Negotiating a local gaze: Belfast tour guides and the challenge of post-conflict representation

ABSTRACT

Since the conclusion of the Troubles in 1998, Belfast’s tourism industry has boomed. Yet, tourists still visit Belfast to learn about the conflict and tour guides must present a narrative of the conflict that is both educational for tourists and respectful of locals’ differing experiences. Conceptualized through the concept of the local gaze, this article uncovers how tour guides construct a narrative about the conflict in the shared city center. Data were collected during 3 months of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation of guided tours and semi-structured interviews with tour guides. The findings show how the legacy of the conflict is incorporated into guided tours. Guides act with awareness of a local gaze during the tour. They are sensitive to the possibility of offending a local passerby when talking about the Troubles and are careful to neutralize their tour narrative. However, opinions about how the Troubles should be presented are not fixed and tour guides push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable. More broadly, the findings show that tourism can provide a platform for discussions about how the past can or should be remembered in post-conflict societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Guided tours
• tour narratives
• Belfast
• local gaze
• socio-spatial dialectic
• shared space

Introduction

In the summer of 2019, tourism is booming in Belfast city center. Ubiquitous red open-top sightseeing busses file in and out of pickup zones and walking tour guides with colorful jackets and official-looking insignia collect their tour group from the meeting point in front of City Hall. Busloads of cruise ship passengers disembark for a day of exploration in the city. Ticket sellers holding flyers aloft call out various offerings. Meanwhile, locals on their way to work and school children searching for their bus weave between tour groups and dodge ticket sellers. The compact city center quickly becomes crowded by mid-morning. Though replete with construction sites, a first-time visitor to Belfast would never guess that only a few decades prior, the city was the epicenter of a conflict known as the Troubles (1969–1998). Thirty years of violent conflict between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists gained Northern Ireland a reputation as a dangerous and conflicted place in mainstream news media. However, the region is now amid a massive transformation which hinges largely on the development of leisure, hospitality and tourism, particularly in the capital city of Belfast.

In Belfast, tourism development is deeply intertwined with the post-conflict regeneration strategy and has helped shape the social character of the city center. To distance the city from the negative images associated with the Troubles, tourism institutions and city branders plumbed Belfast’s pre-Troubles past in search of ‘desirable’ heritage with which to support the revitalized image. Consequently, Belfast was developed into themed quarters based on the unique characteristics of the city which promises visitors a variety of unique historical and cultural experiences (McManus & Carruthers, 2014). The Cathedral Quarter, named for St. Anne’s Cathedral became the center of nightlife and entertainment. The Linen Quarter, once home to many of Belfast’s now-defunct linen mills, was renovated into trendy retail and office spaces. The Titanic Quarter houses Belfast’s flagship tourism project: the six-story Titanic Experience, a visitor attraction dedicated to Belfast’s ship-building history and its most infamous export, the RMS Titanic.¹ There is nothing among these new offerings to suggest that only thirty years ago, the city center was the target of a decades-long bombing campaign and heavy militarization.

While it may appear that Northern Ireland was following a typical blueprint for regeneration via place-based economies of consumption (see Zukin, 1995), the legacy of the conflict is subtly, but crucially, incorporated into the regeneration of urban spaces. As part of its redevelopment strategy, the city center is designated as ‘shared space’. First outlined in a policy entitled A Shared Future (ASF), the shared spaces would,

establish, over time, a shared society defined by a culture of tolerance: a normal, civic society, in which all individuals are considered as equals. … A society where there is equity, respect for diversity and recognition of our interdependence. (OFMDFM, 2005, p. 10)

The provision of shared spaces was to be a bulwark against the longstanding ethno-national division in Northern Irish society which manifested in the territorialization of residential areas. The claiming of streets and neighborhoods by one community or the other, often through the use of sectarian symbols (physical markers such as flags, graffiti, and murals which denote either a Catholic nationalist or Protestant-unionist identity) or through commemorative events (annual parades that celebrate events such as the 12th of July or St. Patrick’s Day) had increased during and immediately after the conflict (Bryan, 2015; Jarman, 1997; Shirlow & Murtagh, 2006). Such physical markers of identity were seen by policymakers as a hindrance to peace and progress (Good Relations Unit, 2006). Shared space was intended to deterritorialize public spaces to encourage interaction between the two communities² and counter spatial segregation. However, exactly how shared space was to be implemented was left up to local city councils.

