Belfast’s divisions, concrete as well as metaphysical, could outlast the dismantling of the border
MY father was born in 1914 so he was six years old when Ireland was partitioned. He lived in a house that was about a hundred yards from the border, on the Derry side. So the immediate landscape familiar to him was suddenly changed.
In those days of few cars it might have been normal for him to go down the stony path of his home on his trike, onto the main road, turn left and pedal into the neighbouring village of Muff.
Very likely, before the erection of the border, his mother shopped more in Muff than in Derry, now cut off from Donegal on the UK side. Maybe they had been regulars at mass in a region that was now another country. The people of the village would have been their neighbours.
But suddenly there was a border controlled not just by customs officers but by an armed constabulary, the B Specials.
Thirty years after partition, my parents lived in Muff and I was born to have a harp on my birth certificate, but I have no memory of life there. I had no acquaintance with the border after the age at which I was starting to walk.
My parents moved to the British side, perhaps in part because more generous welfare benefits included a family allowance, financial support for each child.
After we moved to Belfast, my father drove us to Donegal for day trip holidays, when he could afford a car, to visit relations in Muff and Carndonagh. His anxiety about the border infected his children. We had to sit hushed in the car as we approached a checkpoint then usually marvelled at how lightly we were waved through by customs officers who did not even come out to look us over.
Arriving in the ‘South’ - actually to the north of us - was always accompanied with a sense of relief, largely because of the apprehension unnecessarily built up on approach.
“Be quiet now, children. Wheesht!”
This anxiety on my father’s part was informed by other experiences. He had been a smuggler during the Second World War and after. He never talked about that much. I suspect that unlike some others in his extended family, he had not been a very good smuggler.
Since I grew up in Belfast from the age of five, I did not live with a routine consciousness of the border.
The division that I was aware of was not the splitting in two of an island people but the sectarian division in the city. Even of that, I had little sense in early childhood.
I had a few Protestant neighbours but they were a minority in our predominantly Catholic housing estate. Most of them were in police families. The man of the house would cycle off in uniform in the morning to the station at Dunmurry and his children would go to school in Lisburn while I went to school first in the smelly pavilion at Casement Park and later at the Holy Child school.
I began to learn a little Irish history, mingled with Catholic pride. To us, Patrick Pearse was, essentially, a martyr and a saint.
I had had some encounters with snarly sectarianism before the Troubles but by the time that the civil rights protests arose, met by counter protests from unionists, I was in college among Protestant unionists of my own age. My wariness of unionists and the police was tempered by new friendships.
Then the peace line went up, first as coils of barbed wire across streets in which houses had been burnt during sectarian rioting, long since expanded into enduring structures of brick and metal.
Even these were not as close to me as the border had been to my father, and they changed my patterns of moving around Belfast very little.
The city was partitioned, in effect, but I was cut off from areas I was not inclined to go into anyway. Certainly not during the years of the sectarian violence.
Even now, 26 years after the Good Friday Agreement, political division in Northern Ireland is more concerned with the partition of the island than with the partition of the city.
Partly this is a surviving tradition rather than a present irritant, a sense that a great historic wrong should be corrected. No one can tell if we would be materially better off in the UK or a united Ireland. For many that’s beside the point.
The structures at the border, controlling movement in my father’s lifetime and in my own during the Troubles, are all gone. We move freely.
We move freely around Belfast too, passing through these protective walls with little sense that we endanger ourselves by doing so.
Still there is a major political campaign to remove the border across the island, the one that stretches from Lough Foyle to Carlingford Lough, and there is no significant campaign at all to remove the peace walls, the borders that break up our main city into distinct, segregated Catholic and Protestant areas.
Why not?
Is there not a real prospect that in the future that nationalism envisages, when the border has gone and Ireland is united, Belfast will still be a partitioned city?
Is nobody concerned about that?
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
