By Anna Cuenca
In Belfast,
97 percent of social housing remains segregated along community lines
Stretching high into the sky, the barrier between communities around the republican Falls Road and loyalist Shankill Road is the most imposing example of Belfast’s so-called peace walls.
Built in 1968 by the British army to separate the pro-Ireland republicans from pro-UK loyalists at the outset of decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, the 14-meter metal structure still standing today is covered in graffiti.
And the wall, an enduring symbol of the divisions that have continued to plague the province despite the end of the conflict in 1998, has become a somber tourist attraction.
“I didn’t realise there were so many walls still standing, definitely not 25 years later,” Lori Castillo, an American tourist, told AFP as she smiled and signed her name on the wall.
The wall is one of 75 in Belfast, which collectively stretch 13 kilometers in length.
In 2013, Northern Ireland’s devolved government set itself a 10-year deadline to tear down the walls.
But the goal, opposed by residents who say they still need the physical and psychological protection given by the barriers, remains far out of reach.
“They are still a safety mechanism for people,” said Ian Shanks, head of Action for Community Transformation, which works to reintegrate former loyalist paramilitary fighters.
Michael Culbert, an ex-paramilitary member imprisoned for 16 years for killing British soldiers who now helps rehabilitate former republican prisoners while offering tours of west Belfast, noted there “could be lots of reasons” for their perceived need.
“They don’t maybe trust the peace process,” said the former member of the Irish Republican Army.
‘My enemy’
According to Rob McCallum, a Catholic association leader in an area of north Belfast where the two communities interface, there was “never a plan in place” to remove the walls.
His job is to try to build mutual trust, he explained, because in a segregated community, “you may grow up thinking all the people on the other side are my enemy.”
In Belfast’s modern center, loyalist Protestant and republican Catholic communities mix freely.
But in a patchwork of working-class areas across the city, communities can live side by side but completely segregated.
Streets meet an abrupt end where they run into one of the barriers.
Gates are opened within their structures to allow movement during the day, but close at fixed times in the evening until early morning.
And while families that have lived with the walls for generations pay them little notice, they inevitably impede mobility.
“If something happens, say after nine o’clock, you can’t just get through the other community to the hospital,” criminal justice expert Jonny Byrne said.
“You have to travel the whole way around.”
According to Byrne, the walls have become “magnets for violence and social disorder.”
In April 2021, they served as flashpoints in Belfast for clashes between the communities as tensions over post-Brexit trade rules boiled over.
“Particularly young people, if they’re looking to engage in what we’ve often called recreational rioting, they will come to points here where they can get a reaction from (the) other community,” Byrne said.
‘Twin track’
McCallum explained that while some want the walls dismantled, others remain stuck psychologically “20 or 30 years ago, depending on the impact that the troubles had on them”.
Failure to remove the walls is a legacy of “missed opportunities”, Byrne said.
“The communities where the walls exist are some of the most socially deprived in Northern Ireland. They have been the most affected by the conflict and yet they haven’t seen some of the big benefits,” he added.
The Ulster University expert said the lack of real benefit since 1998 to working-class communities compared to the rest of society had created a “twin-track peace process”.
In Belfast, 97 percent of social housing remains segregated along community lines.
Shanks said pro-UK unionists had not “reaped benefits from the Good Friday Agreement” of 1998.
“We were told… local communities would thrive, major investment would be put into them and we’d have this great kind of loop and sadly that hasn’t materialized,” he said.
Many unionists, he explained, would not be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the peace agreement and many from the community who voted for it then would not vote for it now—“and that would be very worrying.”