Belfast City Council responded to ASF by banning the display of sectarian symbols in the city center, the only piece of legislation enacted to provide a legal framework for what shared space means. In Belfast, the creation of shared space coupled with the commercial regeneration of the city center is mutually reinforcing. The presumed neutrality of a common culture of consumption overrides the polarized identities of Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist, at least within the city center (Hocking, 2015; Nagle, 2009; Shirlow, 2006). This encouraged not only the return to normal civic life but also symbolized the successful completion of the peace process.³ Tourism simultaneously operates within these neutral spaces while helping to maintain them.

This article examines how tour guides negotiate between local expectations of shared space while meeting tourist expectations for Troubles stories. The role of the local is theoretically presented as an understudied gaze in tourism, that of a local gaze. It theorizes that the presence of local bystanders outside of the direct touristic encounter can have a significant effect on touristic representations of place. Empirically this article illustrates how general sightseeing tours represent Belfast’s past in the shared space of the city center and it uncovers the mechanisms through which post-conflict narratives of the past are produced and reinforced in Northern Ireland's tourism. This article examines the narratives from two types of tours, hop-on-hop-off bus tours and walking tours, as well as the guides’ own reflections on their guiding practices with the following question: How do tour guides negotiate the local gaze in the shared city center?

This question points to two things. First, the importance of space for the production of the tour narrative. Understandings of space, I will argue, are reproduced by a local gaze which acts as an instrument of surveillance, ensuring ‘neutral’ tour narratives. This examination highlights the influence that the symbolic power of space and socially held norms of behavior have on the guided tour. And secondly, it addresses how guides respond to the local gaze. It uncovers the internal negotiations of the guides; how they meet tourist expectations while still adhering to or contradicting shared space values. I conclude that through the tours, guides assert themselves as individual agentive actors in the reframing of Belfast’s heritage and identity, while simultaneously acting within the broader social and spatial structures of the shared city center. These conclusions point to how guided tours can become a powerful determinant in the process of reimagining narratives of past conflict.

This research sits within the vast body of literature on the usefulness of tourism as a method of boosting stagnant economies and restabilizing governments in transition after conflict (see Causevic and Lynch, 2011; Hall, 2004; Rousseau and Garcia-Retamero, 2007; Slocum and Klitsounova, 2020; Young and Kaczmarek, 1999). It may be relevant for similar cases in which tourism is utilized in reconfiguring collective narratives and creating more inclusive identities to promote reconciliation after a period of division and conflict.

The socio – spatial dialectic in tourism

As cities are reconstructed to accommodate tourist spaces, there has been more scholarly consideration of how tourism interacts with urban environments. Tourist spaces are not always created as single-purpose spaces, especially when they occur in urban city centers. They are often emmeshed into the already existing physical space of the city or arise organically from them (Judd & Fainstein, 1999). The appeal of a guided tour rests upon the fact that it occurs in situ and is led by a local guide who can facilitate access and provide an authentic and informative experience for the tourist (Salazar, 2006). The unique features that draw tourists to a specific city, neighborhood, or district become commodities themselves via some historical or cultural import (see for instance, Dürr et al. (2020) for examples of slum tours in Jamaica’s Trenchtown or favela tours in Rio de Janeiro). Despite the influx of guided tours, the daily life of residents continues in these spaces alongside tourism, sometimes interacting with or working around tourists. If guided tours must operate in urban places alongside the mundane rhythms of everyday life, how then do the guides negotiate these spaces?

To conceptualize the relationship between urban space and the performance of the guided tour, I rely on Lefebvre’s notion of space as socially produced through everyday practices and perceptions (Lefebvre, 1991). Space, he argues, is constituted through a combination of three elements: the physical space itself (as organized, for instance, by governments, municipalities and urban planners), the discourses, narratives or images about the space, and the lived experience and daily interaction in space. Space, therefore, is a material product which is produced most importantly through socially informed ideological values. Additionally, as Lefebvre asserts, these values serve as a means of control. In other words, one’s behavior in certain places is regulated by its physical and social construction. To this idea, Soja (1980) adds that the relationship between social practice and spatial form is mutually producing, which he describes as the socio-spatial dialectic. As such, how we conceive of space is influenced by how we behave in it (via practices and discourses) and how we behave in these spaces is determined by our collective understandings of them. This dialectic shapes both our interactions in and our understandings of space.

