The winners in Peace

Derry was the cradle of the 1960’s Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland. The Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday helped to bring an attention to the city for all the wrong reasons.

Derry itself fell away from the limelight in the later years of the troubles with much of the focus moving to Belfast, and the recent blip in the peace process with three murders in November and rioting in early July have focused on the Northern part of Belfast.

Meanwhile in Derry they have been quietly picking up the pieces, rebuilding the city, and community relations and dismantling some of the more obvious signs of the troubles.

Namely the massive police/army stations in the centre of the city, with their high walls, watchtowers and banks of cameras trained on the Catholic Bogside and the Loyalist Fountain areas.

And whilst this is all good, there has been one unexpected winner, because what do you do with a space that has previously housed an army barracks or a fortified police station...

...You turn them into car parks of course, to help pull in the money!

So, in peace, the real winners are the car park owners (though I don’t recall that ever being mentioned in either a great speech or a movie)

Answering my own question

When I arrived in Belfast I wanted to come with no pre-conceptions. I wanted Belfast to speak for itself without the baggage attached to it from the subconscious of having seen it feature so much on TV news during my childhood.

I asked the question is Belfast now fully open for business?

I don’t think its a question that just two days can answer, but at the same time I’ve been able to get a taste of where the answer may lie.

Yes, the shops are gleaming, the cityscape stunning and the future rosy. But at the same time the gleaming shops are the same ones which line the street of every town in Britain. M&S, Carphone Warehouse, Next, Orange, Debenhams. I had hoped that Belfast would buck the trend of other cities in the UK and not be an identikit city. Sadly if you were to read out the names of the shops on the main street it would be impossible to tell if you were in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester, Liverpool or Belfast.

In places there is that hint that there is more under the surface. There are no Irish theme bars, just Irish bars. Some of the shops don’t have branches in London, but they do in Dublin and Cork, and in the streets lots of the cars bear number plates from Ireland.

But, perhaps the most depressing thing from my visit was discovering that despite the end to violence and the peace process being over a decade old, the physical divisions between the two communities still exits. The 20 foot high peace walls topped with barbed wire to keep the two communities separate, the gates that sever the link between the communities at night.

In the end rather than answering one question I now have several

• Is Belfast open for retail? Yes




• Is Belfast open for tourism? Yes




• Is Belfast open to community cohesion? Try again in five years time

Perhaps best not to compare

Over the last few months I have visited two places which have been torn apart by ethnic tensions and fault lines between religions.

In one, now peace has returned, the two communities have started to work together to repair the damage of war and turmoil. They have used the cooperation to build up their tourism industry and return their community to peaceful cohabitation.

In the other the communities are still separated by walls and peace lines, the old animosities exist. Whilst the politicians work together the communities are still not together and integrated.

One is a former war zone, the other is part of my own country.

Bosnia was torn to pieces with ethnic Serbs, Croats and Muslims fighting each other, committing atrocities that brought back memories of the worst of World War II. In Mostar the Croats blew up the bridge that linked the Croat and Muslim community in an attempt at ethnic cleansing.
Today, the bridge is restored and the communities are now only rivals when it comes to building the largest religious building.

In Northern Ireland, the peace lines still exist, the police stations are still heavily fortified and the suburbs of Belfast and the towns along the coast are still referred to as Nationalist or Loyalist.

The most shocking sight is that of the gate in the peace wall half way along Townsend Street, closed each evening to separate the Communities of the Falls Road (Nationalist) and Shankill Road (Unionist).

Given all the talk of peace and reconciliation within Northern Ireland it is slightly scary, and sad, to see that the two communities are still so separated.