TROUBLED WALLS

OCTOBER 24, 2019 — JORDY NIJENHUIS

Belfast has multiple faces. If you enter the city as a tourist, you’ll find an open and vibrant place nestled between lush green hills. However, if you grew up in the outskirts, your perspective can be worlds apart from that of the tourists. Instead, you might look at Belfast as a hostile place, or as a city forgotten by the UK mainland.

The city is still very much divided.

Just blocks away from the city center, you’ll find the so-called ‘peace walls’, put in place to separate Catholic from Protestant neighbourhoods and vice versa. The first walls were constructed in 1969 during the Troubles, a violent conflict in which various factions fought over the (dis)continuation of Northern Ireland’s union with Great Britain. The walls were supposed to be a temporary divide between the fighting communities, but even after the signing of the Good Friday Agreements which officially ended the Troubles, the walls have only grown in number and size.

It can be conflicting to walk through the streets of these divided neighbourhoods. On the one hand, they look like perfectly normal communities with people commuting to their work, elderly men sipping on their pints way too early, and kids playing football on the streets.

On the other hand, the past is still lurking around every corner. Colourful murals of glorified warriors and a variety of memorials are scattered throughout these neighbourhoods. Some houses even have a plaque above their door remembering the violent and often deadly break-ins by armed forces.

They form a stark reminder of the past Troubles, when Belfast was still named the Terror Capital of the World and bombings and raids were still an every-day reality.

Every now and then, the walls loom up from behind the houses. As strange as these walls might initially feel to an outsider, most of the people living around them would agree that they are still needed to maintain the peace.

The walls raise many questions, not just for the Northern Irish themselves, but for any society dealing with polarisation on one level or another. How do you involve people that feel left out? How do you keep the peace between fighting communities? And how do you prevent even further escalation, without causing further alienation?

Polarisation might start out as an abstract and intangible concept, but the moment it physically manifests, the moment we start building walls, it will only take so much more effort to ever tear them down again.