Hilltown, Northern Ireland
Vincenta Leyden lives in Hilltown, County Down, Northern Ireland, near the Mourne Mountains. Born in Northern Ireland and raised partly in the Republic of Ireland, her life has unfolded along the border between two places and identities. Growing up during the Troubles, she experienced the conflict not through dramatic moments but through the everyday realities of living in a divided society. Those experiences shaped her curiosity about history, identity, and the ways communities understand the past.
A creative thinker and lifelong learner, Vincenta is drawn to poetry, music, and art as ways to explore emotions and open conversations across differences. Inspired by poets like Seamus Heaney, she writes and reads poetry as a way to reflect on personal and collective stories.
As a mother, she encourages her children to engage with a wider world through music and cross-border cultural experiences. Vincenta believes creativity and curiosity can help people challenge assumptions, connect across communities, and imagine a more hopeful future.
Hilltown, Ireland
“We were from the North living in the South, and somehow we never fully belonged to either.”
Living between North and South:
“So we grew up in the North, in rural Northern Ireland, with a lot of fields, a lot of space. So we had a very beautiful childhood, but also quite complex because of what was going on in Northern Ireland.
I also think that those early experiences of what is it to be Irish, because you weren’t properly Irish if you were in Northern Ireland, and you weren’t properly Irish in the South of Ireland because you came from Northern Ireland.
I think some of my brothers and sisters would say the same thing, I’m not sure we know where we come from, even though there’s miles between where we come from. Because you weren’t properly Northern Irish because you didn’t come from there anymore, you left. And then in the South, then you were a Northerner.
So very much this sort of split personality. And I don’t know if we ever really fit in, in either place, for those reasons.”
The normalization of conflict:
“The lasting impact of what went on in Northern Ireland to me individually or to others isn’t in direct experience, but it’s the everyday societal stuff that we lived with.
We lived in a police state. It was very normal to be stopped by soldiers or police. It was very normal for soldiers to be surveillancing me as a child. That was very normal.
It’s not normal. Do you know what I mean? None of that’s normal. It’s not normal to know that you’re being watched.”
The questions children ask:
“I remember actually being quite small and seeing on a bridge, there was the words ‘No Extradition.’ I remember saying to my dad, what does that mean? And my dad saying, I’m not going to tell you what that means. I don’t know what age I was, but I was very young.
But I remember thinking, if you don’t tell me what it means, I’ll find out. But that’s the nature of children. You ask questions about the world around you.
But there were lots of things you weren’t supposed to ask about. There were lots of things that adults didn’t want to explain because they were complicated or because they were painful.
So you kind of grew up with a sense that there was something happening around you that you didn’t fully understand. You knew it was serious. You knew it mattered. But the explanations weren’t always there.”
The grey zone:
“I think some of those conversations aren’t happening about how each of us are impacted or how we address that impact because it’s about the nuance. It’s about the grey area, that grey zone. Not in the, yes this happened or no it didn’t. It’s in the middle.
And that grey zone can show up in lots of different ways. Sometimes it shows up in alcoholism. Sometimes it shows up in domestic violence. Sometimes it shows up in anger that people carry and they don’t always know where it comes from.
Those things are part of the story too. They’re not always talked about in the same way as the big political events, but they’re part of what happens to a society when it lives with conflict for a long time.”
Letting go of inherited bias:
“I think when you grow up in a place like Northern Ireland, you inherit certain beliefs or assumptions about people. They come from family, from community, from the stories that are told around you.
And at some point you have to look at those things and ask yourself, is that actually my belief? Or is that something I was given?
That’s not always a comfortable process. Sometimes it means realizing that some of the things you believed when you were younger don’t really hold up when you look at them more closely.
But I think that’s part of growing up too—being willing to examine those things and decide what you want to carry forward and what you’re ready to let go of.”
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
The Troubles: Finding a Path Toward Healing in Northern Ireland
To listen to our podcast, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and photos: John Noltner
Field production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah