Reflections on Conflict and Peace in Northern Ireland

By Laura McAtackney (Aarhus University) and John Baucher (documentary filmmaker)

April 2021

It is easy to be cynical about international media interest in Northern Ireland, especially for those of us who come from there and know the thin line that exists between conflict and peace out of the spotlight. We know the everyday experiences of this post/conflict place is more complex than the international press is able or willing to portray. For example, the images of riots on the streets of Belfast are not a new phenomenon, and they are never solely a reaction to high-level politics, even something as mishandled as Brexit. “Recreational rioting” (Jarman and O’Halloran 2001) as a performance of dissent and a release of community tensions—often deliberately stoked by political rhetoric and enduring paramilitary direction—has continued sporadically throughout the peace process and has a lineage of many centuries. The recent upsurge in media interest in clashes, petrol bombing, and bus hijacking in predominantly Protestant Unionist Loyalist (PUL) areas—and its movement to interface areas with predominantly Catholic Nationalist Republican (CNR) communities—has some relationship with Brexit, but an overemphasis on high-level politics does not reflect the fluid situation on the ground.

Northern Ireland is a complicated place. It has a long and protracted history of colonialism, plantation, antagonism, and division, often distilled down to a “two communities” thesis that elides the role of the state and changes over time and space. Violent conflict in Northern Ireland often has a historical and contemporary context, as well as a spatial dimension that means working-class urban areas—those most detrimentally impacted by the Troubles—are the places that continue to experience it. Furthermore, the tendency to present Northern Ireland as an unexplainable problem “reproduces rather than unravels the sinews of conflict” (Vaughn-Williams 2006, 513–26) and thereby reduces the situation to unresolvable.

In reality, it is a place of more perspectives than facts and requires extensive knowledge to avoid undue narrative hospitality to skewed feelings. I have argued previously that Northern Ireland is a place where national identity—as either British or Irish—is conceived as oppositional and of heightened importance despite these fiercely held allegiances being marginal to both national identities (McAtackney 2015, 111). The coexistence of these identities was somewhat enabled by the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement (1998), which at the time employed an impressive sleight of hand that allowed for both Nationalists and Unionists to more or less coexist within the framework of a borderless Europe. But the good intentions of its underlying “parity of esteem,” which aimed to ensure neither community became oppressed by the other, has unintentionally reinforced separation into the postconflict context. The peace process has been marked by enduring divisions and acceptable levels of low-level violence with little incentive for radical change. Despite a peace process of cyclical crises, for me, the implications of Brexit are a significant threat to the peace not only on account of the return of a border (whether that be on land or sea) but also because of manipulation and mishandling by politicians.

My personal connection to these wider societal issues is both personal and professional, distanced and intimate. I was born in Belfast in the late 1970s into a working-class Catholic, Nationalist family that was not especially politically active. We moved around the city throughout my childhood, starting in the west, then onto the north, and finally back to the margins between south and west. Only later did I realize that this was not a common experience; in Belfast, there is a tendency to stay close to where you come from for reasons of security. My earliest childhood memory, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was the funeral cortege of the IRA Hunger Striker Bobby Sands, which passed the bottom of the street where my family lived in May 1981. As small children, we were brought by our parents to a grassy bank overlooking the cortege, and I distinctly remember the tense silence, even as a small child unaware of what I was watching.

Time passed, and living through a civil conflict was my normal; I was accustomed to seeing heavily armed security personnel and their armored vehicles hurtling down the streets. Going anywhere involved navigating a vast array of security infrastructure of static and moving checkpoints; bomb alerts and bombings were everyday occurrences. We were accustomed to listening to the news every morning over breakfast, finding out if anyone had died and what roads may have closed because of bombings and shootings overnight. As a teen, I complacently checked for incendiary devices at my Saturday job in Woolworths (five years = one unexploded bomb behind the boxes of Barbies). From my late teens, I would leave work and join school friends to socialize in city-center bars. Armed with elaborately fabricated backstories and pseudonyms for friends with Irish names, we concealed our identities as a necessary precaution. Bizarre as it reads now, my experience was not unusual: I was a child of the Troubles and a newly minted adult in the early years of the peace process, and I have continued to be fascinated by the changes and continuities between those two states of being ever since.

