TRAVEL / Ulster packs up its troubles: For 25 years violence has haunted Northern Ireland. As the province moves forward towards peace, its landscape and light recall distant memories of how Britain used to be

WHAT TROUBLES? the casual visitor asks, sitting in one of Belfast's smart, safe restaurants that the middle classes can easily afford because disposable income is no problem here. Belfast has been kept artificially afloat for years by enormous subsidies, like that other besieged city Berlin used to be; that much is common knowledge. The surprise is the air of prosperity. Seen one way, and not very much askance, large parts of Belfast, like old Berlin, have the peaceful atmosphere of a protected enclave where, beyond the obvious danger zones, life is one of leafy tranquillity. More than one person told me that the living is easy for the Northern Irish middle classes.

Ten years ago Belfast was under siege; today it feels curiously undangerous. We're so conditioned to think of the place in terms of violence and its aftermath that this new prosperity comes as a jolt - colourful post-modernist blocks say this is anywhere but Belfast. Such little note has been made of this transition that you still expect to see the high-security cordon that used to surround the city centre. It is dismantled now, leaving a pedestrian area free for development into prosperous malls.

Twenty years ago the Europa hotel's status was that of most-bombed-hotel, with body searches at the door. The place still looks like a bomb has hit it - it did, indirectly, early last year - but the expensive renovation that the hotel is undergoing as a result suggests optimism and expansion: the Europa is in the process of being transformed into 5-star Anywhere.

You look in vain for signs of the off-duty hard-boozing correspondents of legend: no evidence of the notorious 'ugly-night' competitions, the sport of bored journos and war-zone groupies in the Horseshoe Bar, the men competing to pick up the plainest woman, to be produced at the next day's breakfast as proof. Instead young BBC production teams with Panorama stickers wander keenly through the corridors in search of some Birtian solution to the problem.

It's not like the news. Central Belfast feels as safe as houses, everything as clean and bright as a Hamley's model. Even the occasional armoured Land-Rover that trundles past seems toy-like, with soldiers in Lego helmets, guns like plastic. Compared to what you've been led to expect, it's frighteningly bland. Only in unexpected details is it sinister, like the white Rolls with the number-plate UZ1.

The smallness of it all is the real shock - especially in relation to the unfathomable scale of sectarian politics - both the province, which you can crisscross in a day, and Belfast itself. All those loaded street names in such a tiny area. Everybody knows, or gives the impression of knowing, everyone else's business, and business for many appears to be good. A police constable earns over pounds 30,000 a year with overtime. 'Most of them are in it for the money,' says an ex-politician. The political complexity, he says, achieves its deepest level in a labyrinthine economy too complex to unravel.

At precisely what point the black market rackets of 'the godfathers of terrorism' shade into legitimate business is hard to say, but behind the obvious political stand-offs is a grey area where profitable deals go unreported, hammered out in secret to the satisfaction of the different parties. A Spectator essay dryly noted how the building of the new link road between Belfast's M1 and M2 was divided up between the different organisations, loyalist and republican, in 'an example of cross-

community co-operation that should be the envy of the Northern Ireland Office'.

Speculation is especially rife at the moment: a sense of political development and settlement has already been anticipated by the building developers. The diggers and scaffolders are moving in. EU and American cash is plentiful, and added to it is the start of a financial wave making the first investments in the future, in anticipation of peace being close. Fly conversations in bars suggest Belfast is transforming itself into a big building racket: 'From boom] to boom town,' says the man in the cowboy hat, who views me sceptically as being the first attack of a tourist invasion that he, for one, would rather do without. As far as he is concerned, life in Belfast is a well-kept secret, not to be shared around.

Central to the current development is the tacit assumption that the violence has been made containable, reduced to an 'acceptable level' (in Reggie Maudlin's once notorious phrase) of sectarian tit-for-tat, with the police and the military as accessory targets, and civilian areas off-limits. Belfast is a strange mutation as a result: an emerging modern city stuck in a time-warp. Some go so far as to point to the advantages of the violence, which has arrested an influx of the sort of urban crime that now affects most British cities. The visitor wanders around untroubled, on holiday from the daily anxieties of modern urban life - the mugging, rape and crack dealing, roaming windscreen-washing gangs, the Big Issue, the usual collapsing infrastructure and, dare one say it, IRA bombs.

