(UK) N Ireland: Healing Belfast Youth
[excerpted from, Latin America & Anglo: Stories across Cultures ?2023]
In December 2006, Northern Ireland was not even a decade past the Troubles.
And the people were still troubled. Yet in Belfast, programs were beginning to emerge that brought youth from Catholic and Protestant communities together, to begin healing the generational trauma before it could continue to be passed along. The success of such programs is still very much in debate today.
My first interest, then, in visiting this city, was to learn more about its history of trauma and attempts at healing. And to do so, I met with a social worker – by now I’m afraid I’ve forgotten her name – who had begun an interfaith program with teenagers, to facilitate and encourage cross-group relationships.
I wanted to know what walls still stood between these communities, and whether it was even possible for people to cross them.
Belfast in particular was in the news a good deal as I was growing up, and it was seldom good. Like Bilbao, like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, like Korea and Cyprus and many a place of ongoing conflict, Belfast had too many stories of violence.
When the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton occurred in 1984, I was 20 years old – just beginning my involvement in political and social activism, with a strong focus on peace efforts. Ultimately, I’d become a trauma psychologist. Thirty years later, I would live in Brighton, in fact – though that story has now been told.
Today, just as much as at the time of my 2006 visit, the Catholic and Protestant communities of Belfast still keep to themselves, in a segregation that encompasses most aspects of daily life and which has been referred to as ‘self-imposed apartheid’. Though the Troubles may have ended in terms of open conflict, the undercurrents remain; this deeply embedded divisive identity, based not only on religious but also political and social distinctions, is generally considered both cause and effect of the earlier strife, its trauma and tension unresolved.
Some unexpected events, however, have begun to close the gap. (More on this soon.)
Belfast has always been the focal point of the division and conflict. In the 1921 partition, in the Troubles of the 1960s through 1990s, in many a conflict between, it has always been focused in and around Belfast.
The social worker and I met in a café for a long, heartfelt conversation over tea, as you do. Her program, still in early days, had indicators of positive outcome, in its focus on sports and other activities appealing to adolescents with quite a few participants both Catholic and Protestant. The parents, however, while allowing their offspring to participate, did not themselves mingle at related events.
The core of the division, it would seem, is that the Protestant majority is pro-Britain; a significant Catholic minority, largely made up of Irish nationalists, has always longed, and fought, for reunification with Ireland.
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Now that the UK has left the EU, however, opinions in the Protestant majority are changing; Northern Ireland had voted to remain. And while this is the common factor given, I must also propose the recent and swift move of Ireland away from its formerly strong alliance with Catholicism as another factor; it is now easier for Protestants in Northern Ireland to consider Irish culture over religious identity.
The 1921 partition of Ireland was only ever meant to be temporary, in fact, just until the conflict of that era a century ago could be resolved, and with reunification measures in place from the beginning (in echoes of Korea’s 1945 division, where I lived and studied same for many years). Instead, what was then known as Southern Ireland became a republic in December 1922, and the partition remained, accentuating the distinction in Northern Ireland between Protestant and Catholic.
For a century, two key elements have existed: the Irish Republican Army or IRA, a paramilitary group; and Sinn Féin, a nationalist political party established in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. And as of the May 2022 election in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin holds the majority in the Assembly for the first time in history.
Sinn Féin translates best as Ourselves, or We Ourselves. While Irish nationalist to be sure, the focus has always been one of self-governance and independence from Britain.
A clear pattern since the election is emerging.
In October 2022, it was noted in the media that Ireland’s reunification talk on both sides was growing. According to the 1998 Good Friday peace deal that ended the Troubles, if a majority in Northern Ireland appear to support reunification, the UK government is compelled to call a referendum.
In April 2023, the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement was observed – including an observation that in Belfast, the walls between Protestants and Catholics were still very much in place. At that time, however, a large-scale survey was conducted in Northern Ireland, the results of which indicated that a majority of participants expected reunification with Ireland over remaining part of the UK.
By late June 2023, multiple media outlets around the world were asking whether Ireland is preparing to reunite, citing Sinn Féin’s expected win in Ireland’s June 2024 general election. This would mean that as of 2025, the party would control both governments, with Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald expected to become taoiseach or head of state in Ireland, and the party’s vice president Michelle O’Neill – yes, both women – already slated to be first minister in Northern Ireland.
It is a changing landscape indeed.
I often wonder what the social worker with whom I met is doing today, all these years later, and how successful her program – or the many others that now exist – have become. I for one, just a little Irish (a few of my distant ancestors) and not at all religious, would very much like to see Ireland’s reunification, from a cultural perspective.
For the first time since its fracture more than a century ago, a reunified Ireland may be on the horizon.