Private Story
Not even my dirty old town
Dublin. A city I was raised to suspect of treachery and to which Ulster Protestants would someday be ‘sold out’ is now my home. I live here with an Irish passport that many might see as a betrayal of an illusory ‘Britishness’ and culture. The words of Louis MacNiece’s poem about the city echo endlessly in my ears: "This never was my town, I was not born or bred nor schooled here and she
will not have me alive or dead.”
As a teenager, a journey from Belfast which once took over three hours on a single lane road now takes two on slick motorways. I remember (or did I imagine?) passing the foreboding slogan scrawled on a wall in white paint not far from the old border checkpoint on the southbound Dublin Road, which read We will never forsake the blue skies of Ulster for the grey skies of an Irish
Republic. Dublin continues to feel as much of a foreign city to me as my native Belfast does, and inspires in me ambivalence: love
and hate, jealousy and longing, familiarity and strangeness.
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