticism from his audience. On several occasions Liam fielded not just tricky questions but also oppositional politics or reconciliation ideologies. On one of our tours, a student argued with him about the one-sided nature of the murals. On another, a student expressed sympathy for Palestine but felt aggrieved that the plight of the oppressed there was being made to seem equivalent to that of West Belfast. She felt that the internationalisation of the conflict through association with other instances of oppression and discrimination was inappropriate. These associations make the tours more engaging and are a part of continuing the Republican struggle for Liam.

From the murals, the tour can differ and go north to Conway Mill and the Irish Republican History Museum, or 200 metres further up the road on the left to the Garden of Remembrance, a small but well maintained memorial garden to those volunteers (D Company, 2^nd Battalion) and civilians of the Falls area who lost their lives during the conflict. While this is not a burial ground, there are grave headstones set in a manicured and well-tended garden visible through railings from the main road. One dedication reads:

In dedication to the memory and in honour of those volunteers of D company who died of natural causes in serving the cause of Irish Republicanism, and to the men, women and children of this community who stood united, resolute and in defiance of the British war machine. Their bravery and courage will be etched in the annals of Irish Republicanism and indelible in the minds of generations to come.

It is further up the road that tourists come to the Milltown Cemetery with its Republican plots, though, in our condensed tour of West Belfast, reverence is reserved for here. We take photographs, stand around in hushed reverence, and listen to the guide telling us about the history of the tricolour from design to symbolism and censorship.

A tour typically takes in the Bobby Sands mural on the gable of the Sinn Fein office. The posthumous message here marshals the viewer, whether Republican ‘or otherwise’. Images of breaking prison chains, the face of the lead hunger striker and resident Member of Parliament (MP) spread the vision. This living history is added to by recent ‘Brits Out’ and anti-H Block (Maze Prison/Long Kesh Gaol) stickers curling around the lampposts, and our guide greeting locals in Gaelic and occasionally leading into their own commentaries on what it was like in the Maze. A turn to the right along the terraced Sevastapol Street, left up Odessa and onto Clonard Gardens where the monastery served as a secret meeting ground during the negotiation of a peace in Northern Ireland. And on to the iconic Bombay Street to view the peace line wall and fence overshadowing the back of terrace houses, many with cages in to protect the inhabitants from missiles thrown from the other side. The ‘mural’ here is canvas, a remembrance of August 1969 when there were sectarian riots, running gun battles through the streets, and over 150 Catholic families were burned out of their homes. There is a colour image of Bombay Street on fire, a mother sheltering her child and negative-like black and white images below of the destruction wrought. Titled ‘Never Again’, it is dedicated to a junior member of the IRA killed on 15 August 1969. It overlooks Clonard Martyrs Memorial Garden where there are other names and faces of those who lost their lives defending these streets. The main image is described by the guide as a photographic version of a mural further down the street, one labelled with a bleaker arms statement: ‘No Decommission’. The conflict has become increasingly personalised during the tour: restrictive, claustrophobic and cramped. Here, the tourists’ close proximity to the experiences of those who suffer/ered the Troubles is seen in the small space between the two communities, the thin peace line, the cramped streets next to each other’s communities and the jostling as we walk down some of them. ‘It is all so intense and immediate’, declared one Iranian conflict studies academic during her tour. ‘It is right on top of you’, she went on to add later after she had looked up at the murals surrounding her on the Falls Road, and the protective fencing above us and the enclosures protecting the back gardens and windows down Bombay Street.

Rather than proceed to the Upper Falls Road, a lot of the tours wind down in this tributary. A walk back to the Divis flats can involve a stop in the Sinn Fein offices to buy souvenirs, and political discussion can develop either on the path down the hill back towards Belfast city centre, or in one of the pubs with the guide. Not to be outsmarted by the tourists, Liam tried lightening the mood during one particular tour by asking some primary school kids off Bombay Street who their teachers were in front of the tourists. Indicating knowledge of tourism as well as a divided society, their reaction was to treat him as a visitor by telling him that they were Catholic and that the wall was their wall before running off playing with some tin whistles.

