How to Fix Northern Ireland E-Book

Malachi O'Doherty

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 364

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'Deeply researched and often revelatory... variegated and sensitive' Literary Review It is twenty-five years since the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the terrible violence that rocked Northern Ireland for decades. Yet, in this controversial and provocative new book, Malachi O'Doherty argues that it completely ignored the real reason behind the conflict and instead left a festering wound at the core of society. Part memoir, part history and part polemic, How to Fix Northern Ireland shows how the country's deep division is simply not about whether it should be governed as part of Ireland or as part of Britain - as presumed by the agreement - but rather is fundamentally sectarian, an inter-ethnic stress comparable to racism. O'Doherty reveals how the split between catholics and protestants continues to invade everyday life - from education and segregated housing, from street protests, bonfires and parades to the high politics of power sharing and Brexit - and asks what can be done to solve a centuries-old social rift and heal the relationship at the heart of the problem.

Leseprobe

How to Fix Northern Ireland

By the same author

Non-fiction

The Trouble with Guns

I Was a Teenage Catholic

The Telling Year

Empty Pulpits

Under His Roof

On My Own Two Wheels

Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life

Fifty Years On: The Troubles and the

Struggle for Change in Northern Ireland

The Year of Chaos: Northern Ireland

on the Brink of Civil War, 1971–72

Can Ireland Be One?

Fiction

Terry Brankin Has a Gun

How to FixNorthern Ireland

Malachi O’Doherty

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by

Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Malachi O’Doherty, 2023

The moral right of Malachi O’Doherty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

All photographs are copyright © Malachi O’Doherty, 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-852-7

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-853-4

Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Maureen

Contents

Prologue

1.  Where the Streets are Green and Orange

2.  Sectarianism

3.  The Hate

4.  What’s God Got to Do with It?

5.  Who Isn’t Sectarian?

6.  Dividing Issues

7.  Race

8.  Stick with Your Own

9.  The Catholic Paper and the Protestant Paper

10.  Languages

11.  Mixed Marriage

12.  Integrated Education

13.  Sport

14.  Crossover

15.  The Fix

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

A Note on the Text

In this book I have departed from the customary use of upper case for reference to religious designation, as in Protestant, Catholic etc. I use lower case with reference to catholic schools, catholic people, protestant streets, etc. I retain the upper case for references to the institutional churches and to the ideologies, e.g. the Presbyterian Church, Protestantism, etc.

My logic is that the upper case for a catholic man implies a respect for the fact of him being a catholic, whereas his being catholic – his Catholicism – may be no more significant in his life than his being a footballer or a husband, neither of which would normally be upper case. And these terms are used so much in this book that I think that typographically the ubiquity of the upper case is inelegant.

Prologue

It was the day of the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement.

That agreement, six weeks earlier, had been celebrated as an historic breakthrough bringing peace to Northern Ireland after thirty years of violence. The world saw Northern Ireland’s trouble as some kind of confused religious war, a relic of religious wars in Europe which had ended four hundred years before. In part it was. Weren’t the Irish nationalists catholics and the British unionists protestants? Was that not centrally important?

The naming of the agreement after that holy day on which it had been completed seemed also to recognise that religion was at the heart of the inter-communal dispute and carried a suggestion that a spiritual breakthrough had occurred around the central fact cherished in both communities, that Christ had died for peace.

For the poetically minded and the devout that suggestion might have impressed. It echoed and perhaps finalised an earlier reference to Easter in the marking of historic Irish days, the Easter Rising of 1916.

The agreement, however, was not poetic. It was the opposite. It had sought to encapsulate long-simmering passions as hard realities and to seek a contractual agreement between bitter factions. It did this at first by paying respect to the forces that had contended with each other historically, acknowledged that each had a legitimate case, a grievance inherited from a troubled past. It classed the violence as political and prescribed a political solution. The problem was not that protestants were evil bigots contemptuous of the Catholic Church and Gaelic culture; nor was it that the catholics were slaves to a foreign church and besotted with blood-drenched mythologies. Neither was it that Britain was a voracious imperial despoiler of Irish decency. All of these analyses were freely available and routinely expressed.

The framers of the Good Friday Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998, chose to describe the past decades of bloodshed, terror and mayhem as a political conflict. At its heart was the question of whether Northern Ireland was British or Irish. Sort that out, they decided, and peace and good relations would follow. The past was indeed part of the problem.

Most of the island of Ireland had taken a road to progressive independence from Britain after a guerrilla war nearly eighty years earlier but six counties in the North had stayed within the United Kingdom.

For decades, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had been campaigning for British withdrawal through bombing and murder. The British would probably have left if they could, but most of the people in Northern Ireland were British themselves and could not simply be dumped. The British army had entered the territory in force to suppress resistance. Armed protestant loyalist factions had sought to aid them by sending death squads out to murder random catholics and, when they could get them, members of the IRA.

This had all been messy and bloody and unpopular but seemed, decade after decade, to be going nowhere, without anyone having any idea of how to bring it to an end.

Animosities were encapsulated in song and daubed on the walls in graffiti and murals, some of them indeed quite artful. The level of violence, by the end of the seventies, had settled down to a routine average of a hundred murders a year. If there is a mistake at the heart of the agreement, it is in the presumption that all this was the work of reasonable people with intelligible grievances.

Murder was a crime, but political murder was a different category of crime and warranted early release once the political problem was resolved, so in the following two years the killers would go home. Some truly grotesque murders would be more or less absolved on the understanding that the motivation behind them had been removed by the agreement.

There was practical good sense behind that decision, for the paramilitary organisations had mobilised support around sympathy for the prisoners and had set up structures to raise funds for them and to campaign on their behalf. It was better to just let them all out to facilitate the dismantling of those structures rather than leave republican and loyalist groups with grievances and excuses.

Numerous books about the Northern Irish Troubles, up to that time, had ended with the conclusion that no obvious solution was in sight, the two communities being so resistant to integration with each other. The agreement, by contrast with this routine pessimism, was elegant and optimistic. It provided for a local power sharing assembly, run by Irish nationalists and pro-British unionists in partnership with each other. It set up cross-border institutions to involve the Irish government and provided for institutional connections between the governments of Britain and Ireland. All of this was to be enshrined in international treaty.

This was the three-stranded approach, the product of sophisticated diplomatic creativity and years of negotiation. Here was proof that a doggedly intractable conflict, often compared to the Israel–Palestine conflict, could be solved. This offered the whole world an example in creative peace-making.

The British and Irish diplomats were proud of what they had done. They had brought nationalist and unionist politicians to the table alongside their extreme and violent rivals within their own communities, and got them to accept a new formula for governing the region acceptable to most, if not all, political parties.

Naturally, everyone was happy. There were high hopes for the agreement’s endorsement in a referendum. The world’s media was in Belfast. I was a reporter working with a camera crew to make a little film about how people on the street felt about the breakthrough. This is what broadcasters wanted, not the close analysis of diplomatic and constitutional formulae but eager hopeful young people looking to a bright future.

We had found a smart young lad from east Belfast and we thought we would take him to one of the big loyalist political murals on the Newtownards Road and interview him there. The mural, black lettering on a white wall, declared: ‘The Conflict is about Nationality’.

Well, that was pretty much the central point of the new agreement: two legitimate conceptions of nationality were to be accommodated within the one region.

We stood Tommy at the wall and prepared to set up the camera. This involved carrying the camera and the tripod from the car boot, setting up the camera and connecting it to the microphone managed by the sound guy. These things always took a little time, time for us to draw attention to ourselves. The camera operator would want to check the white balance so that the painted wall would not have a blue or yellow hue. The producer would want to be sure that the picture was well framed and the sound guy would want to take levels from me and from Tommy to be sure that we came out on the tape – yes, actual tape in those days – without one of us sounding louder than the other. There was also the worry about the noise from passing traffic.

It was a nice sunny day. Men sitting outside a pub across the road were drinking pints and watching us intently. That was normal when you were filming outside. But what’s this? They are coming over?

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ said the first to reach us, a hefty but smallish man in a green T-shirt that was stretched around his paunch. ‘What’s your name?’ he said to Tommy. ‘Speak up or we’ll burn your fucking car.’

