The Piece Wall

On my first Sunday in Belfast the man who convinced me to apply for the trip,who bought me my first fish n' chips and bangors and mash, and who (along with Annelise and Jim) told me there is only one football club to root for, Liverpool, took me to the Shankill Road.  Run on sentences aside, it was a very serious and thought provoking experience.  The Shankill Road and the Fall Road are the two famous roads in North Ireland, home to various terrorist organizations.  Fall Road, on the Catholic side of town, is a hot bed of the famous IRA, or Irish Republican Army.  Shankill Road, on the Protestant side, home to the UVF, or Ulster Volunteer Force.  These two paramilitary forces (among others) killed thousands over the course of a three or four decades of bombings, shootings and other terrorist activities.

The situation (drink) in Northern Ireland is far better than it was even ten years ago, and almost incomparable to events of the past.  However Billy still told me it was unsafe for me to walk the Shankill alone.  So a group of us took a van to go see the neighborhood where Billy grew up.  A wall stretched along the divide between the Shankill and the Fall, and the gate we drove through closed behind us for the night. Billy let us out and drove a little ways down the road and let us walk along and see all the graffiti. The wall itself was covered in graffiti. Some positive, hopeful and peaceful; while some (like many of the murals on buildings all around East Belfast) still portray a message of hate and sectarianism. Such a beautiful and misunderstood art form used both to hate and to love.    The question is, in the end does this wall instill a sectarian hatred, or a longing for peace in the youth of this distraught neighborhood?