The problem with articles like this - on so-called peace walls - is their implicit retention of the ‘unexplainable North’ narrative due to a lack of historic depth and recognition that communities don’t erect and walls without structural facilitation https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2021/0410/1209051-peace-walls-belfast/

While they are well-meaning and provide a lot of contemporary details they don’t provide the context of how communities came to exist with materialized segregation over generations and why it is so difficult for those walls to just come down.

At the same time they report generalized accounts of how communities supposedly ‘feel’ - without adequate discussion of their r’ship to fact - and without accounting for differences within communities about a wide variety of issues. Amazing how infrequently women are included.

The walls didn’t just appear overnight - many have grown, been added to and changed over time - and they didn’t all appear for the same reason. They are specific to place and were often erected to address real fears of attack from the other side. Some date back to the late 1960s.

Peace walls are famously the only infrastructure associated with the Troubles that actually increased into the peace process, where community preferences to add to them were maintained under a rationale that desegregating might be a threat to the hard won peace.

Few peace walls have come down, so few areas around the walls have diversified in terms of community identity (excepting new migrants / marginalized communities who have at times been placed there). Housing executives and other agencies have pragmatically maintained divisions.

There is also the ever present but infrequently articulated reality that peace walls do not exist in middle class areas - they are associated with working class, urban areas; those that suffered the most during the conflict and that have lacked meaningful investment into peace.

In the peace process they often persist in the background - providing a sense of security, maintaining community cohesion - but the reality of an interface is they allow tensions to focus on specific points (often gates) that allows conflict to be sparked between communities.

In the background, walls marking off territory allow for enclave identities to be curated and maintained with little critique. Memorial landscapes continue to be added to - plaques, murals, fenced gardens - to direct and skew memory to specific, spatially-meaningful events.

The walls are activated at times of tension, the usual scenario is political rhetoric and paramilitary nudges orchestrates tensions that result at recreational rioting at the interfaces that can quite easily spiral out of control. They have a range of dynamics, they are volatile.

None of this is new and none of this is solely related to Brexit or the protocol but they are the backdrop that has heightened fears about lessening connection to historic identity and losing out to the ‘other side’. They make it very easy to provoke reaction.

Peace walls have a history, spatiality and materialized / psychic realities that have logics behind them that have not been sufficiently challenged or deconstructed into the peace. Their survivals have been pragmatic but also are about a lack of investment in money and hope.

Maintaining two communities doesn’t just have a lived reality, it is required to maintain the current political carve up. When it comes under threat new crises are whipped up and voters generally fall into line. The will for change needs to be political not just on the ground.

I could go on (and on) but in short - peace walls have histories and logics that have led to a number of intended and unintended realities; the areas around walls have long experiences of orchestrated violence; their creation and maintenance is not just about the communities.