Seventy miles west of Belfast is Londonderry, or Derry as it is now commonly known since the evacuation of the Protestants in their thousands. Derry is more money, more malls, a fierce civic pride, a republican Klondyke. Derry is investment, backed by much Catholic- American money, a fat city awash with surplus cash. But behind Derry's born-again wealth, inevitable rumours abound, of corruption and cronyism, of predatory big fish moving in.

Protestants don't shop in Derry, preferring Limavady or Strabane, but their money is wanted and the spearhead of the plan to lure them back is the rumoured arrival of a Marks & Spencer: united at last by shopping. 'Oh yes, we're big shoppers,' said the Belfast exile in Dublin where they talk enviously of the materialism of the North, wistfully reciting the litany of shops unavailable to them: 'Sock Shop, Body Shop, Next, Boots the Chemist.'

TOURISM is something the Northern Irish are good at, being friendlier than the English, though accommodation verges on the bizarre. Right in the middle of an enormous border checkpoint is a sign to a farmhouse B&B. There's no middle range of rooms in pubs or motels. Hotels are expensive, though weekend breaks are cheap, varying between the super-modern, pooled and fitness-centred, plus wayward service that makes it amusing, and the frankly old-fashioned. 'Hospitality is a cure for doubt,' the Dublin writer Anne Enright wrote.

It is a strange country: the grandeur of the landscape, the operatic weather, the slow drip of violence offset by a relentless banality of bungalows, neat verges and shops that are actively appreciated. Sometimes it doesn't look like England, at others more like a misremembered dream of how England might once have looked. Everything hovers on the brink of hallucination, made more unreal by the speed of the weather changes. Summer days are what English weather once was, that particular climate caught in old holiday photographs, dampness and uncertainty still visible in the air. The greenness of the lawns and fields is hyper-real, like the colour cranked up on the TV, as lush as a greengrocer's artificial turf.

Political allegiance is announced by painted kerbstones, colours nailed to the mast, graffiti always to the political point: UDA, IRA. In July, anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, Protestant towns hang red, white and blue bunting that flutters like trapped confetti over high streets, towns that are a testament to a vanishing tradition of Calvinist thrift. After the untidiness of the south - a Mediterranean laziness almost - you can see why Northern Protestants fear a Dublin marriage. Defensive- looking front gardens of fanatical neatness say so. Catholic gardens are less obsessive, though beshrubbed tidiness is common to both. The shared desire for a neat border.

False alarms of the North's awful food were fed to me in Dublin by the Belfaster who had fled there - 'All deep-fried, even the meat pies.' He said he was raised on the outskirts of Belfast, across the lough from Holywood, where the films (fillums) were made, or so he had grown up believing because his mother had told him so. Sally Belfraoe's book, A Belfast Year, notes the same lack of culinary adventure - horrified woman in Italian restaurant: 'Cheese on soup]'

In fact, food is fine-ish. Fat salmon around Derry, and in town Reggie's, a spanking new fish place, fish mainly unbattered. Elsewhere, presentation undid the chef: dainty nouvelle cuisine menu descriptions arrive mis-translated into jumbo-portions, with enough sauce to drown a herd of cattle. Good bread though, heart attack breakfasts (the Ulster fry), and the fattest oysters, from Strangford Lough, are served in the Belfast Crown, the most civilised pub in the world, unique for its private booths, each with its own door.

The Londonderry Arms in Carnlough on the Antrim coast offers, according to the guidebook, 'plain country cooking, presented with charm', their boiled potato looking and tasting like something from Edgar Allan Poe, while in the bar Winston Churchill glares down from the wall because the house once belonged to him. The clientele is Protestant, middle class, not quite relaxed. After dinner there is impromptu singing to piano accompaniment.

A strangulated old dear gargles bravely, then a man movingly sings a ballad full of unspecified yearning, and time shifts and it could be 1914, 1916. The song is like something from the Great War, sung in the hotels of Picardy, its keening for love full of the knowledge of war. You half expect to look down and find yourself in boots and puttees. The experience of being taken outside of yourself and your own time is as common as the feeling of being constantly ambushed by your past. In the case of this hotel, unwelcome memories of boarding-school visiting Sundays with their smell of cabbage, psychotic carpets and wet outdoors.

