For two weeks, I traveled throughout Ireland. First on vacation and then for work. If you read the Dublin/Belfast Diary, you know many of my thoughts but that blog was by the nature of my job a rose-tinted view of the country. The most depressing part of the trip was my visit to Belfast. I was there in 2000, not that long after the Good Friday Peace Agreements. At that time there was a sense of hope in the air, a belief that things would continually get better. Today, hope is replaced by pessimism. An edge has returned. Although obviously things are not like they were in the 70s and 80s, the vestiges of The Troubles are still evident. In certain neighborhoods, the shortened arm of the law does not reach, giving way to the paramilitary groups instead. There are some twenty or so "peace walls" in the city, security blankets for residents of different communities still very distrustful of each other. As one of our delegates noted, "Even though they may work together in their job locations, the continuing segregation in schools and homes keeps the Protestants and Catholics, as best we could tell, in two entirely different worlds." This delegate had dinner with a Catholic family who live across from one of the "peace walls." He said after the dinner, "The past dies very hard in their minds, and the distrust of the police and burning resentment and sense of being treated as a colony by Britain are all major walls in their minds." I wrote in the Diary, "We saw the economic development that had taken place backed by specific economic strategies created by the District Council. We saw the relative peace nurtured throughout the country and the continuing challenges they face. We saw high tech businesses and new buildings; we saw peace walls and the McGuinness Pub across the street from our hotel where Robert McCarthy was murdered last year. We watched a population of which 39% are under the age of 30, representing a new Northern Ireland. When driving in the west of Ireland a week earlier, I learned about a poem written by one of the residents of an island just off the coast. He depicted the cycle of our lives succinctly and gracefully: Twenty Years of Growing, Twenty Years of Blooming, Twenty Years of Stooping, Twenty Years of Declining. In the last ten years, Northern Ireland has made it possible to bloom again but it is a delicate plant."