His friends had now joined us, three of them. One of them rested his arm across the camera to be sure that no one touched it.

I said, ‘We are making a small film.’

‘Who the fuck’s talking to you? What’s your name?’

There is something of which you will be aware if you are a Malachi, or Eamon or Seamus or Sean, and that is that your name declares that you are Irish, most likely catholic and therefore almost certainly a nationalist. Such a name will be treated as a declaration of affiliation even though your mother gave it to you before you got the vote, about eighteen years before you got the vote in fact. Nothing in the Good Friday Agreement was going to change that.

These guys, I was assuming, with my similar familiarity with the codes, were protestant loyalists. Their affiliation was to organisations which had killed people for having names like mine.

‘What’s your film about?’

‘We’re just sounding out people on what they think of the agreement and their hopes for the future.’

‘You think everybody around here is behind this agreement, don’t you? Well, you’ve another fucking think coming.’

I wasn’t sure that getting into a political argument with him was the way to resolve this. At that point another man came round the corner to join us. I recognised him and he recognised me. He was a senior loyalist but of a type that had emerged during the political negotiations, mannered and conscientious. His value was in the respect he got from the hard men and his ability to translate their concerns into language that sounded astute and reasonable in a television interview.

He didn’t say things like: ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘Och, Malachi, it’s you.’

This was a relief. This would get sorted out now.

‘People are just a bit touchy with a camera around, and the lads just across the road having a drink want to be sure you’re not filming them. And to tell you the truth, we don’t want the impression to go out that the whole area is behind the agreement.’

The political party which represented these goons, and of which this man was a member, had actually helped negotiate the agreement.

‘It’s what you’d call nuanced, Malachi.’

He nodded to the hard men and they turned and went back across the road to their drinks.

‘We’ll go somewhere else,’ said the producer, signalling to the camera operator and the sound guy to pack up, resting a reassuring hand on Tommy’s shoulder.

Then this senior loyalist took me aside. He said, ‘I’m very impressed by your work, Malachi. That film about the Christian Brothers.’

Really?

I had featured in a television documentary about the Irish Christian Brothers, a teaching order, accusing them of strident Gaelic chauvinism and, among other things, being too eager to use the cane or strap, and religious fundamentalism.

‘That was noticed here. That went down well.’

And I suddenly realised what his point was. I had endorsed protestant perceptions of the Catholic Church as part of the problem. That made me an ally in the cause. And it wasn’t the cause of national sovereignty. It wasn’t something covered by the agreement that we were all voting on that day.

Religion was in the mix. In the streets in protestant areas the Catholic Church was still reviled as the enemy. Nothing in the agreement was designed to assuage that.

Had I not been there, this smoother-talking loyalist might have calmed down the thugs and saved the car and the camera. Or we might have lost both, and wee Tommy might have taken a kicking. Who knows how animosities are placated and what really makes the difference when tensions are high and brutes like the man in the green T-shirt are raging and ready?

Or that what eases the tension today will work in the same way tomorrow?

I went away from there wondering what faith we could really have in the agreement after all. Its creative diplomacy relied on an analysis of the problem which didn’t take account of naive religious prejudice and the thrill of taking power on the street.

The best hope was that the agreement would be an enduring fix for an old problem. Failing that, at least protestant unionists and catholic nationalists would work together in the future, come to empathise more with each other and find a common interest in partnership. That hope has not been realised.

We need a new approach.

1

Where the Streets are Green and Orange

Let me take you for a dander round Belfast, my home city. We’ll start from my front door.

This is a nice tree-lined street. The houses are in redbrick terraces, all much the same, three storeys high with sloping tiled roofs. You couldn’t tell from the architecture that this isn’t a part of Leeds or Liverpool. Nothing here is distinctly Belfast until you get to the end of the street and a clear view of the hills.

But let’s walk. You will notice that every house has a car. There are no small children and that tells you something. This is a street for middle-aged professionals and retired people who own their houses. And people who own houses don’t throw stones.

There is no graffiti on the walls. In the heat of summer, resin drips from the trees onto the cars. This sticky stuff holds the dust that blows in and is a bugger to scrub off. Middle-class problems. This is a nice place.