'No hosepipe ban here,' announced the retired major-general cheerfully. The general does four-star B&Bs, dispensing the hospitality of the officers' mess at Drenagh House, his country pile near Limavady. 'Finding the gates is easy enough,' they said in the nearest pub where the whole bar chipped in with directions. 'It's finding the house once you're there.' Secluded in grounds the size of a minor county, the general's mansion, built by the architect of Antrim's spectacular coast road, turns out to be large enough to accommodate a garrison. At the height of the troubles the general was stationed in Londonderry, barely half an hour's drive away. The transition from top brass in the security forces to taking in paying guests down the road may baffle the outsider, but is made to seem quite normal locally.

A night at the general's finds you wandering through the pages of an interiors magazine. Thirteen of us sat down to eat, me the only paying guest, parachuted into the middle of a private dinner party identical to that recurring dream of finding yourself on stage, in an Ayckbourn play perhaps, with no idea of your part or lines, confronted by a forgotten level of manners, all charmingly done, even down to the presentation of the bill the next day.

A million miles away, in Catholic Belleek, at the head of Lough Erne, it's hard to tell which side of the border you're on. Outside a rough looking frontier bar on the edge of town, that you know will be full of hostile bandits, an incongruous sign announces: 'Timoney's Bar and Lounge Traditional music with the Lady of the Eme finalists, 2.30-5.00'. Inside, virginal teenage girls in sashes and modest attire (a glimpse of ankle) play guitar and sing solo, mainly traditional songs, in voices that ache with purity; enough, as the saying goes, to bring a tear to a glass eye.

The strange shyness of the event is emphasised by each singer sitting with her back to the audience, surrounded by other competitors who mime a cheerful appreciation that doesn't quite mask their tension. The family audience boozes, genially, the children on what looks like Tizer and Vimto, while the usual mild level of hallucination hovers over the scene, for above the girls on the wall hangs a giant video screen silently relaying nothing but advertisements that jar with the events below. Racy Haagen-Dazs ads could be coming from Mars for all the sense they make here.

The evening ends with a barn dance, of sorts - 'Ladies choice]' 'Oh feck,' says a man, ducking away to the toilet - the music provided by a trio of impassive children who play with deadpan expertise while the adults stomp around chaotically looking for the pattern of the dance. Timoney's bar and the Londonderry Arms: worlds apart, probably irreconcilable.

Outside, the fine evening and the soft watery light of Fermanagh contradict Churchill's vision of its dreary steeples in his political essay The Aftermath. A magical countryside of hills and lakes, dilapidated at the fringes: an old phone-box invaded by a tree. A tatty black-and-white country bus shelter seen in close-up is pure Mondrian, defaced by the word 'Busty', and on the floor an abandoned green wellington.

After a while you start to get religiously superstitious about these symbols, which sometimes achieve a full-blown surrealism: the De Chirico landscape of Downhill Palace, gutted now, a monument to a Bishop of Londonderry's vanity, sightless windows staring over green fields; and across the border, an image out of Bunuel: hillside rows of dead babies in garish shrouds turn out to be plastic bags of peat.

This beautiful border countryside, the margin where sectarian tensions run highest, seems as out of time as the conflict itself, a patchwork of small-holdings and hedgerows which, along with their abundance of wild flowers, have vanished now from the rest of Britain, uprooted by open farming. As in Sicily, violence and landscape are inseparable and journeying through this unspoilt, secretive country, you start to see how violence and topography relate, how particular landscapes encourage feud, revenge and ambush. Rural violence is even less forgiving than the urban variety, haunted by the memory of vendettas going back generations.

It took several days of driving to realise what was odd about the North: no marked police cars, no jam sandwiches waiting to catch you clocking 85. I went speeding Toad-like down empty roads - Parp] Parp] - only to be told later by a hotel porter that the police sit in unmarked cars, distinguishable only by their dark bullet-proof glass. 'Oh don't you worry, you're being watched, all right.' Silly of me to think I wasn't. That night a helicopter hovered over the hotel.

