Yeah they're fkn youuuge..
.
This illustrates something important about why Belfast is the way it is.
You might not know this, but the blue and red pallets you can see there are stolen property - every last one of them. They belong to commercial pallet pool services, and are rented by freight companies to deliver goods to high-volume businesses like supermarkets. Each of the pallets costs around £15 to replace. These are not used or broken pallets: CHEP, the company that manages the blue pallet stock, takes in and recycles end-of-life pallets itself; they are never available as broken pallets.
So, have another look at that picture, and multiply each blue or red pallet you can see by £15 (let’s be very generous and assume the plain-wood ones were all donated, broken stock). The scale of the theft on show here tells you about how weakly the law is enforced in these sectarian neighbourhoods. Anywhere else in the UK, the supermarkets (who have to pay for lost pallets) would have had the police visit the site and those pallets would have been returned, and the kids given a caution. In Belfast, the prospect of getting on the wrong side of certain “community leaders” (i.e., the ones who used to shoot people’s knees off in back alleys) makes it less hassle to let them steal and burn two to five grand of your equipment than cause a fuss.
And you wonder why nobody wants to start a business in Northern Ireland...
What's that 3/4 of the way up? A Catholic?
Pretty much, yes. 12th July celebrates the victory of the Engl
-ish king Willem Henrik van Oranje over the London-born invader James II at the Battle of the Boyne (in Co. Meath, now in the Republic; the filthy papist government has built a pretty good museum about it), so it used to be an effigy of James II on top. That, or whoever the current pope was.
These days, though, whoever the Loyalists have a beef with gets a spot on the pyre. Although no bonfire is big enough for that list these days...