The Peace Bridge, Derry
This wasn’t the first time that I’d asked people on Church Street in Coleraine to stop for a chat. Nor is it the only occassion that I’ve spent a day talking to locals in central Derry. But everything in the north of Ireland is changing fast and deeply now. And so it was time to return.
I first got to know Northern Ireland in the same way that I first got to know England. For a few months in 2003/4, I worked as a peripatetic chugger. I’d stand in the centre of a different town every day, for six days a week, and ask people to pay £5 a month to whichever charity I’d been given. And for two of those weeks, my employers put me on a team they were sending across the Irish Sea, to try and persuade the locals to join Amnesty International.