When I walk up the street towards the main road and the shops I often stop to talk to a neighbour, Jean who is an artist, Madge who has just had a new hip, Conor the academic lawyer, Maurice who has some kind of social services job, Eileen the retired journalist who has a weekly column.

I don’t think there are any former paramilitaries in my street, orangemen or members of the security services. The window cleaner who comes once a week tells me he went to school with some loyalists. No one here puts out flags. There are no murals on gable walls. I don’t think there is anything here that would tell a stranger whether the street was more catholic or protestant. I don’t know. I don’t go round asking people. They don’t ask me but they don’t have to. They can tell by my name, but you can’t do that with everybody. Andy Burns over there cutting his hedge could be either with a name like that.

I know Morgan across the street is a presbyterian, active in a big church on the corner. The location of that church suggests this neighbourhood was once mainly protestant. There is also a church of Ireland church and a methodist church between here and the nearest catholic church. Amelia, further along, was married to a policeman who died.

This is not a typical street. If I threw a dart at a map of Belfast it would probably land on a street where people do put out flags, or do have graffiti, or where a tattooed ex-paramilitary prisoner walking his dog is known to everybody. I suppose the difference is class. I live in a middle-class street. Back in the nineties, when I moved in, a young professional couple would have been able to get a mortgage on a house like ours; not now. People who have been here a long time are not rich. New arrivals moving in … well, I can’t think of any.

I feel safe in this street. I did not feel safe in the street I lived in as a young man, on a west Belfast housing estate, back in the seventies, where bombers mixed their ingredients in garden sheds and coaxed neighbours into minding guns for them. I doubt this street was ever barricaded.

There has been some trouble here. In the nineties I would lie in bed and listen to the commotion of protest and riot not far away. One night it came close. There was an incident when a car struck a stone gate post. Then there was the year the loyalists came up and painted the kerb stones red, white and blue. They still erect flags out there but you get used to them.

Once the police intercepted an armed IRA team near a school opposite the end of the street.

Charlie the taxi driver was shot dead by loyalists as he sat in his car round the corner waiting for business. The following night I didn’t tell my wife that I was afraid to go across the road for a bottle of wine because I didn’t want to make the fear palpable inside our home. So I went and got the wine.

But that was then.

Let’s go out onto the main road now. Anything distinctly Belfast yet?

There is a steady flow of traffic into and out of town. On the other side of the road there is a Tesco and an Indian restaurant. From the lamp post outside a tanning salon hangs a large Union flag. That flag is fresh out of its packaging and you can still see the fold-lines in squares. If you can look at it with neutral eyes, you may think it adds a touch of festive colour to an otherwise ordinary road. But who here has neutral eyes?

July is coming, the season of parades and bonfires. It will start with marking the anniversary of the battle of the Somme, in which thousands of our grand-uncles and grandfathers were cut to ribbons by machine gun fire in muddy French fields. Protestants commemorate their losses there as proof of their loyalty to Britain. I don’t know what they think other people’s losses were proof of. But they take it very seriously. That large redbrick building with the flag, up there on the right, that’s the Orange Hall and in front of it are black marble memorial stones to the dead of past wars.

If you had been here yesterday you would have seen the orangemen gather there and march down the road with their bands, a police car leading the way. They were a strange mix of sober dignity and ribaldry, the men in suits and orange collarettes marching proudly, the pipers playing martial tunes, the drummer beating the goatskin as if it was the head of someone he found objectionable.

Across the street at the bus stop a little girl practises her Irish dance steps as she waits with her mother. In the past, her mother would have stopped her drawing attention to herself. This dancing declares that she is Irish and catholic; or at least the lesser-informed loyalist – the worst kind – would take it as such. Cultural barriers are softening and some protestant children now learn Irish dancing and some protestants are learning the Irish language in east Belfast.

We’ll walk towards the bridge across the river. The park is on our right with its grand trees and richly ornate flowerbeds, some of them at eye level above the grey stone wall. That park has history. In the early seventies the militaristic Ulster Vanguard rallied there and men in ranks were inspected like soldiers on parade and told to prepare for war.

I like the park. Now you are likely to hear Bengali or Polish spoken by people strolling by. The streets on the other side of the park form a more definable area than those on this side. That is a working-class protestant area and young men and women from there walk their dogs or exercise here. Sometimes the police drive along slowly, looking for drug dealers. Occasionally you will see a hungry-looking young man shudder and scowl as he walks, apparently doubting that he belongs here.

Not every passing jeer has a sectarian motive.

The main gate is flanked by sandstone pillars and bears the crest of the city.

I suspect few study that image, assuming it to be the lion and the unicorn contending for a shield. Actually the creature on the left looks like a wild dog with a chain round its neck and the one on the right is a winged creature with the head of a horse and the tail of a fish. Two creatures of different species apparently rage at each other, the one hampered by chains, the other by a hybrid biology; the one real and familiar, the mad dog, the other purely mythical, the flying seahorse.

The dog is a wolf or, some say, an Irish wolfhound, shackled, the crown for a collar. It has been tamed by British monarchy.

The seahorse also wears a crown around its neck, a different kind of crown suggestive of castellation, protection. So Britain, by this symbol, protects the gentle seahorse while taming the rabid Irish dog.

The shield itself depicts a ship at full sail, symbolising trade and military power with a global reach. In one corner is a bell held fast. This is not a pun that suggests the creators of the image knew their stuff. The ‘bel’ in Belfast is not a bell at all but derives from the Irish ‘beal’ meaning ‘mouth’, in this case the mouth of a river, probably the Farset which now flows under High Street and into the lough through a pipe lined with mussels and grime.

And the motto, ‘Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus’, is extracted from Psalm 116:12: ‘What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me?’ The Lord has been removed from the line and, by implication, replaced with Britain. This is blasphemy but the devout burghers seem never to have noticed.

Now we are at the River Lagan, a mile from where it opens out into the estuary, Belfast Lough. Here we are closer to the university and more likely to see the rowers from the boat club slicing through the water, puffing at their oars, a cyclist with a loudhailer following them along the embankment and shouting encouragement or instructions.

When the Orange Order parades down here with martial bands in July it must not cross this bridge. For years there were protests against the local lodge continuing by the direct route into the centre of town so now it must divert. That decision was based on an understanding that the people in the narrow streets beyond the river were catholics. From among them, protests had been organised against the parades. Bandsmen on the parades replied with jeering, and a determination was made that the bands and those people were best kept apart.

Across the road you will see the smaller terrace houses of the Holy Land where streets are named after Palestine, Jerusalem, Carmel, probably more in commemoration of British military campaigns than for their biblical connotations. This square mile was a working-class residential area, but now the houses are occupied by students, mostly catholic. When a band passed here recently a young man threw his food recycling bin at them and band members charged at the house but he dashed back in and shut the door.

The catholic students are usually on holiday when the bands pass through. Protestant students prefer to go to Scotland or England to study.

There are often flags on the lamp posts here, Irish tricolours, the green, white and orange. You’ll see some young people in the green and white jersey of Glasgow Celtic. They support a Scottish football team but fly the Irish flag. It’s all part of the one tradition to them.

In protestant areas you will see the Scottish flag, the Saltire. Young people there, somewhat less anomalously since they declare themselves to be British, support Glasgow Rangers.

You should see these streets on St Patrick’s Day. Then the whole area is festive with hundreds of students dressed in green, partying from morning to night.

That pub, the Rose and Crown, might strike you as strangely named for a local in a catholic Irish area where tricolours fly. Six catholics died there when the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) threw a bomb in one night in February 1974. Many pubs and street corners in Belfast have stories like that. That bomb was an assertion of the right of Northern Ireland to be British at a time when people feared that the political advantage was flowing to those who were also throwing bombs in assertion of the right to be Irish.

We’ll carry on past where the old gasworks was, now the setting of a fancy hotel, and towards the Markets area, which is not as vibrant as it once was. Places change character here. When I was young you would still have seen the occasional horse and cart in the Markets, or the ragman. He even came out to the suburbs calling, ‘Regs. Any regs!’

This is all a catholic area by the river. Some of the old streets have been redeveloped and a big civil service office building overshadows the old church, St Malachy’s. When it was being built I reported on a campaign to stop it and to let the church continue to preside over the area as the predominant defining feature. As some consolation Prince Charles came to inspect the ornate white marble renovation of the altar. I covered that event too. The first minister and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Peter Robinson also came.

It is hard to comprehend the Belfast catholic attitude to royalty. Many catholics hold it only in contempt but the church was honoured to be visited by the future king. No doubt the bishop discussed architecture with him. Even IRA leaders have enjoyed the attention of royalty since then. Republicanism, in theory, is the total rejection of monarchy but theory doesn’t determine how people respond to each other when they meet.

And there is the Albert Bridge over the Lagan. It is named after Prince Albert, just as the Royal Albert Hall in London is. I don’t recall anyone ever raising a protest against that, or against Queen’s Bridge further along, but as a teenager I was aware of a plan to name a new bridge after Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the campaign against home rule for Ireland, perhaps better known now for prosecuting the case against Oscar Wilde. Local nationalists were outraged and one protester even dropped a brick on the queen’s car on a 1966 visit to Belfast.

Over the river is Short Strand, another catholic area, and then beyond that the population is mostly protestant, all the way out along the Newtownards Road. Even in recent years there has been sectarian rioting around Short Strand. In my youth we used to fear that this little catholic enclave would one day be overwhelmed by the vast surrounding protestant population, but it turns out that most of those people had no malign intent.

Further out, beyond the little houses built for protestant workers in the shipyard and the rope works, there is Ballyhackamore with the arts centre and nice cafes, coffee shops and bigger houses. It appears to take its name from the mud flats or sewage exposed in the lough at low tide. ‘Bally’ (baile) means ‘town’. ‘Hack’ appears to come from the Irish word ‘cac’ for ‘shit’, and ‘more’ (mór) means ‘big’. Bigshitville is now our Hampstead.

At the lower end of the road lived the workers who sustained the shipyard and built the Titanic. When men came back from the battlefields of France and Belgium after the Great War catholics were chased out of their jobs to make room for loyal protestants who had fought for the empire.

That catholics had fought in the war too, while other Irish catholics had been fighting for independence in the south, was easily overlooked. Catholics and protestants had fought side by side in the trenches and come home to an Ireland whose traditional divisions had reasserted themselves. Their fellow feeling and comradeship with protestant soldiers was now an embarrassment.

If we walk through the town, I can show you the grandiose City Hall and the stone buildings of the presbyterian assembly, some of the old linen mills and the great sandstone central library, and you can see that this city was once a wealthy mercantile centre with riches to spare for ornamentation and culture.

Or we can go down some of the alleyways to find an old pub where we can sit among office workers and shoppers to enjoy a bowl of chowder and a glass of stout. The drinkers and diners will not know by looking at us whether we are protestant or catholic, nor will most care, though if we discuss sectarianism or politics we will speak softly so as not to be overheard. No one will be invasively curious or unfriendly. This is neutral territory – but it is better than that. It is friendly. All around us the main roads and the housing estates right out to the edge of the city and beyond define themselves as catholic or protestant, nationalist or unionist, and yet there is not a trace of the demarcating instinct in the city centre.

Though, if a couple of young men walked into the pub in football jerseys we’d all look up, anxious. Gruff, potentially violent sectarianism is working class. The middle classes may harbour their prejudices so close they are hardly aware of them.

No one comes into a pub for lunch in the hopes of having a fight as well. No one asks an attendant in Marks & Spencer for directions to the changing room and wonders at the same time if she or he is a catholic or a protestant. Well, some do, maybe.

We have our native little ways of telling who’s what, from accent to manners and humour or clothes, but they are hardly efficient.

This is the hardest part to explain to an outsider. Belfast is a sectarian city. We may assume that many of these people when they go home are content to live in a sectarian milieu on their segregated estates but clearly they are comfortable outside it too.

Most fear no one. That is not what we mean by a sectarian city. Most sectarianism is collective, not individual. You meet few real bigots. Yet the threat from the few means that whole communities have to be walled off against each other.

