That’s When I Knew 

In September 2021, when I moved from the U.S. back to this part of the world, I felt that in many ways I had come home. I’d missed the mild climate and although autumn was approaching, the grass was still green and lush, the roses still blooming, and even the sound of small trains passing by seemed attractive. I could go out for tea and a scone, and there would be a pot, and water that was hot enough – these had all been pleasures of the past when I lived in Minnesota.

But there was novelty too, as I hadn’t spent much time in the north of Ireland before, and now I was in Bangor, about half an hour north of Belfast, near enough to the sea to walk by it every day. The people I met were wonderful too – there was a bigger variety of accents than I’d expected, and the dialect as well as the culture seemed full of warmth. I loved being asked if I needed ‘a wee bag’ at the supermarket or a ‘wee coffee’ at the restaurant. I enjoyed how, when it was my turn to move forward in some queue, the expression ‘Come on ahead’ sounded so much more welcoming than ‘Next please’. When I couldn’t find my ticket, the train guard would say ‘No worries, you’re grand,’ and I often saw strangers helping one other. As they say around here, Happy Days!

One morning late in that first autumn, I got on the bus outside Bangor Abbey, heading to the rural village of Conlig. There were no vacant single seats, so I sat down next to a woman who immediately noticed my empty cat carrier. ‘Are you off to adopt a cat from Assissi?’ she asked, correctly guessing that I was on my way to the animal shelter. ‘Two of them actually – littermates,’ I replied. She wanted to know all about them, and told me about her own cats, past and present, and apparently responding to my English accent, she shared her memories of holidays in Kent though she’d always lived in Bangor. I told her how much I liked the area, adding that I’d always wanted to move to Ireland because I had such fond memories of visiting during childhood. Her expression changed at that, and she said in a tight voice, ‘Well maybe you will one day’. It was only as I started to explain, ‘No I mean, I’m happy to be here,’ that I realised how badly I’d blundered. The formerly friendly woman was now silent. For her, Ireland was a foreign country and she evidently considered it enemy territory; she identified as British. That was when I knew I still had a lot to learn about this post-conflict environment.

I’d been busy just trying to understand the names and terms for things – Republicanism, for example, means something entirely different in the Irish versus the American context. Initially, I thought Unionists might be in support of a United Ireland, but no, it is maintaining union with the U.K. that they support, as Loyalists do. Then there are contentious place names – at the bus and train station, announcements refer to ‘Derry-Londonderry’ – an attempt at keeping happy both the Nationalists who call the city Derry, and the Loyalists who are offended if ‘London’ is dropped from the name. I was calling my new home ‘the north of Ireland,’ in my head. Even though this phrase differs only slightly from the name, an Irish Nationalist might prefer it to hearing ‘Northern Ireland’, because the creation of the latter, as part of the U.K. has long been resented. I wasn’t deliberately trying to signal allegiance to the Nationalist side, though perhaps it showed my subconscious prejudice. I couldn’t help feeling that logically, I was in the same country I’d visited as a child, even if the north was a different part of it. I already knew from annual visits that Irish people tend to speak of England, Scotland, and Wales as being ‘across the water’. I’d always been conscious of Ireland as an island, physically separate from Great Britain, so I found it puzzling that a person born on that land mass would call themselves British. Perhaps the idea of Northern Ireland being part of the U.K. was also difficult for me to internalise because I’d never met an English person who expressed a sense of connection to the place, while plenty of Irish people felt it had been stolen from them.

It turned out that Bangor, which I had thought free of sectarianism, has a couple of staunchly Loyalist neighbourhoods. It must have been the following June that I first witnessed the run up to July 12th, the holiday celebrating the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. (I know – it’s so long ago, but still so important here.) Loyalists in sectarian neighbourhoods where Union Jacks abound prepare bonfires by stacking wooden pallets into dangerously tall towers. These are sometimes festooned with pictures of Sinn Fein politicians and tricolour Irish Republican flags, to be burned on the 12th. This is also called ‘marching season’ when the men of the Orange Order come out wearing bowler hats and sashes to parade through the streets with their drums and pipes.

Growing up in England, I had heard my father’s views about such marches, which he said were provocative and hateful shows of power. When young, he’d gone to Belfast in search of work, but found that as a Catholic, he was barred from applying for so many positions that he gave up and went to England instead. He told me that the conflict known as ‘the Troubles’ had begun when Loyalists like those men in the Orange Order had attacked a peaceful civil rights march in Derry being held by Catholics like him who just wanted equal access to jobs and housing.

With that background influencing my perception of what I was seeing that first summer, I felt uneasy and even queasy when I heard the drummers practicing near my house and saw the size of the bonfire being prepared. (It was similar to the one in the picture above, which was in Belfast.) Where had I come to live? Two things helped me adjust to the troubling (no pun intended) aspects of this place: one, exploring the beautiful countryside and two, getting to know local people from ‘both sides’ of the divide. It was a memoir writing group that most helped me get to know people whom I might otherwise have thought of as Loyalists I could never understand.

Our group of twelve is diverse and includes at least one person who considers herself British, like my companion on the bus. In reading to each other about our lives, a lot of trust and acceptance has built up between group members, allowing us to avoid tensions about political differences. Connie, our oldest member at somewhere in her nineties, shared stories conveying the excitement she felt as a child regarding those Orange Order marches, helping me understand that they aren’t necessarily intended to be provocative or offensive, even if that is how they are sometimes received. And she wrote about arguing with a perplexed Australian about identifying as British. He’d challenged her: ‘But you were born in Ireland, you speak with an Irish accent, how can you not be Irish?’ She’d responded, ‘Just because Jesus was born in a stable, doesn’t mean he was a horse, does it?’ She also made us laugh describing the fear she once felt as a child hearing that her father was talking to a Catholic in their own front room. At that point she had never seen a Catholic and was disappointed when she peeped in to see that the man did not have horns or a tail. Humour is an aspect of the culture here I would never have suspected back in the days of watching news of the Troubles and flinching at the harshness of rhetoric coming from people like the Rev. Ian Paisley.

These days, there are some proudly non-segregated schools in Northern Ireland, and mixed marriages no longer have to be kept secret, but the very idea of calling marriage between a Protestant and a Catholic ‘mixed’ and a school that accepts students from both religions ‘non-segregated’ indicates a society still feeling its way toward the kind of integration that would be taken for granted anywhere else in the U.K. As my Dad used to remind me, it’s not about the religions themselves, but about historical oppression and violence, and some of that violence was recent enough for there to be people around who still have the scars, physical and psychological. I had lunch with two friends from the memoir group last week. One mentioned that he avoids going into Belfast as much as he possibly can, because just being in the city centre triggers anxiety due to past trauma. The other, who has already a published a memoir about her teenage years, admitted she is struggling with the sequel because she’s not sure she can face going back over what she calls ‘the dark stuff’. That was when I knew that I may never really understand this place, because following the events of any conflict on the news is nothing like experiencing them first-hand.

By Renata Fitzpatrick

Sun 22 March 2026