Borders, boundaries, walls. How physical and social division affects young people in Belfast by Laura Carrer and Elena Mistrello

Belfast, between what was and what could be

Interest in walls, barriers, and forms of segregation in Europe has grown in recent years, especially in relation to how the continent has reshaped its idea of “fortification.” Over the past ten to fifteen years, this concept has taken on a mostly technological dimension: surveillance cameras, drones, and widespread monitoring systems. As a journalist focusing on the impact of technology on society, I was naturally drawn to observe this phenomenon of division from a very specific angle. Over time, however, I’ve tried to broaden my perspective, moving beyond what is visible, to recognize what is separated by invisible walls, mental fences, and fragmented barriers. There are, in fact, European cities where tangible lines of separation between communities still exist, remnants of decades of segregation fueled by armed conflict, identity struggles, and colonial legacies.

When I told illustrator Elena Mistrello about my desire to explore the legacy of the Irish Troubles, her interest was immediate.
Elena is a comic artist, and for years she has been working in the field of nonfiction comics using drawing as a tool to tell stories about the present and the world around us.

Belfast is a city deeply scarred by a sectarian conflict between Protestant and Catholic communities, though to reduce what happened in Northern Ireland to a simple religious divide would be misleading. Beneath what might appear to be a clash of faiths—Protestantism versus Catholicism—lies a far more complex history: one of British occupation and a long struggle for self-determination by the people of Northern Ireland.
It’s a legacy that still casts a long shadow, even over those born after the end of the violence and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Truly understanding what it means to be young in Belfast today is far from simple. We are no longer in a context of open war, with armed soldiers patrolling the streets; yet the city remains soaked with symbols, signs, and boundaries that tell of a tension still very much alive. Walking through Belfast, you immediately sense a geography full of meaning: walls, fortifications, murals, segregated neighborhoods, elements that in another context might go unnoticed or carry a different interpretation, but here they carry a specific weight because they speak of the past and shape the present.

Belfast is neither a European capital bowed down to mass tourism nor the explosive city of the ’60s and ’70s. It is a place that lives on the edge between memory and the future.
Here, time seems to swing constantly between what was and what could be, like leaning your face out of a moving car’s window: for a moment, you hold your breath, then comes a strange, almost liberating sense of euphoria.

R-City is an association founded in 2013 by Alan Waite and Thomas Turley, two activists from different neighbourhoods in Belfast. Since its inception, the organisation has taken on an increasingly prominent role in the social fabric of the city, so much so that it can now rely on a group of collaborators who carry out regular activities aimed at young people and adults on issues of mental health, conflict, gang culture, and educational disadvantage. Its headquarters is in a liminal space, at the intersection of the Catholic and Protestant communities, on a street whose fame precedes its name: Shankill Road.

In 2021, a study by Trinity College Dublin highlighted the positive impact of R-City in working with young people in North and West Belfast. According to the author, Eileen Mah Gricuk, with the right support young people can develop key skills such as critical thinking, communication and openness to diversity, along with increased self-confidence, positivity and ambition. Research participants recognised that their experience with R-City had a real impact on their lives: from self-esteem and access to higher education to better communication within the family and active engagement in the community.

During our week in Belfast, we worked with Donovan Galway, R-City’s project officer, to organise two focus groups with girls and boys who attend the centre. It was a valuable opportunity to get a close look at the work of the charity and to understand how, through daily activities and shared spaces, bonds are built that bypass the city’s historical barriers. The participants, from both communities, embodied R-City’s goal: to create opportunities for authentic encounters, confrontation and mutual contamination, in order to counteract the forms of segregation that, though less visible, continue to shape Belfast’s social life.

