A man from Dublin, having just booked into a hotel in the North for a short holiday, was asked why he went there as distinct from Conamara or Kerry. One reason, he said, was that he had scenery and sea there (it was in Co Antrim) as fine as any further west or south. Moreover, quite a while before he had been on a radio programme about Belfast and its environs, more impressionistic than political, in fact not political at all, and as a result he got a letter from a woman in Andersonstown - and he pulled it out of his wallet, for he had been carrying it around since receiving it - addressing him by Christian name. "It was refreshing to hear your warm and kind words about what we are really like here in the North. I hear us being referred to so often as `them people up there'. I am 72 years old, bred and reared in Co Westmeath. My family, which includes my husband and two children have lived here in Andersonstown for almost 35 years. It was very pleasant to hear something nice being said about us for a change. I appreciate your kind words."
Our friend doesn't remember just what he had said on air but he had warm memories of many parts of the North where he has often been. In the days of his youth, of course, people walked when they wanted to go somewhere; and Belfast was a comparatively small city then, or seemed to the youthful walker to be. He spoke of his love of the mountains around the city. He thought, too, of the Glens of Antrim, with its memories of Seamus Delargy and Eoin MacNeill and the names of many farming people he met while camping in Glenariff, and the poems of Moira O'Neill. Loughareema, Loughareema! Stars come out, an' stars are hidin' / The wather whispers on the stones, the flitterin' moths are free / Onest befire the mornin' light / The Horseman will come ridin' / Roun' and roun' the fairy lough / An' no one there to see. He also spent time in the Mournes. There were three boys in the host family and the four of them climbed, as they remember, all the peaks but one. The name of that Everest of Co Down escapes him. Days on Lough Erne. Boa Island and its impassive two-faced stone god. And everywhere the kindness of the local people. Why, in that slightly distinct peninsula known as Islandmagee, you could borrow a small boat to go after mackerel and nearly be washed ashore by the wave when the Larne-Stranraer boat went out. "Them people up there," no matter how they vote are people, not political units.