As an archaeologist specializing in the recent past, I was drawn to study the familiar for the simple reason that no one else in my discipline was doing it. One of the aspects of Northern Ireland I was most interested in was how “peace” and “conflict” have materialized and evolved (or not) over time and space. I primarily focused on Belfast, especially on the more mundane materializations of conflict that were often overlooked: materialized segregation in the form of so-called peace walls. Historically, civil unrest in Belfast, especially riots, resulted in the erection of temporary barriers and barricades, but over time, some of these took a more permanent form. From the outset of the Troubles in the late 1960s, interface areas between working-class communities became increasingly—and permanently—materially divided. What started with burned-out cars, barbed wire, and makeshift barriers evolved into brick and concrete walls and high metal fencing erected by different agencies across the city. These devices became euphemistically called “peace walls” and are the only material infrastructure associated with the Troubles that increased, rather than disappeared, during the peace process. While it seems contradictory, integration of materially divided communities that had long memories of separation precipitated by conflict were not part of the “normalization” process, and in material terms, territorial divisions had, for many decades, effectively been planned into the fabric of the city (Coyles 2018).

Around 2010, when I started researching peace walls, I spent a lot of time walking alongside boundaries and barriers, noting inertias and the material consequences of planning decisions—including the replacement of traditional terrace houses with defensive cul-de-sacs—to document the fragmentation of the city. It was an ever-changing landscape of high walls with underutilized spaces alongside some interfaces and structures closely attached to others. Some walls displayed abandonment: they were unruly and derelict, covered with paint splashes and burn marks, often with debris  dumped in the unloved no-man’s-land—broken glass and rocks littering the ground from recent interactions with “the other side;” others  had houses with metal grills on the windows placed literally into the shadows of the wall. At times, it was difficult to walk alongside the interface, as it receded into the background or disappeared down side alleys. Piecemeal memorials added by community groups, often ex/paramilitaries, increasingly appeared around these material divisions, acting to reinforce and maintain them. Memorials were generally gated structures that varied considerably in appearance, but they were strategically placed to remember death and destruction in the places they occurred. In West Belfast, it was common for substantial structures to house plaques with lists of dead combatants and civilians, often dating back to the formation of the state. In East Belfast, memorial gardens were smaller with short lists of men who had died from particular paramilitary groups. These memorials were creating and curating partial memories of the Troubles but also maintaining community cohesion in the present as they materialized their experiences of victimhood and resilience.

As I walked the streets, the reality of Belfast as a fragmented city was reinforced over and over again. I came to realize the fragmentation of place filtered down to memory as it was refracted through my own family history. Around five years after I started this research, my mother offered to drive me to East Belfast, as she was concerned about me walking alone around a place that I didn’t come from. We visited a few memorials, and she looked around before noting how much it had changed. As we stopped at Bryson Street—a street off the main Newtownards Road that now included a peace wall—she casually mentioned, “Your granda’s house used to be there.” In the back of my memory, I knew my maternal grandparents had been born and grew up in East Belfast; I also knew that she was from West Belfast and that my grandparents lived there throughout my childhood. Why they had moved from east to west was never discussed. Sitting in the car looking at that peace wall, a story unfolded—my granddad had grown up at 36 Bryson Street, was married from his parents’ house in 1938, and then moved to Iveagh Crescent in West Belfast. After his parents died, the house was eventually passed on to him, and in the early 1970s, it was sold to my parents, who were planning on marrying in 1972. I’m not sure if my parents ever really planned to live at Bryson Street. While my mother recalled it was a “lovely Victorian parlor house with high ceilings,” it was situated in a volatile interface area she had only visited. At some stage before 1972, the house was broken into, petrol was poured on the stairs, and it was set alight. It didn’t completely burn down, but my parents read this incident as a sign of what was to come. They never moved into the house. I had never heard that story before we sat in the car together looking at the wall My mother recalled that the row of houses at Bryson Street became increasingly derelict, and eventually 36 Bryson Street was bought by the city council, who eventually demolished the row of houses, relandscaped the adjoining street, and erected a peace wall that is still in place. 36 Bryson Street was simply disappeared from the street plan and from maps, and all that remains of it is materialized segregation.

Over the years I have ruminated on the connection between my research and my family history and how they might have spoken to each other without my conscious knowledge. Especially now that I am based in Denmark—unable to travel because of the pandemic—I wonder why I was drawn to East Belfast, the one part of the city in which I have never lived. I have tried to find out more about my family’s experiences of living there, but the disappearing of place has also transferred to memory; my mother has little to recall about it. In response to the recent rioting in other parts of Belfast, I have written threads about peace walls on Twitter, and I fell into conversation with a Belfast-based artist, John Baucher. I found out that he lived in the area, and he told me about his project to document the lived experience of that peace wall. His photographs and drone footage of “36 Bryson Street” have been fascinating to view, and so his videos and photographs are an integral part of this piece.

John Baucher

Urban/city living is a negotiation. Traversing an urban environment is a negotiation of publicly, commercially, and privately delineated pathways spaces and structures. There are rules to navigate and adhere to, yet, somehow, it’s human nature to try to take a shortcut. Ignore the rules. Most of us at some stage—if we are honest—will have tried to nip through, pop round, or hop across such delineations. Innocent enough. The peace wall that replaced 36 Bryson Street, and runs for a further three hundred meters, is sadly not such a benign or forgiving beast. The height means there is no hopping over, while deep foundations and solid brick mean equally that there is no nipping through either. The only popping round is to the friends and neighbors in the close-knit communities living on either side, in the shadow of the wall.

I have lived within half a kilometer of this peace wall for fifteen years and have been documenting the area, hesitantly at first (a reflection of local attitudes toward the media), until now, where I have built up relationships and understanding within this—my—community. It’s these careful (and care-full) relationships and hyperlocal negotiations that bind my work to discussions of autoethnography. Alongside my photographic practice, I have also developed collections of ephemera—found, gifted, and retrieved—and include flags, tools, street furniture, and maps. One such map, incorporated here, offers an attempt at negotiating not just where, but who, we are.

REFERENCES CITED

Coyles, David. 2018. “Legacies of Conflict: Housing and the Security-Threat-Community.” In Heritage after Conflict: Northern Ireland, edited by Elizabeth Crooke and Tom Maguire, 118–36. London: Routledge.

Jarman, Neil, and Chris O’Halloran. 2001. “Recreational Rioting: Young People, Interface Areas and Violence.” Childcare in Practice 7 (1): 2–16

McAtackney, Laura. 2015. “Memorials and Marching: Archaeological Insights Into Segregation in Contemporary Northern Ireland.” Historical Archaeology 49 (3): 110–25.

Vaughn-Williams. Nick. 2006. “Towards a Problematization of the Problematizations That Reduce Northern Ireland to a ‘Problem.’” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9 (4): 513–26.

Laura McAtackney (laura.mcatackney@cas.au.dk) is an associate professor in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has published widely on the materiality of the Troubles and peace process since 2002. Her outputs include a monograph with Oxford University Press, An Archaeology of the Troubles: the dark heritage of Long Kesh / Maze prison (2014).

John Baucher is a documentary photographer and artist living and working in East Belfast. He is a member of the www.vaultartiststudios.com. John has exhibited nationally, internationally and his work is held in private and public collections. This work was made possible through the generous support of the Arts Council NI. Instagram: @moochinphotoman.