The Writing on the Walls

November 11, 2022

It was an overcast Sunday afternoon in October 2022. In St. Tiernach’s church in Clones, Co. Monaghan, the Southeast Fermanagh Foundation sponsored a service for the families of victims of the Troubles. It was impossible not to be moved by their stories, the river of sadness cascading through the decades, its tributaries permeating every heart.

Sad, murmuring congregants filtered out through the arched doorway, the vicar enthusiastically shaking hands with everyone. Evidently, his church had not been this full in a long time. When I told him I was from Vancouver, he practically squealed with delight.

Outside, people stood chatting quietly in small groups. A tall man in a dark suit approached me. He was tall and fit-looking, with tightly cropped hair. Some reflex told me he was a security guard, and I was about to be waylaid. After all, as a (former) Catholic at a Protestant service, I was an impostor. Outdated thinking—but old habits die hard.

Nigel, as I later came to know him, couldn’t have been more charming. He may have overheard the vicar’s squeal, or perhaps he noticed how lost I looked. Whatever the reason, we struck up a conversation. My instincts were off the mark, but not too far: he was a police officer—though, he added quickly, never a member of the Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was disbanded in 2001. No doubt he was aware of my origins as soon as I opened my mouth: even after decades abroad, I still sound like a Southerner.

He had lost an uncle in the Troubles, and later a work colleague standing next to him in the doorway of a pub in Belfast. It was a professional hit, he told me: the gunman wore a white wig and crouched low to maximize the harm to his victim.

As a detective sergeant responsible for child welfare, Nigel worked in areas of Belfast where deprivation, crime, drugs, and the legacy of bitter conflict made a toxic cocktail. Now, as the UK economy faltered and the fallout from Brexit took hold, resentment between communities was building. “I’ll tell ye, David,” he told me, “I’ve seen more sectarian hatred in the last wee while than ever before.”

I visited Nigel a few weeks later, and he took me on a tour of Belfast, on a day when sunlight drizzled over the lawns of perfect professional homes in well-to-do areas, where sectarianism was negligible. In past years, these neighbourhoods would have been Protestant-dominated, but affluent Catholics had now moved in. It could have been a lovely suburb in any city.

Loyalist wall in Belfast — Loyalist Wall in Belfast

But in Belfast, things can change in the space of a block. Before long, I could feel the tension along the Crumlin Road, the Shankill, and the Falls, where massive murals proclaimed enduring loyalty to King Billy, or Bobby Sands, or any one of a hundred heroes on either side. Here, the Troubles had been preserved in concrete, as former IRA men, paunchy and grey, toured the murals with groups of Germans and Americans. Troubles tourism.

I had seen similar scenes in Derry, where posters in Loyalist areas depicted hooded men and threats of renewed conflict, and Bogside murals encouraged passersby to “salute the men and women of violence.”

How real was all this? Were the murals community art, a macabre tourist attraction, or a symptom of real divisions, today? What if we tried to tear them down, as we tear down statues of slaveowners or former heroes whose values offend us? Of course, the reaction is predictable: the murals are icons of a perverse heroism. Nobody is tearing them down anytime soon.

Progress is being made, though, to reconcile the two tribes, or better still, to make tribalism obsolete. Alongside present-day bigots, I met couples from mixed marriages who were transcending the old divisions, victims whose only wish was for peace, and others who refused to define their identity by their religion. But it all feels painfully slow. Over 90% of Northern Irish students still attend segregated schools. In class, teachers avoid talking about the Troubles, so students have nothing to contradict whatever bigotry they pick up outside.

Meanwhile, nationalists are triumphant: so close to their dream of a united Ireland that they feel they can almost touch it. “We’re flyin’ towards a united Ireland,” an aging republican told me. Their dream is Loyalists’ nightmare. Brexit, demographic changes—over half of the Northern Irish population is now Catholic—the rise of the republican Sinn Féin party, and the global downturn all make working-class Protestants increasingly desperate. Many feel that Catholics have been granted too many favours, and—with good reason—fear the UK government will betray them.

A wall can come down in a minute or two. But reconciliation takes generations. Time is not on the side of the peacemakers.