If you remember the eighties in Belfast, you probably wish you weren’t there. We slummed it up in Student Land in South Belfast drinking, throwing beds out the window, and chasing women with varying degrees of success.

But the real craic was down town in what Mairtin O Muilleoir memorably termed the Dome of Delight. Post Anglo-Irish Agreement Belfast was a bitter oul bastard of a place. The bitterness in fact was palpable. These were the days. Through the late eighties and into the early nineties, when the Troubles were literally in their Death throes. Increasingly desperate tit for tat shooting and bombings. It was shite.

I remember well the aftermath of the Gibraltar shootings and a subsequent public meeting in Queen’s Union. One of the IRA personnel who had been shot was Mairead Farrell, a former prisoner at Armagh during the first Hunger Strike and at the time of her death a first year student at Queen’s. The atmosphere was electric. And poisonous.

Bit like things down at the City Hall where the central characters were boys like Herbie Ditty, Jim Rodgers, Mairtin O Muilleoir, Tommy Patton, George Seawright and co. Mayoral stints by the likes of Sammy Wilson brought great colour to the place. It was round this time that photographs of Sammy emerged cavorting round some field with a young lady, naked as the day he was born. The facial hair is still the same, dunno about elsewhere. God help her wit my mother remarked at the time disgusted not so much that the young lady was naked but that she was with Sammy.

O Muilleoir was one of the first Sinn Fein Councillors to sit on the council and there was none of the détente of later years. When he went to speak his DUP opponents including Rhonda Paisley, once Belfast’s Mayoral Consort would gulder No Surrender, howl abuse and sing various tribal ditties.

Herbie for his part rather bewilderingly found himself Mayor of Belfast for a year. It was a great Norn Iron joke at the expense of all the industrialists and business tycoons queuing up to invest here. Not. Anyone who turned up would have wondered why the Village idiot was in charge of the Asylum. Herbie drew great praise in some quarters but mostly head shaking and despair when he refused to meet the Mayor of Dublin. This was a man who once claimed to have gone into public life to stop Catholics getting jobs.

In the early nineties my job meant that I attended a fair few receptions in the City Hall. To say it was a cold house for Catholics/Nationalists would be an understatement. It was positively Arctic. The marble halls were choc full of Unionist hagiography bedecked in the Union Flag with life size oil paintings of every Unionist Mayor. At that stage there hadn’t been many nationalist or republican mayors so the hue was distinctly red white and blue.

As a citizen of the city, and one who was in employment attracting overseas and particularly North American visitors on historical and heritage visits, it was embarrassing and intimidating. Hanging limply out the back was the famous Belfast Says No sign. Looking back, what a fucking moronic signal that was to the solitary Martian that would have landed in Donegall Place and quickly left again for the friendlier climes of a Siberian Gulag, North Korea or Pinochet’s Chile.

If you want to catch up on reminiscences from this time, read O Muilleoir’s book. You’ll think it is a work of fiction. But it’s not. Mairtin himself recently returned to the Dome of Delight after a period of absence doing something better with his time.

He must have felt it was just like the old days when the Unionists walked out the other day in objection to a sign in Irish that said Nollaig Shona Duit. That’s Happy Christmas as gaeilge for all you non-speakers of the leprechaun language. The exodus happened during a debate on diversity. Not being an avid City Council watcher (we have enough rarified discussions in our local chamber) I came to this one late. But, as one Twitter correspondent observed:

“the union jack flies all year round and an irish language Christmas greeting is met with small minded bigotry.”

I remember during the debate at Queen’s after Gibraltar, a guy in a Fairport Convention tee shirt with an English accent stood up and said “why can’t we all just get along with one another.” He nearly got lynched by both sides.

Without wishing to sound like him, and I don’t really like Fairport Convention either, surely it is time a few people wised the f*** up here. There are plenty of other things to be getting on with in Belfast and elsewhere rather than revisit the dark, blackly humorous, but still dark days of the Dome of Delight.

Otherwise lads, let’s break out the old Belfast Says No sign and just go for it.

This weekend Derry becomes the Halloween capital of Ireland.