The presence of the security forces contributes to the general air of arrested development. With none of the complexities of multi-racial Britain, it is tempting to see Northern Ireland as the last resort of the bigot: a colonial hangover, a whites-only enclave. Some interpret the security as a blessing, providing a level of personal safety missing in the UK. More than once I was told that many have learnt to live with the divisions, even Republicans, who are take the government grant for the kitchen extension as a way of ripping off the Crown.

New housing is everywhere. Bungalows in the South are ordered by catalogue, originally written by a Dublin senator under the title of 'Bungalow Bliss'. Northern ones are plainer but more prosperous looking. After the British fad for renovating the old, this desire to build a new place of your own is refreshing.

Just as you feel you're starting to get a handle on all this, something happens to remind you. The Belfast to Dublin train stops at Moira, barely 10 minutes down the line, and it's all out and on to buses because of a security alert. Ten miles further on, at Lurgan, the connecting train has gone AWOL. There's a hasty confab between officials. No one knows what to do with us, so our three buses lurch on, acquiring refugee status, turned away at station after station, in vain pursuit of a lost train. The passenger mood becomes hostile, the driver so relentlessly cheerful that a public lynching seems on the cards. 'Thayse things are sent to tray us,' he announces.

Time unravels. What should have been a two-and-a-half-hour train ride goes into limbo. Portadown comes and goes. The shambling convoy proceeds at 30mph because the third coach driver has never driven outside Belfast. Ours is a Protestant, visibly anxious the nearer he gets to the border.

In Catholic Newry, he can't find the station and is barracked by a section of the bus: 'Left, for Christ's sake]' Still no train, but at Dundalk in the Republic, only 20 minutes away, we're promised that one is waiting. Desperate cheerfulness sets in.

At Dundalk, weak laughter and a near riot: no train, no cafe. In an act of Christian generosity a woman gives me half her sandwich while her sister tries to get me to take up smoking again. A hopeless queue forms for the one phone. Three likely lads crowd the ticket office window and ask for 'three tays and cheese sandwiches?' Outside the smoking break drags on indefinitely, exasperation giving way to resignation. The wealthy and desperate haggle with local taxi drivers: ' pounds 45 to Dublin,' the cry goes up. Others are left stranded, victims of a missed connection to Cork.

The convoy trundles on, the bus emptier now, only a hard core left. Two-thirty, three-thirty. More connections missed. You give up worrying, once you start to see this bizarre journey as a metaphor for the larger state of things. Inaccuracy, disinformation and fantasy - all encountered on this ridiculous detour - are, you realise, acceptable ways of negotiating your way through the maze of Northern Ireland.

There is no straight answer here, and as this journey drags on forever and bus-lag sets in, a remark read earlier and puzzled over begins to make sense. John Morrison wrote in The Ulster Cover-up: 'In a situation fraught with obscure gradations of motive and opinion, the psychological appeal of an extreme and simplistic political hard line is very great.'

It's true, you end up knowing nothing about Northern Ireland, not even scratching the surface. This mad bus ride is a microcosm: truth is shown to be dispensable and irrelevant - propaganda, disinformation, fiction and anecdote its replacements. The only thing that is guaranteed is a good story.

TRAVEL NOTES

GETTING THERE: British Airways flies from Heathrow to Belfast: flights start at pounds 90 return on a weekday, pounds 100 at the weekend. Stays must include a Saturday night, and the offer lasts until 31 October 1994. STA Travel (071-937 9921) offers a flight to Belfast from Heathrow for pounds 69, which must include a Sunday night. Manx Airways (0345 256 256) flies to Belfast from Luton, fares from pounds 86.

STAYING THERE: Prices are for weekend stays only, and include bed and breakfast. Europa Hotel, Belfast (0232 327000): single room pounds 47 per night, double pounds 65. Plaza Hotel, Belfast (0232 333555): single room pounds 38, double pounds 49. Londonderry Arms Hotel, County Antrim (0574 885255): single room pounds 45, double pounds 65 per night (or, for two nights bed and breakfast plus dinner, pounds 59.95 per person). Bed and breakfast at Drenagh House, Limavady (050 4722649) costs pounds 40 for a single room, pounds 50 double.

FURTHER INFORMATION: The Northern Ireland Tourist Board operates a Freephone number (0800 282662) and will send general information about Belfast on request. The British Travel Centre (071-839 8416) will also provide information.

(Photographs omitted)