The landscape and the people and even the weather are wonderful. The first time I stepped off a plane at Belfast City Airport, all I could see were businesses named after branches of my Scottish family: Shaw's Taxis, Copland Bakeries, Wilson Engineering. I should have noticed but didn't that all the companies that advertised in the airport had Scottish names.
I've been back often since. I've been to Derry, Belfast, Armagh, Antrim, Newcastle, Strabane and Hillsborough to work or on holiday. I've seen the Mountains of Mourne and Lough Neagh. I've often said: Northern Ireland is like Scotland would be if we had money.
When I was working, I put wee village primary schools in Ayrshire in touch with similar schools in Northern Ireland and the kids discovered - not surprisingly - that their lives had a lot in common. They were country kids. Kept beasts of their own which they showed and sold and they went to school in a pretty good humoured way because they had to. But they wouldn't be sorry to leave and go to work on the farm, which is what they were brought up to do.
Watching these young people interact was a great lesson in understanding that a lot of adults would do well to copy.
Except they don't. The companies that advertised in Belfast City Airport had Scottish names because the owners were Proddies. They were the part of the Irish-Scottish exchange that had brought prosperity to some of the people of Northern Ireland. It was when I stood on Derry's walls and heard from a professor of history from Queen's University, a Catholic himself and born and brought up in Derry, how he had witnessed the murder of a wee girl by a British soldier and had run and run to get away from the rubber bullets, that I understood how divided this community was.
A huge part of the Good Friday Agreement has been about reconciliation. My hope is that we already have a generation growing up knowing only peace. I still remember the looks of confusion among youngsters who had come to display their Irish dancing to people attending a conference in Country Down when a DUP councillor got up and left the conference hall while Martin McGuinness (minister of education then) was speaking. And we need to work at it so that in another 60 years, the enmity will be gone. Not everyone seems to want to be reconciled: there are those on both sides who seek to keep the hatred going. I count the DUP among them.
So you can just imagine how I felt when I found the Conservative Prime Minister, who called a general election that nobody wanted, and then found herself struggling to keep her place as head of government, had allied herself with the DUP.
You can google DUP if you like, but basically the DUP are against everything that almost all of us in Scotland consider civilised: they are anti-homosexual, anti-equality (gay marriage), anti the right of women to decide their own sexual health (contraception, abortion). There are even a few creationists among them who believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago.
I can't tell you that the DUP belong to the past, because I can't imagine a past that would have contained them. But I worry about our future if the Tories have decided to hand any part of it to the DUP.
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