Ironically in a City best known as the epitome of the Gerrymander, the home of the civil rights movement, Bloody Sunday, and two Nobel Laureates it is in the bacchanalian celebration of the ancient Celtic Festival of Samhain that it has gained most renown. The Festival is a City Marketing dream.

My brother in law acerbically referred to it as the largest underage drinking festival in Ireland and, a proud Derry man himself, observed how the majority of the male population of Derry appear to relish in dressing up in women’s clothes come Halloween. He also remarked, that not any old thing will do – they all seem to have something stylish that fits, with a nice comfortable fitting bra to underwire the whole affair. Maybe it is all those years of having two names, the city dwellers are in touch with both their feminine sides.

Some of the sights you see in the City in Fancy Dress are eyeboggling not to say jaw dropping. Others very funny. A couple of years ago as we made our way back up towards the car, the students of Magee were making their way down to the fleshpots of the city, plastered they were, to man and woman. One particularly hefty doll lumbered towards us, dressed not so much as Tinkerbell as Tinker Big Ben.

Strapped to her back were a pair of ludicrously small wings. As she passed stocious I remarked to her you’ll need a bigger pair of wings than that if you want to get off the ground. She mumbled incoherently and staggered on. No doubt she found warm and penetrative embrace in the arms of some young Derry fella dressed as a big nurse called Wendy with matching bra.

The city puts on a great show for Halloween. Yesterday for example with Cáit, Leo and Peter, I attended a show where a character called Ron Airhead inserted himself fully into a large orange balloon. My son Peter was greatly agitated that he wouldn’t be able to get out. He did of course, but it is great that in the forthcoming City of Culture one can watch such vacuous but entertaining nonsense.

Tomorrow night the City Council will detonate thousands of pounds worth of fireworks from barges in the middle of the Foyle, watched by thousands of Fancily dressed folks perched along the banks of the River, standing on the new Peace Bridge and hanging around Guildhall Square. After, the families will disperse home leaving the party people to drink on into the night.

Angela’s friend Elaine once hooked up with a fella on Halloween night whilst dressed as a petite red devil. She had to make her way home early in the morning still dressed in red carrying her little fork with which perhaps she snared her prey. A passing street cleaner laughed when he saw her totter along high heeled and red devilish-sheepish and started to sing ‘After the Ball is Over’.

After the weekend finishes, and the ball is indeed over, it will be back to normal in Derry, whatever that is. To the outsider like myself, married into the city and its people it is never normal. But that is part of its charm and attraction. And that has made all the difference.

According to figures in the Irish Independent this morning, the turn out for the election of Uachtarán na hÉireann was less than 50%. We will get the exact figure later today when the votes are counted.

That means that one in two people registered to vote don’t care sufficiently about the role of Head of State or who fulfills that position to actually exercise their franchise. Given that a proportion of the population of the Irish people will not have been registered to vote through address changes, failure to re enrol on the electoral register, it means that less than one in two people will have voted for the President. What does that tell you?

The ‘winner’ therefore will likely be elected on say optimistically 35% of that vote. That is in fact a fairly paltry mandate when you extrapolate that out to include the entire population.

In countries such as the Republic of Ireland, the impact of a low turn out is ameliorated slightly by the use of the Proportional Representation Single Transferable Vote. The downside of this electoral system is that many people do not understand that they should vote down the card in order that transfers work properly.

In regards to the election result unfolding today, after all the vitriol, abuse and muck raking, the reality is that after a short period, few people will be in the slightest bit interested what the President does. He/she will make their regular appearances at Rugby internationals and All Ireland Finals. There may be the occasional pronouncement or other but in reality the position of Uachtarán na hÉireann whilst constitutionally relevant is largely irrelevant.

In a country where politicians have suffered from a serious loss of credibility through fault of their own, the Republic of Ireland has completed a Presidential election that has highlighted all that is bad about the country.

It has allowed all sorts of pustules to burst open releasing an infectious and disgusting torrent of poison and invective.

At the end of the process the country will get the person that most of the minority vote for. Then, they will all move on to the next moment of national soul searching.

I for one can’t wait.