Wandering discussion

You try to fill the picture up with people’s names, about the IRA and what it was like. I’m hoping by the end of the tour – we are a walking tour – people can come away and I’ve made a point. They don’t have to agree with me. You can completely disagree with me.

There is performance in the political tour of West Belfast. In some places, Liam relies on props: his body and physical memories of being ‘on the blanket’ in the Lower Falls by the murals; sometimes getting a friend to phone him in the Upper Falls at the Milltown Cemetery so he can act out a scene with ‘Gerry’ (Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein). In the past, tours could be organised to hand over at the interface from Republican tour ‘up the Falls’ to Loyalist tour ‘down the Shankill’ with the orchestrated handshake handover between the two. There is now no handover or handshake between these community guides. Belfast is still very much a divided and wounded city (A. Feldman, 1991; Schneider and Susser, 2003) with tensions and divisions easily flaring up such as with recent flag protests. And yet, these remnants of the Troubles remain part of the attraction to the tour and to the city for some of the tourists.

Walking the Falls is a different experience to driving the Falls. The walk is embodied and immersive. It is open and receptive to the environment and allows for the spontaneous from the snippet of an answer to a question to the greetings on the street, to the possibility of meeting the guide’s compatriots and witnessing something clandestine from the margins. It also gives space to the tourist to respond, reflect, question and challenge the guide. Physically, it is like walking against a low tide with waves of shoppers and citizens around us and impelling us to either follow them or to get out of their way. It has a pace and a carefully marked rhythm to it as we stop at regular intervals for a description, a history and some personal insights and experiences, but, unlike the hill walker reconnecting with the physical world and setting forth a moral order by footstep and Romantic imagination (see Vergunst, 2008), this is more of a Gothic interlude in our everyday. It is exotic, disturbing, attractive and leaving us craving more titbits (‘Catholics say “haitch”, Protestants say “aitch”’) but thankful for our return home to a very different world with very different problems of a very different magnitude and order at the end of the tour. Driving the Falls, one is static but for the swivel of the neck, a brief glance to the front, the side, behind. There is less sensuality or intimacy. As Larsen (2001: 94 author’s emphasis) notes, in this contemporary age, ‘(t)ourism’s mobile body is primarily a moved, rather than a moving, body’. The difference is between travelling as dwelling and touring as glancing. It is the exception, now, that the tourist body moves entirely under its own steam to consume the tourist experience. Walking Belfast appeals to a bygone age, to contemplation and meditation, to the co-presence of body and attraction found in the pilgrimage. This performance of the mobile, Larsen (2001: 81) refers to as the tourist’s ‘pilgrimian’, extends MacCannell’s (1976) original observation about the obligatory nature of visiting the well-known tourist markers as though they were sacred sites.

These sights/sites are, for Edensor (2008: 138), ‘pre-ordained’ in the guided tour. They are integrated into an authoritative representation of place by the tour guide, such as Liam. They contrast with the counter-aesthetics and alternative memories emerging from the unfamiliar somatic-scapes of the ruins that he himself walks. Walking the Falls, it is the ruin of man that links the activity of walking with its narration. It is more than ‘a choreographed performance in which bodies communicate meaning through stylised movements and stances are cloaked in self-consciousness’ (Edensor, 2008: 125). For Liam’s political tour, the walking is the story frame, the plot, a narrative trail linking the non-walking stops. It is a part of the storytelling, its delivery and its reception. Liam uses his walk to propel his tourists, to bind them together and to pace the tour. As Solnit (2002: 5; see also Rapport and Vaisman, 2005; Sheets-Johnstone, 1966, on movement facilitating cognition) suggests, ‘(T)he rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts’. It creates consociates. This all develops as we move in step with our guide and instructor, regardless of our ideological ground: the ‘co-presence’ of sharing a walk and how it starts to take over the body, as Vergunst (2010: 386, 380) picked up on Union Street, Aberdeen; Liam’s convictions spreading through the tour party walking up the Falls Road, Belfast. The narrative of the Troubles is absorbed and embodied through the physical narrative of the street synchrony.

