Before you arrive in Belfast by sea, your ship slips into a fjord. On each side, low hills roll into the water and at the nape, the silhouettes of the city jut through the haze. In the foreground, there are the mighty shipbuilding gantry cranes Samson and Goliath, Northern Ireland’s Eiffel Tower. To the north is Cavehill, which Jonathan Swift saw as a sleeping giant guarding the city.
On the streets around Cavehill, where suburban rows zip up the lower slopes, almost everyone I met complained about the “same-old, same old”. Ghostly rain clouds clung to the hilltop, and middle-income voters tried to forget about the past.
But this election time, it’s one party in particular that voters are accusing of being obsessed with yesteryear. “Every time I turn on my telly, the DUP are banging on about history,” says one woman. A neighbour, who explains in a Welsh accent that he married into the area, makes a similar observation. That people marry into rather than out of North Belfast is a change in itself.
