I am not a big fan of Belfast City Airport. Just getting to it is a nightmare. And £7.50 for less than two hours parking.
And at 8.30pm on Friday last …it was a ghost town.
No planes leaving until the next morning…I was there to pick up my son…and the feeling of a commuter airport. People leave in the morning and come back at night.
And not much to occupy the waiting time.
The viewing area closed and the bookshop-newspaper shop closed and the Coffee Shop closed at 9pm.
So not much there…but the Tourist Board provide a load of books and leaflets.
Take a look at this.
Published by Feirste Thiar…the West Belfast Tourist organisation based in the Gaeltacht Quarter on the Falls Road, it shows thumbnails of the murals in “nationalist” West Belfast.
While many are highly political, some are sporting and cultural while some are of “international” interest.
A few years ago, I noticed that the main Belfast Tourist Office in Donegall Place had a book on Republican monuments in Belfast as well as a leaflet for the Republican Museum at Conway Mill.
So its not entirely surprising that this map is available (free) at the City Airport. Some LetsGetAlongerists are of course appalled at “Terror Tourism” but really there is no point in thinking that the Troubles are not an “attraction”.
Perhaps the only surprise is how easily this has got into the mainstream.
And nobody in Loyalist East Belfast seems to have noticed.