At one point in the play a character talks about the fact
that the Troubles have made Belfast a popular tourist destination – people want
to see where the riots and murders took place. She is particularly concerned
with the actions of a German couple who are fascinated by everything to do with
the events, including the fact that Republican women would bang the lids of
their metal dustbins to alert their men when the security forces were
approaching.
In the play, the Germans want to buy Kate Tidy’s dustbin lid
as a souvenir. They offer her ten pounds for it, but then comes the good bit,
as she tells the Germans:
“That was the first bin lid ever banged on Internment
morning . . . it was handed down from my
granny. It is a collector’s item. It’s worth . . . two hundred pounds”
OK – so it’s a play, but I can just imagine something like
that happening. It strikes me that nothing has changed in centuries – throughout
history gullible people have been offered all sorts of trash for huge sums of
money, in the belief that it has some particular significance. If all the
supposed bits of the “true cross” of Christ’s crucifixion were put together
you’d be able to build Noah’s Ark with them!
This was the trade that Chaucer’s Pardoner was in back in
the 14th century – ripping people off by conning them into believing
that something of no intrinsic worth has miraculous properties.
Nothing has changed – people still pay absurd sums of money
for items that once belonged to celebrities, or so they are told. The average
human being seems to be just as gullible as ever!
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