Operating under the framework of the dialectic nature of space and social practice, from a production standpoint, local understandings of tourist places constructed within urban centers continue to hold existing socio-spatial dialectics. With the exception of ‘enclavic’ tourist spaces (Saarinen, 2017), such as theme parks, resorts or cruise ships that are designed to create a closed environment specifically to eliminate tourist contact with the outside world (which may result in a new socio-spatial dialectic), all tourism occurs in spaces with pre-existing social and symbolic understandings. These manifest within the tourist industry to configure practices, shape narratives and produce specific representations of place.

Guided tours in particular are dependent on the social and spatial context in which the tour is located. The guided tour inherits culturally coded patterns of behavior ‘informed by pre-existing discursive, practical, embodied norms which help to guide their performative orientations and achieve a working consensus about what to do’ (Edensor, 2007, pp. 202–203). This has a great bearing on the overall performance, narrative, and messaging of the tour. Though Edensor (2001, 2007) stresses that these performative behaviors are often unreflexive (he was referring specifically to tourist performances, while I turn the focus to tour guides), I argue that that is not always the case. Rather, I draw attention to the sensitivity guides show toward their own tour performances and the ways in which they conform to or contradict their own understandings of the places in which they perform the guided tour.

The local gaze in tourism

The idea of the tourist gaze, coined by Urry (1990) has been a pivotal concept for the study of tourism. Referred to as a ‘socially patterned and learnt “ways of seeing”’ (Urry & Larson, 2011, p. 2), the tourist gaze is ‘structured by culturally specific notions of what is extraordinary and therefore what is worth viewing’ (Urry, 1990, p. 66). In other words, understanding the tourist gaze (what tourists value as extraordinary or at least distinct from their own lives) helps in part to identify the factors that shape their expectations as tourists.

While the concept of the tourist gaze is essential to academic understandings of tourism as a social practice, the influence of the tourist gaze on the development of tourism activities was not always viewed positively. The tourist gaze spurred many scholars to critically examine inherent and unequal power relations in an industry that was shaped ‘according to the exercise and decisions of the gaze' ((Larson, 2014, p. 305). See also, Lujan, 1993; Babcock, 1994; Nicks, 1999). Many studies have empirically shown that the tourist gaze wields power over locals who are pressured to comply with tourist expectations in ways that reduce tourist-guide relations to ‘a phony front of friendliness or even servility’ (Cohen, 1988, p. 308).

On the other hand, studies demonstrate how awareness of the gaze can be harnessed by tourism workers. Bunten’s (2014) work on indigenous guides in Alaska argues that hosts are aware of and respond to these gazes in ways that ‘subvert asymmetrical power relations’ (p. 84) and which can be used in advantageous ways (i.e. by fulfilling guides own motivations or preferred representations). Tourism, then, is both a way of seeing, and for those who harness the power of the tourist gaze, a way of being seen. The broadening of the idea of the tourist gaze also extended to a multi-directional gaze. Scholars identified a reciprocal or ‘mutual gaze’ (Cheong & Miller, 2000; Hollinshead, 1999; Maoz, 2006) in which hosts project and construct their own notions of otherness back onto their guests. This helps guides anticipate the needs and desires of their customers, but can also lead to multi-directional stereotyping between tourists and guides.

While guided tours are generally formulated to satisfy the needs, interests and desires of the tour group, there may be other contributing factors. Guided tours, particularly ones in an urban city center, are intrinsically public performances which can be viewed by many more people than just the tour group. The concept of the ‘local gaze’, has been proposed for instances where tourism workers return the gaze upon their visitors to make assumptions about different tourist behaviors and preferences (see Maoz, 2006; Urry & Larson, 2011). However, I use the idea of a ‘local gaze’ not in a reciprocal sense used by pervious scholars but to refer to the way that other local residents in the near vicinity of the guided tour have an effect upon the performance of the tour. This gaze can result in conflicting expectations between what a tourist wants from the tour and what local bystanders consider acceptable representations in tourism. This is especially poignant in a post-conflict context where discussion of the past is still sensitive. Under a local gaze, tour guides are surveilled (in the Foucauldian sense) by onlookers who interpret the content of the tour and evaluate it for its level of appropriateness or veracity. In some instances, the local gaze may serve as a means of controlling and regulating the tour narratives to fit pre-existing social norms. These gazing locals share a common socio-spatial dialectic framework with the guide, unbeknownst to foreign visitors, which informs what they deem as appropriate in a tour narrative. This article suggests that onlookers outside of the direct touristic encounter can have, particularly in post-conflict circumstances, a dramatic effect on touristic representations of place. It also shows how guides must then act with a high degree of awareness not just of their tourist audience, but of potential observers as well.

