Poster on the Falls Road, Belfast. Image: Adam Ramsay
Once I’d sung “Flower of Scotland”, they seemed to trust me a little more. I’d gone into Boyle’s on the Falls Road to ask people how they were voting in the coming election. But if I was honest, I suspected I knew the answer: pretty much everyone else I’d spoken to on this famous street at the heart of Republican West Belfast, the safest constituency in the UK, had said they were voting Sinn Fein. It turned out to be more complicated than that.
The bar was surrounded by men: middle aged and older, all at least a pint down at midday and chatting together in the way that crowds of regulars do. The first bloke I spoke to told me that the Shinners had done nothing for him, and he’d be backing People Before Profit, the newish socialist grouping which got its first two seats in the elections in May. Next was a tall and raucous man probably in his sixties who insisted he and I sing Scotland’s unofficial national anthem together (he knew all three verses, more than many of my Scottish friends), and then got me to put my finger in a dent in his skull which he claimed came from a ricocheted bullet during the Troubles. He said he wouldn’t be voting. Stormont is a British institution, and “we need a United Ireland”. But a man on a bar stool next to him insisted quietly that his friend would in fact show up when it came to it – and would back Sinn Fein. The third man in what seemed to be a trio at this side of the bar mumbled that he wasn’t voting either, and his friend explained that “he’s a Sticky”.
