I am just back from a week in Northern Ireland, and of course my body thinks it is noon while it’s still the wee dawn hours here in Minnesota, so I’m doing my best to be productive, though perhaps not profound, as I start to process this whole experience.
On the last day of the trip, I took a walking tour with Arthur Magee of Experience Belfast and we visited the Peace Walls, barriers built in the late 1960s to separate Protestant and Catholic communities and reduce the sectarian violence of the Troubles.
There are more than 21 miles of peace walls cutting through the city, some almost 40 feet high, so that petrol bombs couldn’t be lobbed over them.
As we walked and talked, Arthur shared his flavors and insights to bring the history alive and it became clear that while the Troubles officially ended with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the troubles aren’t over. Much the way that slavery officially ended here with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but our issues of race and economic inequity remain.
The Peace Walls have become a part of the fabric of Belfast life, with murals and messages of all sorts. I’ll need some more time to let it all soak in (plus a good night’s sleep or two) but for now, I’d like to share a few photos from the walk, plus a few quotes from Arthur that helped put things in context for me. Squint a little as you read the passages, and see if anything sounds familiar.
-Everybody wants peace and everybody wants it on their own terms.
-Good people here did horrific things to one another.
-It’s very simple. It’s us vs. them. The trouble is, we all look the same.
-The tip of the iceberg is when someone gets killed, but there’s a lot more that happens under the surface that is difficult.
-People are very easy to control when they feel like they are under attack.
-As soon as a flag comes out, people start to die.
-Both sides said, “We did nothing wrong. It’s all their fault.”
-We are moving forward, but not everybody is moving at the same pace.
-We experienced a decency drain. Good people moved away. But if that happens too much, what have you got left? If decent people don’t stay, things will never change.
-Life is really simple when it’s always someone else’s fault.
-The reason why we’ll come together isn’t because we’re all kumbaya, it’s because we’ve no choice; because guess what? We’re not at the centre of the universe.