Methods

The data for this article were gathered during three months of ethnographic fieldwork in Belfast, Northern Ireland during the summer of 2018. I participated in eighteen tours: ten bus tours offered by two different companies and eight walking tours from six different companies. Guides were made aware of my presence as a researcher at the start of the tour and an audio recording of the tour was made if permission was granted by the guide. This was not always the case as some guides see their tour narrative as intellectual property and don’t want it shared with colleagues or competitors. During the tours, I made observational field notes about the tour narratives and sites visited. Participation in tours not only allowed me to experience the tours as a tourist, compare tour narratives and identify repeating patterns but also to establish rapport with guides who would later become interview participants and identify key informants whose expertise would shape my understanding of tour guiding practices, concerns, hopes and fears.

In total, I conducted sixteen interviews: six with walking tour guides (two of whom are also bus guides), six with bus tour guides and four additional interviews with bus company employees (managers and bus drivers). The interviews focus on the guides’ decision-making processes, their personal backgrounds, and a reflection of their own guiding practices and philosophies. Interviews with other tourism workers provided a more holistic picture of the industry, the internal workings of the companies as well as the relationships between companies. Interviews were conducted with the informed consent of the interviewee, recorded with permission, and transcribed. Guides were also granted the use of a pseudonym and anonymization of personal details, which all but one requested. The data from interviews and tours is also supplemented with countless informal conversations with guides, ticket sellers and tour managers. These conversations were unrecorded, but detailed notes were made immediately after. All data were analyzed using grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) allowing for common patterns to emerge. In the analysis, I provide an in-depth examination of tour narratives and guides’ own reflections on their guiding practices within the shared city center.

The local gaze in the shared city center

The notion of shared space, while not clearly defined in ASF, rests upon the collective social agreement ‘to respect the validity of each other’s cultural practices' (Nagle, 2018, p. 15). This respect comes primarily in the form of absence. For instance, British and Irish flags or murals with sectarian denotations, which are common in territorialized or single-identity areas, are completely non-existent in the city center.⁴ And while you’ll find memorials to Northern Irish men who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War or aboard the RMS Titanic, you’ll find no such commemoration to Troubles victims (Switzer & McDowell, 2009). Consequently, the city center is generally interpreted by Belfast residents as a neutral space, one to be shared by everyone of all religions, politics and identities (Hocking, 2015).

The creation of shared space may have been legislated through ASF policy, but it is also willingly adopted and upheld by residents in their daily interactions. And it's not just visual markers that denote identity. There exists a complex social discourse in Northern Ireland (noted by Rallings, 2014), whereby certain words, names or patterns of speech are associated with a person’s ethnic, religious and political identity. Even seemingly inconsequential differences in speech can be a giveaway, such as pronouncing Mater Hospital with a long or short ‘a’,or the letter ‘h’ as either ‘aitch’ or 'haitch’. The consequences of such differences range in severity from relatively harmless to potentially incendiary, as this local guide explains.

You always run into the danger of offending someone, even if you say small things. Like if I said, ‘I’m going to Londonderry for the weekend' or ‘I’m going to Derry for the weekend'. That’s me telling you what side I’m on. You want to keep yourself neutral? Then it’s Derry/Londonderry⁵ at all times. (Personal Interview, 04 July 2018)

Residents intentionally refrain from discussing politically charged topics which may ‘cause offense’ (in the local parlance) to someone else. These behaviors, what Shirlow (2006) refers to as ‘rehearsed narratives of inclusion, practice and belief’ (p. 103), have become an underpinning value for acceptable social behavior in the city center. People consciously moderate their behavior within Belfast city center in order to remain neutral or risk the chance of causing offence to someone else.