In her study of political tourism in West Belfast, Patri noted that a lot of the tourists visiting the Falls Road were already politically aware: coming from the Basque region, Catalonia, Quebec, and the Americans with Irish origins. Post-1998 Good Friday Agreement (Patri, 2009), these tourists visit out of solidarity and with a desire to learn from the experience to counter the perceived powerlessness back home. The city and the conflict have changed since the days of more active service. Theirs is now a ‘lay pilgrimage’ (Anderson, 1991: 124, cited in Patri, 2009: 26). Their view is an enshrinement of the key stops on the route (from the murals to Milltown, the Peace Wall to the Divis flats). They find the tensions palpable, the murals contemporary, the guides convincing. This is no simple commodification of atrocity, a clear ‘dark tourism’ à la Lennon and Foley (2000). The complexities of having a guide as witness who gives personal testimony frames the experience. In his study of Israeli youth tours of Poland’s death camps, Jackie Feldman (2008: 66–68) observes that the parties are strictly divided between teacher who disciplines, local guide who mediates and organises, and survivor-witness who speaks as symbolic incarnation: they speak for the dead and not just of the dead; they are ‘professional witnesses’ (Feldman, 2008: 68). Where the guide tells stories, the witness retells their own story for impact and to maintain authenticity.

Walking the Falls, Liam performs a personalised tour, acting as a tour guide but also as a member of the community, as an Irish Republican and as a former prisoner. He combines all roles and works up a ‘singularity’ in his narrative as his conversation shifts from the ‘We’ to the ‘I’ (see Patri, 2009: 31). To quote from Patri (2009):

Tours are ‘studded’ with references to the place where the guide had grown up, where he used to live, what ‘used to be here’ and ‘what used to be there’ and what ‘they used to do’ on this or that occasion. Their use of the language is replete with first persons and deictic forms, constantly confirming the feeling of presence, of ‘having seen’ and ‘having been there’. The pronoun ‘we’ has many different meanings; it may be used in the sense of ‘Republicans’, ‘combatants’, ‘prisoners’, but also ‘locals’ and ‘people living in the area’. And when the ‘we’ is turned into an ‘I’, it is there that the tour gains its singularity, differentiating itself from all the others. (p. 31)

Other morsels and intimate insights into his past are sought: he is always asked about his recruitment and training with the IRA and his own involvement with terrorism. In his interview, Liam showed an explicit awareness of the structure and impact of his work and of his relationship with the visitors. By responding and engaging with his tourists, and by adding personal stories to his historical narratives to give them traction, Liam plays with the intimacy and the ‘darkness’ of his tour (see Hepburn, 2012; Skinner, 2012). He lightens it with humour and irony and darkens it with tragedy and his brutal details (see also Bunten, 2008; Causevic and Lynch, 2011; Feldman, 2007). He aligns, repositions and animates the Falls for the tourist. These are ‘cosmopolitan’ skills and mobilities in a guide – one of ‘the mechanics of globalisation’, for Salazar (2012: 16) – who can play to the tourists’ imaginations; understand and seduce them; look both ways in a presentation, Janus-faced; make ‘us’ shiver at the blanket moment and encourage the students to warm to him at times but to also recoil at others. He is the ambivalent guide. For all this, Liam is a popular tour guide. He often stays in touch with his tourists. They have an informal drink at a bar at the end of the tour, and this cements social relations and is another opportunity for him to present his Republican ideology.

