If they're bringing money into the economy I suppose it's a fair point Davy, but it would also be a constant reminder, maybe that's the point for the tourism, I don't know.
I did two tours of N/Ireland back in 70's, back then it made the streets look degraded and unkept, but showed the troubles that was going on in NI at the time.
Jock said "But you never made it to Special Services, did you? You were a cannon fodder squaddie who jumped ship when we started going to war, weren't you?".......oops....
I noticed from the pic they're at Divis street, where, or near where Divis flats used to be, which brought a reminder of an incident we had there one night, unintentional of course.
To paint the picture for some,
After the incident pictures and jokes started appearing on notice boards etc, along the lines of "what's small and red and goes up and down"
Long Kesh was/is the prison which had the infamous H Blocks where they kept the IRA terrorists. Our job, along with all the other units which circled the prison was to help prevent, and assist in recapturing any escaping inmates before they could get too far.
Like every other unit, we also had to do street patrols.
One afternoon we came back from a street patrol, later 3 mates decided they were going out on the town, which we were allowed to do, but not allowed in no go areas; no go areas were areas Squaddies were not allowed to enter because of the high risks, it was also a night our unit weren't hosting the disco.
They asked around to see if any of us wanted to go, we all said no, we're going to one of the other units discos.
Anyway they went out, but along the way decided to take one of units civilian cars, a red mini, and headed toward Belfast
The story goes, as they told it, they drove around and visited a couple of pubs that were deemed no risk for British Squaddies. Anyway, as the night got older they got drunker, then eventually decided to drive back, around 1 or 2am from memory.
As it happens, they got lost and were driving around looking for some landmark they could recognise, and they found one.
It was very dark and they decided to stop and have a look around, one got out the car and quickly got back in again, he said "effing hell, it's Divis flats".
For those who don't know, Divis flats was known as a notorious area, and it was a suspect IRA hide out, basically it had become a slum area, it's also the place a British Squaddie was captured, taken there and murdered by the IRA.
Anyway, after talking it over, they decided to get out and have a look to see how they could get back to camp, they walked around apparently for about an hour, then decided to go back to the car cos they couldn't just leave it there.
When they got back to the car, they found the bomb squad had cordoned of the area and were just about to blow the mini up as a suspected car with a car bomb. They got back just in time to watch the bomb squad blow the mini up, it went straight up in the air and came down and crashed onto the ground smashing into quite a few spare parts.
We also got the stories of how scary it was for'em.
Hence the jokes appearing on notice boards "what's small and red and goes up and down"......"a red blown up mini".....