With so many politically loaded words in Northern Ireland, coded language infiltrates tourism as well. Because the Troubles is still part of recent memory, much consideration goes into what to say and what not to say to tourists. This is a common concern for tourism workers in places with a recent history of conflict (see, Rousseau & Garcia-Retamero, 2007; Young & Kaczmarek, 1999). However, guides in Belfast city center develop their tour with more than just the tourist in mind. As a walking tour guide, Noah⁶ must be mindful not only of his tour group, but also of locals on the street. He jokes that being a walking tour guide comes with occupational hazards. At times, he has to raise his voice to be heard over the noise of the traffic and if for a moment the traffic goes quiet, he may be left shouting about the IRA and the UDA.⁷ ‘Usually what happens’, he explains, ‘is a member of the public will interrupt me and will then start to rant at me because they've overheard ten percent of what I was saying and misconstrued it’ (Personal Interview, 16 May 2018). For the most part, it’s not a problem, Noah says. Tour groups are ubiquitous in the city center and people understand that Troubles politics are part of the story of Belfast. But the guides all demonstrate a strong awareness of the possibility of being overheard by local bystanders. This local gaze acts as an instrument of surveillance, which produces a sense of responsibility to uphold the social contract of neutrality in the city center.

While discussion of the Troubles is tolerated in tourism, provided that it is done ‘respectfully’ (by which people mean neutrally), conversations about the Troubles are typically avoided in shared public spaces outside of tourism. As one guide explained, ‘it’s not the first thing [locals] talk about with each other. They’re gonna talk about what’s happening now.' (Personal Interview, 04 July 2018). This statement is exemplified by a story relayed to me by Noah. One evening he was hanging out in a bar with some friends and a tourist who had been on his tour earlier that morning recognized him and started a conversation. The tourist, who became increasingly inebriated, pestered Noah with questions about the Troubles. Too embarrassed to continue, he and his friends left the bar. ‘It just ruins everybody’s evening,' Noah explained (Personal Interview, May 16 2018). Bringing up the conflict during everyday social interactions in shared spaces is considered disrespectful, embarrassing and potentially distressing for everyone involved. It goes against the idea that the city center should be a place where ‘people from different backgrounds can access and in which they feel safe’ (Rallings, 2014, p. 432). Guides bring with them pre-existing understandings of space that form the socio-spatial dialectic. Although guides are granted leeway (up to a certain point) to discuss things with tourists that they would not discuss in their daily lives, the guides themselves – and by extension the tour narrative – are still informed by shared understandings of the city center as neutral territory. How then do guides respond to this during the tour?

Responding to the local gaze: depoliticize and depersonalize

As with any presentation of the past, choices must be made about what to say, and what not to say. For guides, whose primary medium of communication is verbal, discussing politically charged topics, both past and present, becomes even more challenging in shared space, especially when tourists want to hear Troubles stories. While it is unlikely that tourists would recognize the biased language, the tour narratives are carefully formulated to avoid causing offense to anyone (tourist or local) with an opposing perspective. In order to present a neutral tour, guides typically rely on two common strategies: depoliticizing and depersonalizing tour narratives.

Noah is conscious of the words he uses during the tour and does his best to avoid politically sensitive trigger words. For example, he intentionally calls the Troubles a ‘conflict’, and he explained the importance of choosing his words carefully. ‘There's some people who would call it an illegal occupation’, he says. ‘Say that to the wrong person and they could be really up in arms about it. Because terminology is everything’ (Personal Interview, May 16 2018). Here, he refers to a fundamental disagreement on national identity that underpinned the conflict. For nationalists, the Troubles was a struggle to overthrow a British colonial oppressor and reclaim the right to their Irishness. For loyalists, it was a fight to preserve their Ulster identity and the political union with the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland, political identity is still an ongoing point of contention, even after local referendums reconfirmed the region’s continuing union within the United Kingdom. Not that many tourists would pick up on the distinction, yet this careful wording saturates the tour narrative, and with good reason. Tour guides who are overheard giving a biased tour face an onslaught of public wrath which can result in the guide’s eventual firing (see, Mannheimer, 2022). This rarely happens, but guides are hyper-sensitive to these events when they do occur. By depoliticizing his language, Noah safely acknowledges and respects differing opinions and experiences of the conflict, a fundamental tenant of neutrality.

Sharon⁸, a freelance walking tour guide explains how important it is to distance oneself from the past by avoiding personal opinions.

