Good fences make good neighbors

August 22, 2019

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Your neighbor is your other self dwelling behind a wall. Khalil Gibran

Sometimes people just can’t get along. Sometimes divorce is unavoidable. Sometimes it’s necessary to build fences and walls to keep human beings from killing or harming each other. And sometimes the time is right to remove such barriers and allow folks to come together when they are ready to do so.

The always interesting question of appropriate boundaries between individuals and between groups of people occurred to me yesterday as I walked along the “peace walls” of Belfast. These fences and walls, some of which date back to 1969, were built during the violence of the “Troubles” of 1968 – 1998 to separate warring Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, Derry, and other Northern Irish towns and cities. But since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 officially ended the Troubles (thanks in large part to President Bill Clinton and Senator George Mitchell), the violence between Protestants and Catholics has greatly subsided, and some of these walls built to keep peace through separation have been dismantled.

The local government of Northern Ireland has vowed to remove the last of these walls by 2023. But according to our tour guide Lynn, the majority of both Catholics and Protestants in these adjacent working class neighborhoods want to keep the walls in place, because they don’t trust each other to refrain from violence. They feel safe and secure in their homes and neighborhoods because they feel protected from each other.

Northern Ireland has been transformed by the 1998 peace agreement. The last time I was in this British province, in 1986, Belfast and Derry were patrolled by armed British soldiers, and the tension and fear in the air were palpable. But now the soldiers, their Land Rovers, the barbed wire, and the checkpoints are long gone, and tourism is booming. Cruise ships now regularly dock in Belfast, and people come to see the Titanic museum, various film locations of the Game of Thrones TV series, and the murals and graffiti that decorate or deface the peace walls. Northern Ireland, like the rest of Ireland, is thriving.

Brexit could do serious short term damage to the economy of Ireland, both in the British-ruled north and in the independent Irish Republic in the south. But beyond the immediate social, political, and economic trends, something positive is happening on this island. The people here seem to be evolving toward a more tolerant, more internationalist, more conscious world view. So even though tribalism is alive and well in Northern Ireland (nationalist Catholics vs unionist Protestants), the peace and prosperity that the Northern Irish have enjoyed for the last 21 years have convinced most people here that the violent extremists on both sides must not be allowed to turn back the clock and bring back the bad old days.

In 1968, when I was 16 years old, I wrote a 10 page paper about Ireland for my Modern European History class. Entitled “On the Possibility of the Reunification of Ireland,” that paper concluded that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would one day be reunited because of demographic change. That is, although Protestants outnumbered Catholics by a two to one ratio in 1968, Catholics had (and still have) a higher birth rate than Protestants, so eventually Catholics would outnumber Protestants in the north as they already did in the south. And that high school prediction of mine is about to come true, as Catholics are now approximately 50% of the population of Northern Ireland. Part of the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 stipulates that if and when a majority of the people of Northern Ireland vote to leave the United Kingdom and unite with the Republic of Ireland in the south, the UK will not stand in the way of the will of the Irish people.

The Irish here in the north are not quite ready to tear down all the walls that divide them. But they are making good progress in that direction. For now I think it best to leave the peace walls in place until such time as the folks in those neighborhoods feel safe and secure enough to voluntarily remove them.

Boundaries, borders, fences, and walls between people are necessary – until they are obsolete. And I hope that I live long enough to see the Northern Irish transcend their limited loyalties in favor of more inclusive identities. One of these days I might even try to do the same thing myself.