Northern Ireland's Invisible Border (Part 1/2)

you have a population that considers itself essentially Irish and a population that considers itself essentially British. They shot me four times and twice in the chest and once in each arm. Five soldiers and scapegoat were blown to pieces. There was no body. There were only pieces. a kind of constant cycle of rebellion and repression rebellion and repression these communities remain, they have space the deprivation levels of unemployment in mental health the high levels of suicide in the city it is crazy it is a national crisis we just replaced a teacher with an hour all those deaths and why nothing first so this is the UK side.

I'm about to reach the

border

and I think this, literally, here's the line, the color of the lines on the side of the road changes from white to yellow. Would you really have to be paying attention to recognize that all this is here and that you are going from one country to another? But then this sign, we have a sign right here that pretty much tells you everything you need to know. he says welcome to Northern Ireland, but the word North in Northern Ireland has been erased. Little things like that tell you that this is actually an incredibly contested

border

and people are not happy that this is where people are willing to, at the very least, confront property. express your feelings about it and do much more than just confront the property thirty years ago this border crossing was bombed by the Irish republican army the attack was

part

of the problems a civil conflict that was essentially fought over this border Ireland is divided in two The Republic of Ireland is sovereign and independent, while Northern Ireland is governed by the United Kingdom.

Irish nationalists and republicans reject that division. To them, the British in the north are an illegitimate occupying force, so they took up arms to expel the British and unite Ireland into one. country in short to get rid of the border that's why in october 1990 the ira bombed the koch quinn border checkpoint even in a conflict known for its atrocities the attacks were noted for their cruelty hello how are you I'm fine how are you David, I'm , you are welcome. Would you like to comment? Yes, please. Thank you. This is Euron Patsy, it's Pattie Kathleen Gillespie and me and her husband.

Patsy didn't consider herself a political person, but Patsy had a job in a British company. army barracks and in the eyes of the anger that turned him into a collaborator, he was an assistant to the chef and the kitchens and at Fort George, it didn't matter what you did in the camp, if you were a civilian worker, they said that "One night, Kathleen and Patsy arrived home to find a group of masked gunmen holding their children hostage. They pushed me into the living room where Jennifer, my daughter, was 12 at the time sitting on a couch. crying, there was a gunman standing.

I think they left three in the house with us and two left in luxury in the car. They crossed the border. Look what happened Patsy was chained to a truck and then he drove to the. checkpoint where they told him to drive, it was detonated by remote control and five soldiers and scapegoat were blown to pieces there was no one, there were only pieces, hurry up, can someone sit around the table and plant something like that? the mentality of people like that they can just sit down and plant things like that in cold blood to answer that question, first you have to know the history of how the Irish border came to be.

It is a very old story. England has been trying to colonize Ireland for over 800 years. In the early 17th century they sent waves of Protestant settlers to the northeast corner of the largely Catholic island. They turned the city of Derry into a colonial outpost and renamed it Londonderry, so these walls were built by Protestant British settlers to protect themselves from the population they were. By colonizing the Irish population, the intention was actually to replace the Irish Gaelic population and turn it into a Protestant British territory. It did establish a largely Protestant population in this

part

of Ireland, but it also set off a sort of constant cycle of rebellion and repression.

Ireland became independent from the United Kingdom in the 1920s, but instead of abandoning the largely Protestant north, the British simply drew a line around it and kept it for themselves, hence the border and leaving two groups of people. within Northern Ireland who should, to put it mildly, disagree, although to an outsider like me these populations don't look different, they don't look particularly different, they consider themselves enormously different, you have a population that considers themselves essentially Irish and a population that she considers herself quintessentially Irish. itself is quintessentially British, you can see that divide wherever you go in Northern Ireland and you can hear it too.

We are arriving in a small town called Green Castle in the middle of rural Northern Ireland and we are here because tonight at the local pub. There will be a performance of traditional Irish rebel songs, which are the body of old folk songs about the Irish nationalist fight against the British. Oh, everyone inside knows the lyrics to each of these songs, even if they're not actively singing them and um, he's been playing for over an hour and 15 minutes and he still hasn't run out of songs. Do people on the other side of the divide call themselves unionists or loyalists because they are loyal to the British crown?

They have their own musical traditions, we are in Castle Durg, which is a small town that is right on the border, it is about less than a mile from the border, this is a loyal youth marching band for young people like Mason Caldwell, these bands are social clubs, but they also enforce this strong connection to the past, what does it mean to you to be a union member? That's really the tradition that I grew up in, you know, with my father and then there was a stage where I got into a fight with him about something because I was about to go to a Catholic with him and then he felt like, oh my God, He got into a fight with you for dating a Catholic girl.

