Northern Ireland’s peace walls: the great divide keeping Troubles at bay

More than 15 years on from what was known as the Troubles, walls, gates and fences still separate some Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland.

The longest of these barriers, separating the Shankill and Falls roads in Belfast, is more than 10 metres high in parts; an imposing structure of concrete and steel fencing.

At nightfall and weekends massive steel gates at crossing points are locked and often the stone-throwing begins, each side blaming the other for rocks found lying close to the wall most days.

The 1998 Good Friday agreement signalled an end to the sectarian violence that had dogged Northern Ireland since the 1960s, but the so-called ‘peace walls’ remain.

Many say this is for good reason.

Brian Kingston, a local councillor with the Democratic Unionist Party, admits the term ‘peace wall’ can be confusing for outsiders.

“They’re called peace walls I suppose because they’re there to keep the peace between communities where there have been attacks, attacks on houses,” he said.

“Literally in the past you know there would have been shootings, petrol bomb attacks, people burned out of their houses.”

Northern Ireland’s government has put forward a proposal for the dozens of existing walls or interfaces to be removed within the next 10 years, but the plan is unpopular with those who live in their shadow.

“If the politicians are going to say it’s a good idea, I don’t know what they’re thinking about, because there’s too much bitterness between the two communities,” one woman living on the Shankill side of the divide said.

“I’m not proud of it, but it’s there to keep the two communities separated, so there’s nobody gets really hurt, because if that peace wall came down there’d be more lives taken.”

It is a view echoed throughout the Shankill area, a part of town adorned with Union flags and where few, if any, Catholics live.

“For the next 35 minutes or whatever it is, you are not going to see a Catholic in this area,” explains Paddy Campbell as he begins his taxi tour of Belfast’s trouble spots.

“Catholics don’t live here, they wouldn’t be welcome here, they wouldn’t want to live here.

“But the same operates when we leave the Protestant Shankill area to go onto the Catholic Falls Road. You will not see any Protestants over there, for the same reasons.”

One young man says there would be “civil war” if the walls came down.

He too thinks the politicians are out of touch.

“If Martin McGuiness [Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister] and Peter Robinson [first minister] are saying things like that, why are they not going to live on the front line?” he asked.

On the other side of the divide many Catholics think the wall should stay.

One man says that taking down the walls is “probably the stupidest suggestion I’ve ever heard.”

“In most other countries they have all sorts of sports; soccer, cricket, whatever. In Belfast we have something called recreational rioting,” he said.

“It starts off with the very young children, they come out and they start throwing stones at each other.

“Then it sort of graduates up the age groups, until finally the adults are out, and they’re at it too.”

There are a handful of people prepared to speak out in favour of the walls coming down.

One 30-something couple emerging from a bar wants them taken down.

“It’s 2013. The war’s over. The war’s over,” they said.

As they speak another man walks past.

“Keep them up,” he shouts over his shoulder and walks on.

Back on the Protestant side, councillor Brian Kingston concedes that the 10-year plan is “probably not” realistic.

“Equally, it’s a long timeframe and the first minister has said ‘well it’s a target’, it’s to try and say let’s see what progress can be made,” he said.

Around the Shankill and Falls Road area, huge murals painted on the sides of buildings close to the walls honour some of those killed in three decades of violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants.

Some of the dead were paramilitaries, some were ordinary people targeted simply for their religious affiliations or victims of random terrorist attacks.

Tourists flock to see the wall and the murals. Huge tour buses pull up one after the other at a section of the wall which the former US president Bill Clinton and the Dalai Lama both signed.

The visitors take photos, sign the wall themselves and move on.

It is a little like the scene at remaining sections of the Berlin Wall, but tour guide Paddy Campbell say the two should not be confused.

The Berlin Wall, he says, “was built to keep the people in, but this wall was built because both sides wanted it.”

Some of the more militaristic murals in the nearby housing estates are gradually being replaced, but otherwise it’s hard to see how the stark divisions between the areas have broken down much at all in the past 15 years.

 

“The improvement is, no-one’s shooting anyone,” says a man on the Catholic side.

“If you take the walls down, eventually someone’s going to end up shooting at each other.

“That is just the way it is here.”

Councillor Brian Kinston says at the end of the day most people would like to see a future “where we didn’t have to have walls.”

A decade and a half after the Good Friday peace agreement that future is still a long way off.

 

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-11/barbara-miller-on-peace-walls/4745202