West Belfast.

February 20, 2023

              Today we were led around West Belfast and heard from a panel of former paramilitaries and British police. In Shankill, Mark, a 24 year veteran of the British army, led us through the loyalist, unionist side of the wall; he handed us off across the gates to the nationalist, republican Falls Road side to Pader, who’d been 16 years imprisoned for killing an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. At Tar Anall in the Conway Mill, we sat around a panel made up of Noel, a gunman for the Ulster Volunteer Force who also went to Long Kesh for murder; Lee, a veteran of British infantry who’d served two tours in Northern Ireland at checkpoints and watchtowers; and Michael, now of Sinn Fein and formerly of the Irish Republican Army, who spent another 16 years at Long Kesh for murder.

              Mark presented an unapologetic, severe argument for British Northern Ireland: to reunify Northern Ireland, the IRA was willing to destroy its economy, its buildings, its morale, its grandmamas, kiddies and babies, and the murderers and terrorists—responsible for specific, knowable deaths and horrors—are now in Stormont, in charge; meanwhile, the Brits of Northern Ireland only ever wanted to keep homes and people safe. In a few months, the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement will arrive, and, he asked, what has it brought us?

              He came by his bitterness honestly—both his father and brother murdered, and his own body the target of three killing attempts, resulting in a seven month coma, prosthetics, and the loss of two toes. Mark succeeded in driving home the question that Alice later asked Pader, our IRA tour guide: is the violence endured by civilians seen as justified? Why can’t we reconcile? Mark says, beating his head: the memories. Beating his chest: the heartache.

              The most powerful and undeniable thing Mark described was that wall and its effects: On one side, 100% of the people are Protestant; on the other, 100% Catholic. Not a single Catholic on the Protestant side, he claimed, and not a Protestant to be found among the other. Everyone locked in by the wall, everyone locked out, the gates slamming shut every night at nine. Each side has its own shops, its own schools and nurseries, its own churches and even its own buses. Before 1969, Mark said, we shared drinks, friendships, and handshakes. Now there’s the wall, seven kilometers long and three meters thick, its first brick laid in 1971. And has it fixed anything? No, we just keep building it higher. First in ’93, and then, the Good Friday Agreement, did it mean the wall could come down? No, in 1998, they just raised it higher. The children are playing in their own playgrounds and taking lessons in their own schools. The kiddies aren’t playing, nor praying, nor eating, or learning together. The next generation is already locked in.

             The idea of separateness is incredibly vivid. And when he toured us through the central blocks of Shankill Road, its angry murals a little like the martyrs’ row on the other side but also bellowing in its thick-font accusations (“PROBABLY THE UK’S WORST EVER PRIME MINISTER AND HIS CABAL IN THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY,” “SINN FEIN/IRA VERSUS ISIS,” “SINN FEIN/IRA’S SLAUGHTER,” “CHILDREN MURDERED BY SINN FEIN,” “30 YEARS OF INDISCRIMINATE SLAUGHTER BY THE SO-CALLED NON-SECTARIAN IRISH FREEDOM FIGHTERS”), I thought very much of those children raised here in their segregated homes, shopping and walking all their young lives through the vitriol of victimization.

              Mark walked us through the gates that would close at night and open at seven each morning and took us to Pader. Mark wanted us to face the full impact of the horrors he described in the tradition of a fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian, and he had the desired effect, leaving us unable to make eye contact with another human being. That’s how Pader found us, long faces, cast down.

              Pader provided not only a contrast in perspectives but demeanor, giving nods to us and laughing, and calling out to all the passersby. Haven’t seen you in a bit, Pader. Yeah, cuz’ I’ve been avoidin’ ya! Heya, Pader? How are ya? Magic, Patrick. Magic. Just telling them all about how ya fucked the British all on yer own.

              But the things Pader was describing were dead serious, too. The contrasts he provided to Mark’s story were several. First, he and other nationalists were insistent that their argument was not about religion but colonialist occupation. We saw this in the murals up and down Falls road—images touching on Palestinian plight, American civil rights and South African anti-apartheid heroes, Cuban revolutionaries, and many other peoples rising up against post-colonial structures. Second, he and other nationalists shared the argument that they were fighting back against the most sophisticated government and military in the world, and as such, violent acts were acts of war and political in nature.

              We would hear from Duncan Morrow of Ulster University the next day, who would describe it this way: Each side says, We can’t trust the other. Here’s the proof: Awful things They did to us. And here are heroic things we did to defend ourselves: no recognition that their awful acts and our heroic acts are the same—you did it because you believed what you were fighting was much worse.

              We left the separated tours for an integrated panel discussion with Michael, Noel, and Lee.

              Michael Culbert was a distinguished, good looking man with deep laugh lines who now works with Sinn Fein and engages others in dialogue and reconciliation. Also he’s a man who, while working as a social worker during the day, directed violence and destruction, and continues to hold sway now. And as truly appreciative and respecting he was of Noel and Lee, Michael—or Mickey as the other men called him—he seemed to suggest peace was a strategy rather than a driving principle. When Alice asked the men if they had any regrets, Michael said in a line to which students would return again and again, “I regret that I got caught.” At the time, we laughed: he had told so many jokes, was so kindly teasing of Noel and Lee. But he wasn’t laughing when he said it. He said, I’m sad for the families of the British forces I killed, but I have no regret for taking part in the anticolonial struggle. Then he went back to joking: I regret that Henry VIII went and got that divorce, is what I regret.

              Noel was a diminutive, sweet looking man who was described by another this way. Lovely man. Lovely. Brutal murderer. This article about Noel is eye-opening and made me think again and again of Sayre and Noel joyfully talking about their passion as footballers. Noel’s path from bitter violence to mentor of peace was long and hard won, and now he questions the very meaning of Britishness.

              Lee was a working class British soldier who served terms in Northern Ireland and programmed to follow orders and to see the entire Catholic civilian population as IRA and as the guilty enemy. During the cease fire of 1994, he started reading again and reacted strongly to British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling’s phrase “acceptable level of violence” in Northern Ireland. A road through heroin, homelessness, and history (that is, a PhD in American history) brought him to work like these panel discussions, to unravel people’s narratives of conflict.

              The three men said some common things: Peace is the way forward, and no one wants to go back to the violence. The real issue is not religion, but economic opportunity. If they’d replaced the factory at Mackey’s with a university, as once was maybe going to happen, rather than a wall, if someone had invested and provided both educational and economic opportunities rather than spending all that money on the Titanic Museum, what might have happened for these two communities?