WHAT’S the best way to manage a divided society, a society divided by race and ethnicity?
Is it to work through government policy towards integration in the hope that one day the division will be negligible, or is it to accept and even endorse the division, given that it’s what people want?
In most countries people of shared ethnicity tend to gather together, so we have Black and Asian communities, we have Irish communities. We have Chinatowns and Little Italys.
And while these may create points of tension they also add colour to a city with festivals, exotic restaurants (not so much in the case of Irish communities, perhaps), theatre and music.
Such communities also sometimes dissolve into the wider society through intermarriage, the adoption of customs, the effects of education, children growing up with the accents and attitudes they acquire in school and on the street.
Northern Ireland’s sectarian division is unique in several ways.
One is that an outsider could hardly tell the difference between the communities, cannot know if the person serving a drink in a downtown bar is an Irish-identifying Catholic or a British-identifying Protestant. Both are white. Both speak English in the same way. Neither has distinctive cultural attire, apart from football shirts. Their sense of humour will be much the same.
Social attitudes surveys will suggest that the Protestant thinks more literally and legalistically while the Catholic is more socially tolerant and imaginative but the variation is small.
They look like people for whom integration would be natural and easy. Yet they live in separate housing estates, send their children to different schools, vote for different political parties and enjoy different sports.
Nonetheless, some integration is occurring. Far greater numbers marry across the divide now than did twenty years ago. Even so, they tend to bring their children up within the territory and culture of one of the parents.
They will probably not be as politically assertive of that identity, preferring to support middle ground politics. Yet some will grow up more assertively aligned to one culture, perhaps having sided with one parent against the other.
There will be a wide spread within a community between those who are passionate about identity and those who give it little thought.
If you go into those areas of intense cultural concentration at certain times of the year, you will see the flags flying from lampposts. You will see wall murals and graffiti declaring the local identity politics. You may get the impression of a homogenous, angry culture all around you; but actually most people are not angry or difficult.
They might harden in their attitude at times of inter-communal stress or when they feel their background culture is threatened or insulted but most do not live day by day with a focused bigotry, contempt or wariness of the other side.
In Belfast they may live near a wall that divides their area from an area in which the other community prevails, but they are not afraid of that other community, or at least not of most people within it. Still, they would probably prefer the wall stayed up. It’s what they are used to.
Ten years ago, the Northern Ireland Assembly planned to remove the ‘peace walls’ that segregate communities by 2020. They still stand firm.
Division like this is so deep that political focus is more on managing it than working against it. The Good Friday Agreement provides for how two distinct communities can govern together. It is not a blueprint, by any means, for merging them and conducting politics in any other way, say on a left/right divide as in Britain or France.
And while these communities say that their most important concern is that Northern Ireland should be part of a united Ireland or perpetually British, neither has a plan for how to include the side that loses that argument.
Public bodies concerned with sectarian division, disputes over parades, flags, community rights etc tend to focus on how rights can be endorsed and respected rather than on how the promotion of identity can be irritating and ought to be reduced.
For the problem, at heart, is not simply that two identities sit side by side and incidentally rankle each other through ignorance. It’s that each rivals the other, each preserves its coherence through conflict with the other, generated by political representatives or hardcore purists who often have violent inclinations or tend to be indulgent of others who do.
Were the acrimony to subside cultural definition would be blunted too and the horrific prospect - for many - would emerge, of actual tension free integration.
It would be nice to imagine a future Northern Ireland in which each culture enjoys enduring interaction with the other.
People say they want this to change.
Most parents would like schools to be integrated, or say they would, but fewer than one in ten is. And since the communities live in separate distinct areas only bussing could change that.
Change can only be very slow and perhaps a political system which does so little to promote it is only being realistic.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Book
