Belfast forever

Hunger strike of the Republican prisoners during summer 1981 then the tragic death of Bobby Sands and his friends put Belfast in the international media scene's limelight. And for quite a while...

At first sight, the Northern-Irish capital looks like any other modern cities: construction sites everywhere, ghettos on the outskirts of the town and even sometimes tourists storming some districts on the double-decked red buses to admire para-military frescos of Shankill Road or Falls road, but how many of them are guessing the difficulty and the particularity of Belfast?

Belfast is like a puzzle and a fair experience of the geography of the city is needed to know on which territory you are on: protestant-loyalist or catholic-republican.. Even if the frescos, the pavements painted with the colours of the community or flags waving on the roof tops are clear indicators.

For a few years, since the city has been rebuilt, mixt zones are disappearing little by little. Twenty years ago, this is where middle classes would live. As if the solution, in the short-term, to avoid conflicts was to separate physically the communities rather than finding a true political solution. When the districts are closing little b little on themselves, like Ardoyne or Short-Strand, fierce Republican enclaves.

Numerous new houses are being built and when they are on a "peace-line", a buffer zone between loyalists and republicans, a several metre-high protection barrier is set up straight the way. Belfast is not longer a front-page matter anymore but here, the story of these last years keeps on haunting people's mind.

A lot of inhabitants have never been " on the other side", ni even when driving...I remember an old guy that I drove from Divis-flat, at the bottom of Falls Road to go very close downtown who forced me to do a large bend no to cross the loyalist district. He admited never to have done it in his whole life. It's fair to say then that Belfast is no normal town.

Text by Gilles Favier