So when I talk about the Unionist parliament that was formed in 1921, I don’t say ‘they were bigoted or they discriminated against the Catholics’, I say that ‘it has been proven that there was overt discrimination’, or I say that ‘James Craig, the First Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, said himself, that it was a Protestant parliament for a protestant people’. So that I don’t say it was a Protestant parliament. (Personal Interview, 21 July 2018)

This way she is careful not to give her own personal opinions but refers to other sources in order to free herself of the responsibility of making what could be perceived as biased claims or personal opinions. ‘You don’t want to get into a confrontational situation because if you give a personal opinion that is counter to somebody else’s views, somebody from Northern Ireland could jump up', she says (Personal Interview, 21 July 2018). Additionally, guides leave descriptions of the past vague. They refrain from naming individuals, choosing rather to refer to broad groups such as, ‘nationalists’, ‘loyalists’ or ‘paramilitaries’. They are sensitive to the possibility that family or friends of individuals could be present at that very moment. ‘You never know who’s on the bus' is an often-stated reason for keeping the tour neutral. Just as with Foucault’s (1977) panopticon, the perceived surveillance caused by the local gaze encourages self-censorship and influences the production of carefully neutralized, or politically de-charged, narratives of the Troubles on city center tours.

However, neutralizing language requires practice and is not always easily achieved. Some words or phrases are so deeply ingrained that guides are not even aware of them. A bus tour guide recalled an incident in her training where the seasoned driver advised her not to say that her husband was Irish on the tour, because it could be seen as supporting nationalists’ efforts for a united Ireland. It’s safer, he said, to describe the husband specifically as Northern Irish, so as not to offend any political sensibilities. The wording was so automatic for the guide that she hadn’t considered the potential consequences.

The expectation that the tours are neutral comes not only from the local gaze, but is also self-imposed and self-enforced by the guides who see their ability to present a neutral Troubles narrative as a mark of professionalism. Guides pride themselves on their ability to remain neutral on the tour and criticize colleagues who present one-sided or biased narratives, stating ‘that doesn’t belong in tourism'. While some critics (see Nagle, 2010; Neill, 2006, 2011; Shirlow, 2006) have accused tourism of ‘watering down’ or ‘sanitizing’ the conflict, guides see themselves as respecting the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives. By presenting a version of the Troubles that is both personally and politically distanced, guides also reproduce and reinforce the notion of the city center as a shared space.

Challenging the local gaze

Yet the issue of Troubles representation in the city center is still a topic of debate (see Ironside & James, 2024). Not everyone agrees on how or how much the Troubles should be part of tourism. Most of the tours in the city center are general sightseeing tours of which the Troubles is one small part. Guides incorporate some Troubles information but would rather focus on Belfast’s pre-Troubles heritage or its recent regeneration. However, there is (at the time of research) one major outlier that caused a ripple of anger and suspicion throughout the Northern Irish public.⁹ The tour, given by a man called Donzo is entirely about the Troubles and specifically focused on the violent events that occurred in the city center. The 2.5 hour-long walking tour ‘allows you to explore the darkest period in Belfast’s recent past' (Guided Tour, 30 May 2018). Donzo takes visitors to sites around the city center where various bombings and deaths occurred between 1971 and 1994. His aim is to examine the motivations for and lasting legacies of the conflict and to describe, as he says, ‘what it was actually like to live here on a daily basis at constant threat of violence’ (Guided Tour, 30 May 2018).

Unsurprisingly, the tour received heavy resistance from Belfast City Council, Visit Belfast Centre, journalists and locals alike. There were major concerns that talking directly about Troubles violence would threaten the hard-won peace and security that the shared city center provided. ‘People just want to come here and enjoy themselves. They don’t want to be confronted with the past all the time' (Guided Tour, 12 May, 2018). Many voiced concerns that the tour was being used to glorify Troubles violence or to promote a political narrative that favors one side or the other. Others claimed that describing violent events was insensitive to victims and their families and that Donzo was immorally profiting off the suffering of others (Meredith, 2013). And the name of the tour, to be fair, A History of Terror, is slightly alarming and one which the owner now regrets. ‘If I could, I would change it now to something like, A History of Change, or A History of Hope, or something. Terror is very dark,’ he concedes (Guided Tour, 30 May 2018).

