Yesterday was the last day of San Fermin, the nine day festival in Pamplona, world renowned for its running of the bulls. The festival sees the population of the city swell from 240,000 to over a million, attracting visitors from all over Europe as well as those from other continents. I was only able to take two days of it and in those two days spoke to people from Goa, New Zealand, the US, Colombia and South Africa.
In little over two weeks time a similar thing will happen in my home city of Belfast when the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, Ireland’s national traditional music festival comes to town. Belfast City Council estimate that over eight hundred thousand people will participate in the event and that it will bring considerable financial benefits to the city’s bars, restaurants and hotels.
Belfast is of course no stranger to tourism with Belfast’s Titanic museum voted as the world’s leading tourist attraction by the World Travel Awards in 2016 and away from mainstream tourism we have the conflict tourism which sees groups of tourists take tours on foot and by taxi of the murals and areas around the interface wall which straddles historical conflict zones in West Belfast. West Belfast of course has its own jewel in the crown with Féile an Phobail, the festival which showcases West Belfast and attracts thousands of visitors to the area. With its hundreds of musical, literary and political discussion events an Féile excels in political tourism. Along with the more localised discussions and lectures centred on immediately local themes like the wider Irish political situation, Brexit, the rise of racism, the epidemic of violence against women I have chaired and participated in discussions with visiting groups from the Basque Country, Catalonia, Corsica, Sardinia, Flanders, Kurdistan, Palestine, Nicaragua and South Africa. I think that most would see the tourism listed above as generally positive in terms of an enjoyable and/or educational experience.
Which brings me to a much darker, sinister aspect of tourism recently in South Belfast.
The 12th of July march has long been pushed as a cultural festival by the Orange Order. I remember the erstwhile ‘Orangefest’ publicity campaign complete with cartoon super hero ‘Diamond Dan the Orangeman’ and the tourism benefits of the 12th have long been claimed. From empirical observation those tourists visiting specifically for the 12th tend to be a mixture from Anglosphere former colony and Commonwealth countries and Evangelical Christian types.
Over the weekend Sandy Row in South Belfast hosted a number of French extreme right activists for the 12th, (Huguenots?), who indulged in a bit of political activism of their own:
They graffitied the area with a number of grossly offensive racial and misogynistic slogans:
For those who don’t speak French salope is a grossly offensive sexual insult used against females and it refers to to the case of Gisele Peliccot, whose husband Dominique would drug her and let scores of other men rape and sexually assault his wife while she was unconscious. The other disgusting bile used needs no explanation.
(The group responsible for the graffiti are a group of French neo Nazis known as ‘Le Normaux’ and if you follow the Progressive Politics link above there are other links to them).
Now, I for one don’t think that the disgusting misogynistic and racist bile above is representative of all of unionism and I would hope that the majority would be horrified and completely reject such incredibly offensive sentiment but the fact that they were hosted and were able to publicly express such sentiments in such a strongly unionist area does say something but here’s the thing, folks: If you want to portray the Twelfth as a tourism desire this is not the type of tourism you want.
The DUP’s Carla Lockhart recently told a ‘Youth for Unionism’ event that they could ‘learn from nationalism and republicanism. They have used education so well’
perhaps they could also learn a thing of two about political tourism.
Hughie Beag is a West Belfast native and recovering legal scholar who spends lots of time in his spouse’s native Basque Country
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