ALBANY — A lasting encounter from a 1998 reporting trip I made to Northern Ireland with photographer Steve Jacobs for the Times Union to cover the impact of the Good Friday Agreement occurred at a so-called “peace wall” in Belfast.
More than 20 miles of 25-foot-high walls of brick and metal were erected across Northern Ireland, mainly in Belfast, to separate loyalist Protestant neighborhoods from republican Catholic ones.
The walls were at once metaphors and stark reminders of the deep and bitter generational hatreds between nationalist paramilitaries fighting to end British occupation and loyalist forces battling to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom.
Our in-depth Times Union series explored how “The Troubles” split apart families. Three decades of conflict spurred some to flee to start a new life in Albany. Others stayed behind in Belfast to fight.
The sectarian violence known as “The Troubles” left 3,700 people dead and 50,000 injured during 30 years of conflict beginning in 1969. In 1998, a “power sharing” pact, also known as the Belfast Agreement, was the culmination of years of negotiations to quell a war zone.
In Western Belfast, we came across a couple of lads aged 10 or 11 on the Catholic side lobbing fist-sized rocks over the wall that separated the Falls Road from the Protestant Shankill Road.
Protestant kids tossed the stones back. Neither group of kids could see the other. Fortunately, the large rocks thudded to the ground without hitting anyone, averting serious injury.
I asked the Catholic boys why they were tossing the stones over the wall.
They shrugged. Then one of them piped up. “Because our older brothers did it,” the boy said.
It was a reflexive rite of passage, lacking any understanding, an automatic primal hatred bred in the bone.
…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply