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THE MURALS are getting a fresh lick of paint. Gaudy images of Balaclava-clad gunmen wielding semi-automatic rifles under the legends UFF and IRA are good for the tourist industry - official.
It's amazing how quickly the mean streets of Belfast have become the streets to be seen. Of course, terror tourism always did have a constituency of sorts. Sinn Fein used to have a ready supply of crude maps detailing the security force bases of west Belfast. They went down particularly well with students from Spain's Basque region.
But now everybody's at it. Ulsterbus has started a twice-weekly guided tour which takes you past all those places you've seen being firebombed or rioted at on the early evening news. The loyalists' Freedom Corner slides past in the east of the city. Click, whirr, everybody rushes to the left of the double-decker. There goes the Bobby Sands mural on the side of the Republican Press Centre in the Lower Falls. Snap.
Fred Heatley spins the yarns, sparing no blushes. The civilians shot dead by soldiers, the soldiers lynched by a mob at an IRA funeral. Everyone peers queasily out of the coach at a very ordinary high street where ordinary people are shopping.
It's rare enough now to see the troops' Land Rovers prowling through the city centre, a grinning squaddie poking his SA-80 nonchalantly through the back door. The police, too, are mothballing their trademark battleship-grey armoured vans - the ones which look like they've been made in a BBC workshop for Dr Who or Blake's Seven - and replacing them with bog-standard saloons.
But the tourism focus is changing. The troubles were always an embarrassment to the tourism boards, both north and south of the Irish border. Northern Ireland has always had stunning rural scenery and ravishing seascapes, but nobody dared visit them. So the Beginners Guide To Northern Ireland advises first-time visitors to take in the four corners of the province in order to appreciate its diversity.
Start by driving north-west out of Belfast to the very source of the recently-concluded political violence. They should rename Londonderry/Derry the Comeback City. The Alpha and Omega of the Troubles, 20 years ago it was an ugly shell, the ultimate Ulster cliche, known throughout the...