Donovan is to all intents and purposes one of the souls of the organisation. She belongs to that new generation of activists who grew up within the walls of the centre, where she took her first steps when she was still a child. Her parents, both Protestants, separated when she was ten years old. When she started attending R-City, she kept it a secret from her father for weeks because he would not accept her associating with Catholics. Living in two separate houses she only visited him once a week, for Sunday lunch, thus managing to keep the secret. When her father found out, he was against it and tried, to some extent, to hinder her. But things changed. Today, remarried and with a new family, he has another daughter whom he teaches to “gowhere Donovan goes”. She tells it with a smile, with a sense of redemption: although her family is no longer what it used to be, she conveys to the listener the feeling that she has made it. Donovan is a determined girl, known to everyone in the neighbourhood. They greet her on the street, honk at her, stop to let her cross. The boys and girls see her as a guide. And it is evident that for many she really is.

Some parents, especially in the early days, continue to show reluctance in allowing their children to attend the R-City centre. In the accounts of two children who emerged during the focus groups, this resistance stemmed from the fear that they might become the target of attacks from the “opposing” community – not only verbal, such as insults or provocations, but also physical. This concern reveals how tensions, although more subtle than in the past, are still alive and rooted in the daily perception of many families.

What emerges strongly from the focus groups is that, for many young people between the ages of 13 and 17, the identity of belonging is not a conscious choice, but a condition received as an inheritance. One is born into a community and grows up under the weight – or protection – of a label that is given before one even understands what it really means. To an outside eye, the separation appears “only” religious, but for them it is much more complex – and at the same time indefinable. To be born into a Protestant or Catholic family in Belfast is to carry a label from birth, a sort of imposed destiny that, as they put it, “doesn’t really make you understand why you’re Protestant or Catholic, but you know that’s how you’re brought up”. With them it becomes clear that the religious dimension that seems to characterise their lives is marginal, if not entirely absent: no one attends Church, no one talks about faith. It is rather in everyday culture, in shared symbols and family history that identity takes shape. This is clearly seen in the objects they have brought with them for the meetings, each loaded with a personal and, at the same time, collective meaning.

Almost all of the boys and girls from Protestant families proudly carried the Union Jack – the flag of the United Kingdom created by the union of England, Scotland and Ireland – or, in some cases, the more pronounced Ulster Flag. Darcy, for example, told us that that flag represents “her culture and his community because she has always seen it around, and because she sings the (English) hymn”. A symbol that defines a position in the world, an identity that manifests itself more through geography and imperialist history than through a faith. 

Those from a Catholic family chose different symbols. Olivia, for example, did not limit herself to the Irish flag, but carried a Fáinne Óir – a small golden circle pinned on the right lapel of her jacket. It is the sign of someone who knows the Irish language and wishes to speak it whenever the opportunity arises. The metal of the pin indicates the level of mastery of the language: gold is the highest grade. For Olivia, that symbol encapsulates her knowledge of her family history, Catholic and Republican, and represents a deep connection to a culture she describes as “oppressed by the English”. Her narrative is marked by an awareness that goes beyond that of her peers. For her, the Troubles are not a faded or distant event, but a reality that still shapes the present. Yet, even in her case, a conviction returns that unites many: ‘If it were up to us, everything would change. The problem is that for the older generations it doesn’t’.

When we broach the subject of education, the kids all agree: they would like it to be more inclusive. If there is in fact a surprising – almost unbelievable, when seen from the outside – but at the same time crucial aspect of everyday life in Belfast, it is that the historical memory of the Troubles is transmitted almost exclusively within families. The school, in fact, does not play an active role in this process. The school system remains largely divided, with Catholic and Protestant schools located in their respective neighbourhoods and attended almost exclusively by students from the same community. This means that many young people grow up in culturally homogeneous contexts, without ever openly confronting the recent history of their own area, let alone those who have experienced a different version of it.

‘Catholics talk more about what happened,’ Leah tells us, ‘because they have moments of coming together, like Sunday mass or other community occasions.’ Joshua, on the other hand, says he only met his first Protestant friend when he was 14. One reality that remains common: integrated schools, which welcome students from both communities – and also from non-Irish backgrounds – are still rare, and often far from the working-class neighbourhoods of North and West Belfast, where many of the R-City kids live. The first integrated school is more than half an hour away from their neighbourhoods. This makes school choice a logistical, as well as a cultural, issue: many families simply opt for the nearest school, which almost always corresponds to their community affiliation. Thus, the cycle repeats itself. One grows up within invisible boundaries, with histories that never really intersect. There is a separation between communities even in the most intimate bonds, because even falling in love can turn into a minefield: what happens if a Catholic and a Protestant tie the knot? Where to live? In which neighbourhood to build a life together without feeling out of place or threatened?

