Obama’s inauguration as seen from Northern Ireland
Black america has come a long way - how far has Northern Ireland come in a similar time?
The Presidents’ Club in Belfast was a fitting place to hear the televised inauguration speech of President Barack Obama on 20th January.
There was a fleeting opportunity to gage the reactions of Belfast businessmen to one sentence: ‘Old hatreds shall one day pass.’
While the television commentators marvelled at how far black America had travelled, I reflected on the journey made by Catholics and Protestants.
The journey led them on that wet, cold Tuesday evening to the Presidents’ Club on the top floor of the Midtown Center, a warehouse-in-to-business centre conversion by a local developer, Mark Finlay, chief executive of Barnabas Ventures.
He decided that the best use of the top floor space in the Cathedral Quarter was a club for those from the US, Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland who believed in ‘the island economy.’
And so we partied in the open-plan club with its IT facilities and bar. On the walls there were portraits of the eight US presidents who identified most frequently with their Irish ancestry – not just the familiar twentieth century ones like Wilson, Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, but also the more obscure like McKinley, whose fame lies in being assassinated.
Four were Republican; four Democrat; four from the north, four from the south.
It was not as easy to categorise Tuesday’s guests. Yet when I first visited Belfast 39 years ago, everyone wore a label coloured orange or green. Continue reading »