At first glance, the tour flies directly in the face of how one is expected to behave in shared space. Donzo doesn’t shy away from discussing topics that everyone else considers ‘too sensitive’. He vividly describes the acts of violence and names key individuals involved in those events. Talking specifically about the violence that occurred and deaths that resulted from it in a part of Belfast where evidence of the Troubles has been explicitly erased is risky. Commemoration and memorialization have always taken place outside of the city center to preserve the neutrality of shared space (Dawson, 2016; McDowell, 2008). In single-identity neighborhoods, there is a consensus over who is considered a victim and who is considered a perpetrator, but in the shared city center, there is no agreed narrative (Lundy & McGovern, 2001). While Donzo’s tour is historical and educational in nature, naming specific individuals and events treads too closely toward commemoration. ‘In the early days of doing this,’ Donzo explained, ‘the tourism bord and the visitor center would not advertise us. They said that we were in danger of causing offense by talking about the conflict in the shared space of the city center’ (Guided Tour, 30 May 2018). Locals, whether they are involved in tourism or not are extremely sensitive to the ways in which the Troubles is represented. They are acutely attuned to legacy debates, and the question of how (and more importantly who) to commemorate is an ongoing debate in Northern Irish society. Tourism has become an important part of that debate.

But Donzo, himself highly aware of current social debates about Troubles commemoration in shared space (or lack thereof), worked hard to gain acceptance for his tour. By way of response, he went on local radio talk shows to discuss his perspective on the matter for a public audience, and he invited his loudest critics from Belfast City Council and Visit Belfast to take his tour. His critics found that his tour was well researched. He delved through the archives of the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland and accessed police deposition papers, coroner reports, declassified government documents and news reports. Essentially, all the information that makes up his tour is already in the public record. ‘Then we’re not treading on anybody’s toes with insensitivity because it’s part of the zeitgeist' (Personal Interview, 30 May 2018). On the issue of naming individuals, he says, ‘there are so many names in the public domain. Like the three Scottish soldiers,’ he said, referring to one of the events he details on the tour, ‘we name them because there’s a huge memorial at the site where they were killed' (Personal Interview, 30 May 2018). The names of individuals who were involved and survived, he leaves out. During the tour he refers to his sources, the witness statements and coroner reports, to lend factual backing to his narrative. He is precise in his descriptions and avoids generalizations. Like the other guides, he debunks stereotypes with carefully worded claims so that he cannot be accused of bias. ‘I did not say that a lot of Catholics were mutilated,’ he says in response to a tourist’s question, ‘I said there was one particular Loyalist gang that seemed to specialize in mutilating Catholic victims, the vast majority of Catholics who were killed would have been in bomb or gun attacks’ (Guided Tour. 30 May 2018).

Like the other bus tour and walking tour guides, Donzo is sensitive to the local gaze. He holds the same values of shared space and applies the same principles of depoliticizing and depersonalizing during the tour, although more loosely interpreted. He is careful to craft a narrative that presents an overview of events, rather than a particular perspective and refers to publicly available information, although his tour boldly pushed the boundary of what is considered acceptable. His priority is educating tourists about the realities and legacies of the conflict by acknowledging the past rather than avoiding it. He states that,

I’m providing a narrative that is mediated and not one that presents the perspective of Group A, Group B, Group C. I hope to provide people with enough information, education, political insight that helps them produce their own opinion of what happened here. (Personal Interview, 30 May 2018)

Despite its rocky beginnings, the tour was, as of 2018, the most popular walking tour on Trip Advisor and now employs multiple guides to keep up with demand. It receives rave reviews for the quality of the tour narrative and the depth of research underpinning the information provided. It is now fully supported by the Visit Belfast Centre and is graded 5 Stars by the regional tourism board, TourismNI. Now, Donzo can’t complete a tour without at least three pedestrians greeting him on the street. He is well liked and is trusted by locals to provide tourists with an unbiased, respectful and educated narrative of the conflict. Other city center guides conform more conventionally to the local gaze and regard it as something to be cautious of. By contrast, Donzo pushes the boundaries of what the local gaze will tolerate. He has redefined what is considered acceptable while still preserving the values of the shared city center.

Conclusion

This article examined how notions of the city center as a shared space influence narratives of the Troubles on guided tours in Belfast. It considered the role of the local gaze as perceived by the guides and the strategies guides use to comply with behavioral expectations in the shared space. Empirically it uncovers the careful considerations the guide must make when guiding tourists. How to talk about the conflict in a way that is both respectful to locals and educates curious tourists is a delicate act.