Emblematic of the persistence of community segregation in Belfast are the physical barriers. Today the city has as many as 30.5 kilometres of internal “boundaries”, divided into 97 different forms of defensive architecture: walls, fences, gates and closed roads. Most of these structures are concentrated in the working-class neighbourhoods of the north, west and east of the city, precisely where coexistence is most fragile. Paradoxically, Belfast today has more walls than it did in 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

‘The Peace Walls keeps Troubles away’, one of the young people in the second focus group organised with R-City told us. It is a common perception that these walls represent not only the tangible historical memory of the two communities, but also a daily security device. They are the visible symbol of a balance that relies on separation. Protection and distance coincide, as if the only possible form of peace were one based on the absence of the other. It is a perfect example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you grow up in a context where division is normalised, where physical boundaries define the social and cultural order of the city, then it becomes difficult to imagine an alternative. Separation not only becomes part of the urban architecture, but it becomes ingrained in the very way reality is interpreted.

There is an intersection between Ardoyne and Shankill that represents this invisible original sin. The former is a Catholic, working-class neighbourhood where there is a strong sense of community and attachment to Irish origins. Whole streets of terraced houses in Anglo-Saxon style line the central thoroughfare, dotted with full-wall murals that speak of everyday life and inspire young people to react all together: to loneliness, to mental distress, to violence. A reminder that there are those who, playing football on those streets all up and down North Belfast, made it to the national team. On the other side is Shankill, a Unionist and therefore Protestant stronghold, crossed by the long and historic Shankill Road. Walking along it from the city centre, looking upwards, one immediately grasps the imprint left by the Troubles and subsequent years on the Protestant community. One of the centres of Loyalist activity during the Northern Ireland conflict, where several attacks on Catholic civilians were recorded, it is now dotted with Unionist flags flying alongside Israeli ones, and memorials dedicated to the victims of the IRA bombings. The Royal Pub is a landmark, and the Protestant church presides over the heart of the neighbourhood.

As mentioned, the barriers are the physical symbol of separation, but most striking are the symbols, which speak to the heads and hearts of those who live them every day. Peace walls appear here and there behind the courtyards of houses, like the sun trying to make its way through the clouds of the Irish sky: visible, at times, but circumventable. The mental ones, however, are not. This is clear from the story of the Catholic boys and girls from Ardoyne, who have to cross a heavy inheritance to reach the R-City centre. After passing through the automatic gate that opens daily at 6:30am and closes again at 10:30pm “we don’t know why, but we are told for the safety of both communities”, they are faced with the last mile. A stretch of road – Crumlin Road – that marks, more than any physical barrier, the invisible line of separation. Here a simple rule applies: Catholics walk on the left, Protestants on the right.

The impact of the division between communities in Belfast is all there. Boys and girls of Catholic affiliation avoid crossing Shankill: they prefer to take a longer ride to R-City, passing through on the other side. Although they have never experienced the brutality of the Northern Ireland conflict first-hand, they bear the burden and consequences. For many of them, especially the boys, gender identity is deeply intertwined with community identity: being “male” also means representing one’s belonging, symbolically presiding over one’s spaces. And crossing “other people’s” neighbourhoods can mean expressing one’s masculinity. ‘Paramilitary groups use boys as puppets,’ some of the boys in the focus group said in chorus. They are not referring to the historical armed groups active during the Troubles, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), but to the paramilitary formations present today, particularly in Protestant neighbourhoods. Paramilitary groups that no longer have the ideological or political legitimacy of yesteryear but which operate mainly in loyalist and unionist contexts, and which the young people of R-City do not hesitate to define for what they have become – forms of real organised crime. The UVF and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) continue to share control of territory, exerting a constant, if more muted, presence in the daily life of communities.