Liam is a well-known figure up and down the Falls Road. His work is supported and people will greet him and his tourists on the streets. This adds to the experience and consolidates his credibility and authority in the tourist’s mind. He does have to be careful though not to give over too much time to those ideologically motivated residents whom they meet during the tours. Unscripted stops and greetings in this synchronised kinetic experience can sometimes take too much time and are difficult to control. In general, the local population welcomes the walking tours to their streets, whether run by Turais Political Tours or Coiste na n-Iarchimí. Unlike the Black Cab tours, which speed the tourists through the streets in and out of West Belfast, the walking tourists linger at the end of the tours, they walk back down the Falls, they buy a drink or food or souvenirs from the local stores and so feed back revenue into the local economy. Furthermore, the tours serve a number of local political ends. They are an opportunity for the tour guide to voice their experiences and ideology. They are also an opportunity to bring visitors into West Belfast and to work to offset feelings that this part of Belfast has been neglected by the government and local authorities. It is pro-active action taken ‘for themselves by themselves’ (Patri, 2009: 11), resisted in some Unionist quarters for focusing upon a conflicted past, for concentrating upon political tourism rather than cultural and heritage niche tourisms and for continuing to expose discontent to visitors to Belfast.

To return to the Northern Ireland (NI) Assembly records for Stormont debates on Tourism in 2008, West Belfast MLA Maskey called for more support and infrastructural spending in West Belfast and the Shankill area, for integrated local level tourism where tourists spend time in the location, rather than be driven in and out, ‘a fishbowl scenario’ as he described it. He continues on the subject of political tourism:

(I)f political tourism were promoted and developed by the NITB and other bodies, it has the potential to lift those communities from areas of social need into areas that have great employment and socio-economic opportunities that will become must-see areas for tourists. The possibilities are immense.

His criticism was that the Northern Ireland Tourism Board (NITB) invests in large signature projects such as St Patrick in Armagh, the Titanic Quarter in Belfast, the Giant’s Causeway centre up north. This is to the detriment of other – popular – locations, namely the attraction of the Troubles past, to the potential seduction of old cordite on the street, to where real people gave and lost their lives:

Political tourism attracts many visitors, whether people like that or not. Curiosity is a major reason for that attraction. … However, currently, the NITB neither invests in nor recognises that type of tourism.

MLA critics of political tourism, such as Cree and Ross, made two points of attack on the niche practice. The first was to disapprove of political/terror tourism for glamorising violence and criminality and for being against the wishes of the people in the sense of ‘not letting us move on’. The second was to reframe – or dilute – the concept as ‘historical or cultural tourism’ by including Orange Order celebrations, Ulster-Scots heritage, the modern politics of peace and reconciliation apparent at Stormont. Yet as Patri (2009: 37) points out, telling your story is a significant step to avoiding misrepresentation or criminalisation. As a mode of expression, it is a significant outlet: for Liam, it is about understanding his worldview as an activist. Walking the Falls and talking the Falls are significant mechanisms for ‘continuity’, be they physical or ideological for the tour guide. This applies to the tourist as well, though it is the tourist who has the moral dilemma of accepting the authority of a contentious figure who deliberately ‘works’ their ambivalence. Allice Legat (2008: 35) marshals us theoretically with the suggestion that walking, to which we can include this walking tour, is ‘the experience that binds narrative to the acquisition of personal knowledge’. For her (Legat, 2008), ‘walking … validates the reality of the past in the present and in so doing, continually re-establishes the relation between place, story and all the beings who use the locale’. (p. 34) This is, perhaps, one of the reasons for the significant amendment of Sinn Fein’s motion before the Legislative Assembly. Like the murals themselves, Liam’s political tours are not whitewashed for consumption. Nor are they approved by the Belfast Welcome Centre, the Northern Ireland Tourist Board or the Legislative Assembly in Stormont. It is no surprise, then, but is of great significance, that the motion debated at Stormont was only carried without division once any reference to political tourism had been excluded:

That this Assembly calls on the Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Investment to bring forward plans to develop tourist infrastructure; recognises the benefits to the local economy of tourism; and seeks to promote Northern Ireland in a positive manner. (Hansard, 19 February 2008)