This pocket guidebook in the Footprint series is a lively and unconventional guide aimed at an audience of younger travellers, primarily a British one. Sean Sheehan and Pat Levy have both grown up outside Ireland. They are frequent visitors, one now settled there. They have a romantic enthusiasm for Ireland, their links strongest with the West. They write in a determinedly jaunty style.
The strength of this guide lies in its treatment of hotels and restaurants. Here the author's writing style works well. They descriptions are vivid. Thoughtful details, such as which restaurants open on Sunday nights and, especially useful, which have the best vegetarian menus, are included and they are strong on facilities for children. Nightlife is also well covered with good sections on pubs and clubs. Similar coverage is given to those places outside Belfast mentioned in the guide. Generous attention is paid to festivals and other annual events. There are also five pages devoted to the Gay and Lesbian scene.
Doubts start to arise when the authors describe places people might wish to visit. It soon becomes obvious that they do not know Belfast very well. It almost appears as though they have only visited it because they were commissioned to write the guidebook. There are simply too many errors. I, with my colleagues, am indebted to the authors for introducing us to Aunt Sandra's Candy Factory, which none of us had ever heard of. However, the Castlereagh Road is in East, not South, Belfast! The visitor who looked in Belfast City Cemetery for the grave of Lord Edward Carson (sic – actually Sir Edward Carson or Lord Carson of Duncairn) would be disappointed. The authors appear to have missed it when they visited St Anne's Cathedral.
Other factual information does not come up to the standard of that already mentioned. In Northern Ireland, while Sterling is the currency, the local banks circulate their own notes and this can cause confusion for visitors. This is not mentioned. Also defective is the list of bookshops. It contains three that are now closed, one of them for a good ten years, and it misses out the best independent bookshop in the city. They refer to a branch of “Dillons”, a chain of bookshops long swallowed up!
Doubts increase when they describe places outside Belfast. Here guidebook writers have two possibilities. They can either write about the six counties that make up Northern Ireland or they can write about the historic province of Ulster, these six counties and three which are now on the other side of the political border. Sean Sheehan and Pat Levy do neither. They choose a few places they like and describe them as “The North of Ireland”. They are possibly unaware that this term has politically become loaded in recent years as certain politicians have used it because they felt uncomfortable talking about “Northern Ireland”. It was, however, clear what geographical area these politicians meant. That cannot be said here. Three of Northern Ireland's counties, Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh, are left out and only a small part of one of the other three, Donegal is mentioned. This involves the exclusion of Armagh city (the reviewer has to admit that his local patriotism is outraged here!), the lakes of Northern Ireland and the troubled but beautiful and historically interesting Southern part of County Armagh. The authors refer to “Belfast and its environs” but they include the Inishowen Peninsula of Donegal – somewhere more remote from Belfast than the places mentioned above. They also include Dundalk and its surrounding area‐ as much part of “the North of Ireland” as, say, Rugby is part of the North of England and by no stretch of the imagination in the environs of Belfast. Any visitors inspired by the guide to go from Dundalk (p. 80) to the North Antrim coast (p. 82) will be taken aback to know that they have a journey of at least four hours to get from one place to the other. They will also look in vain here for any information on the places in between. Even the areas covered have some surprising exclusions. The section on the North Antrim coast omits Carrickfergus Castle.
Things get even worse when the authors attempt to tackle Northern Ireland history and politics. It has to be said that they rather clearly come to it with certain preconceptions. This would not matter if they stated different perspectives or supplied accurate factual information. For example, throughout the guide they refer to the city of “Derry”. At no stage are we told that its official name is “Londonderry”, how, historically, this came about or why today the use of different versions of the name is a contentious issue. A chronology is provided with dubious statements and downright inaccuracies. To say of 1641 that “the local population of Belfast rebelled against the Scottish and English settlers” might at least provide the basis for an undergraduate history essay topic. More straightforwardly inaccurate is their entry for 1985. The Anglo‐Irish Agreement did not “bring a degree of power‐sharing to Northern Ireland”. Protestant organisations did not “make the city unworkable”. The Agreement was not “abandoned”. Their glossary is even more tendentious. Sinn Fein would certainly not appreciate it being said that in the North it “represents the political wing of the IRA”. Even in Northern Ireland's rich culture of political accusation no one ever said that the Ulster Defence Regiment was the “political wing of the LVF”.
All this is unfortunate because it does badly something that, done properly, could be valuable. Visitors to Northern Ireland need, perhaps more than visitors to many other places, information about a tangled history and a complex political and social situation so that they can understand in the places they visit what they see and why the people they may meet think as they do. The Lonely Planet guides do this sort of thing rather well. It would not be an easy task for Northern Ireland, but a perfectly feasible one if undertaken with knowledge, sensitivity and empathy for all the people who live there.
This guide can only be recommended for its coverage of accommodation, food and leisure. For visitors who wish to know about Northern Ireland there are already excellent descriptive guides available, notably that by Evans (1998), and guides to Ireland as a whole that contain generous sections on the North. Particularly fortunate is any library fortunate enough to possess Sandford (1981) still unrivalled after a quarter of a century for its combination of knowledge and enthusiasm.