For girls, however, the context is slightly different. The risks of aggression – physical or verbal – seem to be perceived as minor. ‘Even if I am being looked at, no one asks why, as a Catholic, I am walking through a Protestant neighbourhood,’ all the girls met in the focus groups recount almost unanimously. But even this apparent freedom is the child of the same dynamic: that which links the possibility of moving to the gaze of the other, and which continues to define who can be where – and under what conditions.

The boundary between the Protestant and Catholic quarters of Ardoyne runs along a street that separates two only seemingly similar sides. As in much of Belfast, symbols dominate the cityscape: they impose themselves so insistently that, when they change, it is impossible not to notice them. As soon as you turn right onto Alliance Avenue, a very tall pole topped by three surveillance cameras immediately jumps out at you. At the base, stands the Red Hand of Ulster, the open red left hand pointing upwards, the historical symbol of Ulster – the province that includes Belfast – and originally the official seal of the O’Neill family. According to one legend, the symbol originated from a contest between two tribal chiefs to claim land: one, seeing the other in the lead, would cut off his hand and throw it to the shore, thus touching land first and securing the right of possession. Today, the Red Hand is one of the few symbols used by both communities in the
north of Ireland, although it has become more commonly associated with the Protestant community. Catholics tend to interpret it as representing the nine historic counties of Ulster, while for Protestants it symbolises the current six counties. This appropriation is well explained in the work of sociologist Bill Rolston, who has highlighted how forms of symbolic revisionism have allowed Protestants to reinterpret and integrate elements historically shared or belonging to the Catholic tradition into their collective identity.

After finishing our work at R-City, we walked down LawnBrook Avenue, heading for Cupar Way. With us was Professor Bill Rolston, who acted as our guide, pointing out every detail useful for reading, interpreting and – as far as possible – understanding Northern Irish culture and identity. We followed his gaze, which knew where to rest. Halfway there, we could already glimpse our final destination: the longest peace wall in all of Belfast.

To see it for the first time, the wall is shocking. And it remains so even as we walk the entire two and a half kilometres along it, observing every detail. Built in 1969 by the British army to “contain” the clashes between the two communities, today it is a presence that shows no signs of disappearing: on the contrary, it is maintained and even reinforced in certain sections. Its structure is divided into three sections, made of different materials: at the base, three metres of concrete; above, a green iron barrier another three metres high; finally, a metal fence that reaches a total of nine metres. The wall is covered by a stratification of murals and writings that have been superimposed over time, like a vertical archive of memories and tensions. On the Protestant side, the houses of the Catholic community can be glimpsed; on the opposite side, on the other hand, visibility is almost nil. Some residents of the houses facing the wall have even installed metal cages above courtyards and windows to protect themselves from objects being thrown from the other side.

For the boys and girls of R-City, the city’s murals – including those covering the peace walls – represent a key piece in the construction of their historical memory. They are powerful visual symbols. Professor Rolston’s discerning and critical eye, which has documented every little change in the murals’ depictions for decades, does not see them as “all the same” as they appear to the boys and girls and from the outside. The republican ones speak of struggle, of resistance, of unity, and are often brought up to date by linking them to international battles and the support of populations considered oppressed in the same way. Palestine, above all. Unionist murals, on the other hand, speak of belonging, of loyalty, of denying space to the Irish, of glory. And they are actualised in their support for the state of Israel. In Professor Rolston’s immense photo archive there is a photo of a mural on Percy Street, taken in 1994 in a playground between some Protestant houses, that struck me deeply. ‘There is no nationalist area of Ulster, only areas temporarily occupied by nationalists,’ it reads.

At the same time, however, they have also become a tourist attraction, especially with the increase in visitors in recent years. This double meaning does not always convince young people. Many young people perceive a discrepancy between the narrative proposed to tourists and the one they experience themselves. ‘It is always a very divided interpretation,’ they relate. ‘There are Protestant taxis and Catholic taxis.’ They refer to tours organised by taxi drivers – often former militants – who offer visitors a glimpse of what those high walls mean in a seemingly pacified European city. Belfast remains a city to be read, screaming under its breath.