While tourism is partly seen as a separate field of activity from normal daily life, allowing for the discussion of topics that might not normally be tolerated in locals’ daily interactions, the leeway given to tours has limits. In Belfast, the understanding of the city center as shared space means that guides carefully craft their narratives about the Troubles to respect that, reflecting the socio-spatial dialectic. They put in a great deal of consideration to ensure that they present a neutral narrative of the past. By depersonalizing and depoliticizing their explanations of the past, they maintain a respectful narrative toward their fellow residents. This avoids causing offense to anyone and upholds the city center as a shared space.

However, the issue of how to talk about the Troubles is still under debate. Without a strong official or institutional position, guides are largely left to their own devices when it comes to crafting their tour narrative. This allows for individual guides to challenge what can be said about the Troubles in shared space. Guides can redefine what is considered acceptable while simultaneously maintaining a respectful narrative. Narratives of the past are always a work in progress and tour narratives are never fixed. As tour guide Donzo has shown, the guided tour is a fluid cultural project which adapts and responds to current social concerns and change what the social climate will allow. This also points to larger implications that tourism can have on social change, particularly for post-conflict societies.

Theoretically, this article makes two claims. First, that the importance of pre-existing understandings of place to the production of tourism cannot be understated. Tourist spaces do not exist independently from the places they inhabit. As Edensor (2007) notes, the guided tour inherits culturally coded patterns of behavior informed by pre-existing discourses and practices. These manifest within the guided tour to configure practices, shape narratives and produce specific representations of place. When in alignment with pre-existing understandings of place, the guided tour is both influenced by and helps reproduce these understandings in a socio-spatial dialectic.

Secondly, the power of the local gaze, not often considered in studies on tourism, is brought to attention. Because guided tours are public affairs, they are subject to a local gaze. In instances where locals are invested in how their city is being represented, their input can heavily influence the production of tour narratives and determine representations of the past more broadly. The power of this local gaze over the guided tour is of course contextually dependent, and it’s potential to have great bearing on the production of guided tours has not fully been considered in academic studies. Further consideration of the local gaze – how a local gaze is enforced, under what circumstances does it assert itself and how guides respond to it – can offer new insights into the dynamics of touristic narrative production.

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Notes on contributors

Emily Mannheimer

Emily Mannheimer is a lecturer at Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication in Rotterdam. She specializes in tourism as a means of post-conflict redevelopment. Her work focuses on heritage, memory, and narrative in Northern Ireland.

Notes

1 This is a perfect example of desirable heritage mining, as the Gaeltacht Quarter (the Irish cultural district located on the traditionally Catholic nationalist Falls Road) is significantly under-represented in Belfast’s tourism promotion when compared to the other Quarters.

2 These communities are also referred to in the academic literature as PUL (Protestant-unionist-loyalist) and CNR (Catholic-nationalists-republican) communities. Although these terms have different meanings they are often used interchangeably. Although in their daily lives, people commonly refer to themselves as being Protestant or Catholic, this do not necessarily correspond to devout religious belief and practice, as Feldman (1991) notes, but rather the social environment in which they were raised.

3 There is much debate over the extent to which the city center is actually shared. Many scholars suggest that ASF produces new lines of exclusion based on socio-economic status (see Komarova, 2008; Komarova & Bryan, 2014; Nagle, 2009; Neill, 2004; Rallings, 2014; Smyth & McKnight, 2010). However, my aim is not to engage in this debate, but to examine its influence on the performance of guided tour.

4 In Belfast, many residential neighborhoods are known to be either Catholic/nationalist or Protestant/loyalist. These neighborhoods are clearly marked (or territorialized) with visible symbols like flags, graffiti and murals which express the identity of its residents.

5 She is referring to the classic example of the Derry/Londonderry name debate. Using the name Derry implies someone who is Catholic/nationalist whereas Londonderry (because of the inclusion of ‘London’) is the name preferred by Protestant/loyalists. When speaking, it’s pronounced as one continuous word, ‘Derrylondonderry’.

6 This is a psyeudonym.

7 The IRA (technically PIRA, Provisional Irish Republican Army, but colloquially referred to as the IRA) and UDA (Ulster Defence Association) are two of the many paramilitary organizations that operated in opposition to one another during the Troubles. For more information, see https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/violence/paramilitary.htm

8 This is a pseudonym.

9 There are many other tours in Belfast that focus exclusively on the Troubles. However, they don’t operate in the city center, but in the single-identity (not shared) residential areas of west Belfast where there are different expectations for talking about the Troubles. See Leonard (2011), Mannheimer (2022), and McDowell (2008); Skinner (2015).