Fathers shot, daughters killed in bombings: Ghosts of the blood-soaked Troubles haunt Northern Ireland
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — By now, these walls were meant to have fallen.
Just as they did at the height of the Troubles — three blood-soaked decades of sectarian and political violence that shook Northern Ireland and transfixed a watching world — separation barriers still snake their way between neighborhoods of low-slung red-brick row houses, keeping mainly Roman Catholic Irish nationalists and Protestants loyal to the British crown physically separated from one another.
Nearly 50 feet tall in some spots, daubed with slogans and topped by metal spikes, the dividing lines are known, with scarcely a trace of irony, as "peace walls." In the quarter-century since the Good Friday agreement, the landmark deal that largely ended the conflict, successive target dates for dismantling the barriers have slipped past, one after another.
"Ah no, love — they won't come down in my lifetime, I don't think," said Kathleen Smyth, 63, walking with her daughter and granddaughter on Falls Road, the main thoroughfare in west Belfast, where the tricolor of the neighboring Irish Republic flutters from flagpoles.
Across the divide on Shankill Road, where many tattered storefronts display the Union Jack, 35-year-old maintenance worker William Harveson angled his chin in the direction of a sturdy gate that would seal off foot and car traffic through the barrier in a few hours, at sunset.
"It's still needed," he said. "Just in case."