Some divided communities in other countries suffer the complication of physical distinction between the people of the factions. Belfast would be easier to read if protestants and catholics had different skin colour. Then it might not be possible to have the relaxed mingling in the city centre and they might divide into separate bars. Or if they had different attire, the way in which you can distinguish a hindu from a muslim in Uttar Pradesh, we would be perpetually aware of difference. But there are no strong distinguishing features to warn you in Belfast that you are not among your own, not until you start talking to each other.

Some may adopt football shirts or tattoos to advertise their tribal allegiance. In most city centre bars the young man in a football top will not be served. The tattoo will be discreetly covered.

Now let’s go up the Falls.

Belfast is like a wheel with spokes, with main roads running from the centre in all directions out to the suburbs. The Falls starts at Castle Street, which is a continuation of High Street which is built on the old river.

From the bottom of Castle Street we can travel all the way out to Twinbrook and beyond without ever having to take a turn. All of that area is catholic.

That is not to say that everyone there would identify as a catholic believer or be happy with the word ‘catholic’ as an ethnic label, but there are very few who have not been baptised in a catholic church, who have not attended or do not send their children to catholic schools, who will not be buried according to the rites of the Catholic Church.

Immediately we step into Castle Street I feel that we have crossed into a ghetto. Nearly all of the people here heading home are catholics going deeper into a catholic area. This is also a rough and shabby shopping area for some who aren’t going on into the more diffuse and indefinable space of the mixed city. Here are shops enough for them. Here also are a few pubs and there is an air of dereliction. In the evening there are the alcoholics and the drug users. You don’t go far without someone asking if you have any change and you keep walking because the decrepitude of the desperate looks dangerous.

I am displaying prejudice here, disdaining the poor and the bored who perhaps have come here to find each other, some perhaps looking for reckless, perhaps criminal distraction.

Catholic west Belfast is not uniform in any way. There are estates of public housing and enclaves of home ownership. All classes are there, apart, perhaps, from the very rich. There is no way to sum up the area. The only generalisation you can make is that nearly all people there are baptised catholics and most of those among them who vote, vote for Sinn Féin, the political party whose modern form grew out of the IRA.

There are a few nice shops in Castle Street; the delicatessen, the more elegant lounge bar. They remind you that this was once a more salubrious part of town, the beginning of the centre rather than what it feels like now, the end of the ghetto.

Probably all of the people at the bus stop are catholics. Some are migrants from Poland and Lithuania whose Catholicism has no local political relevance. And there are a few of Asian and African backgrounds, but so far only a few.

All of the people at the taxi rank are going to catholic areas. This is a fixed route, a fixed-fare taxi service. Black cabs which in other parts of town would be wandering freely across different areas were established here as an alternative to the bus service when the buses were taken off because of rioting.

Soon we pass the ring road and are into Divis Street where it fades into the Falls Road. There is the tower block and the double-spired cathedral. And across the road the old hostel for homeless drunks.

This area was a battlefield. I can tell you how I stood here during one of the riots at the start of the Troubles and watched men throw petrol bombs from the top of the tower block. I can show you the bullet strikes in the old redbrick primary school.

Look up each of the side streets and you will see gates barring the way through to the road that runs parallel with the Falls, the Shankill, where the protestants live. No one is stopping you going there, of course, but each point of access between the two roads can be closed to secure each from the other.

This area around us now is the lower Falls, mostly residential to our left as we head out of town, shopping centres and industrial units on the right. It is not a lovely area, though we can see Black Mountain and Divis from here. There is history and propaganda in the wall murals that associate the local armed factions with international causes, treating the demand for Irish reunification as on a spiritual par with resistance to apartheid in South Africa or the cause of the Palestinians.

Tourists come to see this wall and be photographed in front of it, associating themselves with an IRA hero they’d probably not heard of until the tour guide pointed him out.

Here on the left is the memorial garden in honour of D Company of the Provisional IRA with a black wall bearing the names of those who got killed or accidentally blew themselves up during the Troubles and the dates on which they died. Anniversaries here are marked with flag-lowering ceremonies by slack-bodied, sentimental old republicans in black berets. They say the rosary for their fallen comrades.

At the crossroads there is the big hospital on one side and the convent school on the other. The hospital, right in the heart of a catholic area, is for everybody and protestants will cross town to avail of it, as catholics will sometimes cross the Shankill to reach the catholic hospital, the Mater. Medicine is neutral.

