“Belfast possessed in Churchill’s phrase ‘an underworld... with dark forces of its own.” ---BRIAN BARTON from “A Pocket History of Ulster”

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MICHAEL, MY TRAVELING COMPANION, AND I finish our breakfast and head out of the doughnut shop. We catch up with a stream of folks heading across town to the glass-wrapped, copper-domed Waterfront Hall, sitting pretty on a plaza beside the River Lagan. Our group is headed to the first day of a peace conference held Oct. 19 to 21 in Belfast by the Worldwide Community for Christian Meditation. The conference is the third and final leg of a “Way of Peace” dialogue between Christian monk Father Laurence Freeman, the head of the WCCM, and his Buddhist monk friend and fellow traveler, H.H. the Dalai Lama.

There is much more on tap besides their tete-a-tete. The conference includes weighty-sounding workshops on inter-religious dialogue in Northern Ireland and more cerebral ones such as “Poetry and Peace: The Power of Words” and “Soil, Soul and Society: A New Paradigm for Peace.” Plus, there will be a meeting with victims and perpetrators of the 30-year long bloodletting in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles, an almost casual sounding name for a battle royale between Catholics and Protestants which has killed more than 3600 people in all sorts of terrible ways.

A peace process known as the Good Friday Agreement, inked in 1998 and overwhelmingly ratified by Irish voters North and South, has stilled the worst of Northern Ireland’s bomb-happy heyday (most every major pub in downtown Belfast, for instance, has been bombed out and rebuilt, bombed out and rebuilt).

Walking the Belfast streets this morning, we newly arrived peace tourists are unfamiliar with how solid this whole peacemaking process is -- relatively solid, I will come to learn. Yet isn’t that what everyone thought about the Mideast peace process before it erupted recently into an acid bath of vitriol, body parts and triumphant upraised bloody palms?

So there is this frisson of alertness -- bracing, in some ways -- which a newcomer to Belfast feels, as you stroll past government buildings topped with twin rows of concertina wire, armored entryways lined with whirring surveillance cameras and rifle-cradling Royal Ulster Constabulary guards. Olive-green, armored Landrovers occasionally whip down the streets, metal plates hanging to street level to prevent petrol bombs from being rolled beneath them.

As we near Waterfront Hall, a shaven-headed American man, wrapped in the rust-orange robes of a Therevadan Buddhist monk, stops at a street crossing. Across the road, a billboard for Guinness Stout displays a huge closeup, maybe 40 feet wide and 15 feet high, of a woman’s shapely rear end clad in pink panties, a tattoo peeking out from underneath her panty line. “Commit” the billboard says, rather inscrutably. And below that: “Live life to the power of Guinness.” The picture would not be out of place in “Playboy” magazine.

The monk’s name is Santikaro Bhikku and I have signed up to attend his workshop: “Meditation as an Antidote to Consumerism.” As we walk on, I glance back at the titillating billboard. While the groundbreaking Good Friday Agreement is evidence of big changes afoot in Ireland, the panty billboard is evidence of other changes in a country once dominated -- some would say hog-tied -- by the strictures of religion.

Another Guinness billboard seen around town tries a different shock tactic. It presents another close-up, only this one shows the 15-foot high face of an old Irishman, his red-rimmed, rheumy eyes testimony to the drink or two he has taken in his day. He looks tired, worn out, ready to give up -- or give in, at last.

“Forgive,” says this billboard.

This, too, seems a sign of the times.