The convent is almost vacant now. No young woman wants to be a nun these days. The girls in their burgundy uniforms will do A levels and go to university. They will be teachers and doctors and solicitors. Almost all of those girls were baptised catholic. What they actually believe is for them to say. The university most will go to is Queen’s University in Belfast where most students are catholic, though no one consciously determined that that should be so.

It’s different at the teacher training college next door to the school. It is a catholic college for providing catholic teachers for catholic children in catholic schools.

There is another teacher training college as part of the university. It was set up to provide non-denominational education, mostly in state schools, which are mostly protestant schools. Between these two colleges we train too many teachers and can’t provide jobs for all of them.

We could go further out along the road and I could show you the cemeteries and some of the historically interesting graves like those of IRA members. I could show you the murals commemorating the IRA and the memorials to the dead. Much of west Belfast is like a theme park to militant republicanism.

But let’s turn here and go up the Springfield and across to the protestant Shankill.

We can pass through the peace line without difficulty. It isn’t closed most of the time, though the big metal gates form an impregnable barrier when it is shut and bolted. The area on both sides of the gate is waste ground, but carry on through, past the bleak space, and you come to a T-junction off a busy road.

Nowhere in the real world would you just stumble out of bleak dereliction into a thriving commercial centre like this. Property this close to shops and offices and dense population should logically be valuable and in demand.

We are going to turn down the Shankill and back towards the centre of town.

There is a good view of the mountain now behind us, more like two rounded peaks huddled together. Just to our right is the ornate old library and across from that the community centre.

Just as the Falls Road has its memorial murals commemorating paramilitary gangs, there are gable walls here adorned with portraits of men with guns, rolls of honour listing the dead of different groups described as companies, battalions and brigades. There is symmetry here between communities which insist that they are different from each other. A memorial garden contains tributes to those killed by IRA bombs in pubs on this road, in a fishmonger’s and in a furniture store.

No one on either side of the peace line is allowed to forget history, at least the history of inter-communal murder. You pass it as you go out shopping or walking to school.

The flags here are the Union flag and the Ulster flag, a red hand at the centre of a red cross on a white background, which is not the same as the flag of the province of Ulster, which has a yellow background and represents the whole province of Ulster, three of whose counties are in the Irish Republic.

And there are the routine reminders that people have other concerns, the other fishmonger’s that supplies fancy restaurants and smokes its own salmon, the leisure centre, the vegetable shop with its stalls out on the footpath. There are fast food shops and pharmacies. Not so many bookshops.

I can point out to you the pubs that are favoured by loyalist paramilitaries. If you don’t mind, we’ll not go in.

Nearly all the people here are protestant, which is not to say that they are believing christians. There are more diverse churches on the Shankill than on the Falls, for Protestantism includes various congregations, from the Presbyterian to the Methodist and the Church of Ireland and the smaller evangelical Churches, the Elim Pentecostal, the Baptist, the Free Presbyterian and more. That homogeneity of Catholicism worries the protestants because it suggests to them that catholics are a more coherent community, a church-bound obedient people. And while they were a minority in Northern Ireland compared to protestants, they were a solidly united people, in the protestant imagination, in a way that protestants themselves never could be.

It was often claimed through the Troubles period that the driving force behind IRA violence was the Catholic Church. This was an idea that catholics themselves found bizarre, when voiced by orangemen or the ranting preacher Ian Paisley, yet they were perhaps not taking into account how Catholic Church rules requiring children of mixed marriages to be raised catholic had the effect of eroding a protestant community.

As in Castle Street, where we moved from the city centre into the lower Falls area and passed through a depleted and cheap-looking area, we pass now into a similar space as we leave the Shankill and go back into town.

Communities have been separated by open space and sometimes by the otherwise unnecessary widening of roads where walls would not have done the job. You can see this in other areas too, like at Short Strand, where protestant and catholic people are kept at a distance from each other by town planners having turned a small road into a multi-lane highway for just a few hundred yards to expand the space between catholic and protestant housing.

This is a city shaped to accommodate division.

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