I didn't date her even though he was close to her, so I didn't, yeah, but I did. I don't really understand it and I started telling my stories about the things he grew up with, then I understood a little bit, so I have to stick to this, no kind of things, so would you date a girl from the castle now, I really don't think you do it. I can't really because I have a girlfriend, so no, but I mean, let's say you don't have your girlfriend with a buzz cut, would you initially date a Catholic? Probably not, no, it's okay, especially since the link was put up.

I got so into the band, you know they saw it just to date one and then get kicked out for it. You'd get kicked out of the band for dating a Catholic girl. I would say, what did you understand? What is that? He told you that it made you think about this differently, he just explained to me everything that happened throughout his life and how something starts again and there I am, a Protestant who leaves with a Catholic and that all started Well, I could probably be an easy target, you know? so I was worried about that, I was worried about myself in case something happened again because you never know the ways and I could easily start, you know, just as there were armed republican groups like the IRA, there were also loyalist paramilitaries fighting.

To keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, the murders between them created the misconception that this was essentially a sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants, but that explanation leaves out an important actor, the British state, it is useful to think in it more as basically an insurgency a nationalist insurgency against the British state and as part of its counterinsurgency strategy that state in many cases allied and collaborated extensively with local paramilitary organizations loyalist paramilitary organizations such as the Ulster Defense Association and the ulster volunteer force the uda and the uvf obviously that The counterinsurgency did not work, the only thing it did was add fuel to the fire, as counterinsurgency usually does.

This place is a perfect example of that and there are places like this all over the city. It's a betting house, so it's a place where people go. place bets in the middle of a predominantly Catholic neighborhood in 1992 a militia loyal to the uda two armed men arrived at this place they simply entered and shot years later it was discovered that one of the firearms they used to carry out the attack was actually provided to them by the police by the royal ulster police shows them that the British government was not like a neutral force. The British government was collaborating extensively with one side of the conflict which was the loyalists because the loyalists were essentially fighting on their behalf.

Mark Sykes. he survived the shooting niall murphy is his lawyer together they are trying to hold the british state responsible for the attack in court i was shot four times at least four times and i was shot twice in the chest and once in each arm and i still have a bigger bullet than my chest since I was a week old. I have lived in this area. I've actually lived on the streets, so I know what this community went through, but you had to live your life, you had to go and do normal things and normal things.

For normal people they went to their betting shops on a Wednesday and placed a bet on a horse race they were not involved in politics they were not involved in political parties that were not involved in the conflict there were people there making a bet In a way, the The way this conflict is talked about often gives the impression that it was a conflict between two types of warring ethnic tribes who hated each other and that's why they killed each other and you don't usually hear about it much. about the role the British state played in this conflict, the biggest trick they ever pulled on the international stage was to relegate it to a dispute between two sectarian tribes, that was a lie when we learned the truth about how our loved ones were murdered. shows that the state knew that its own citizens were going to be murdered with the weapons it provided, so it no longer becomes a civil conflict between two worn-out trades.

We believe that this agreement, this treaty, addresses the wounds that have damaged our society, the problems ended in 1998 with the Good Friday agreement, both parties laid down their weapons, the British withdrew their troops and the border was left open, there has been violence since then but he is a shadow of what he used to be the majority of people in

northern

ireland

have left the war even those you would least expect gary Donnelly is a dissident republican, that is, a republican who to this day does not agree with the ira's decision to lay down its arms, but has opted for a different set of tactics.

Now he is a local elected official and helps run a community center for vulnerable people, including former prisoners and veterans of breathing problems, once you breathe, our bear begins to disappear. Do you make God disappear? I'm a little afraid of neck things. Who taught you these things? My yoga teacher comes three yoga teachers. in the long money and one we teach you the movements the abundant heart to breathe and then the anatomy all the cash is a prison a meat is a prison just less than 14 years two to season then we express it we have street credibility in the city because of our past we are history and who we are I have a life legend that says I could be sent back to prison at any time this year.

The breakfast thing is something that arose because everyone who comes here in the morning there is nothing to do after a week stops, everyone is left with their own mental health, their own problems and what are we doing, most of us Boys would drink, very few people I know from prison who do not drink or smoke, you have people from unionist communities who come and consume. the services you provide, yes, repeatedly, are all working class people, so why wouldn't they hire you? You know, managers. You know, everyone always talks about them. You know, Republicans and loyalists.

National unions. Catholics and Protestants. People don't talk about people don't talk. In terms of class, if you raise those questions and say that it is a class issue, then someone has to be responsible for the failures and that is a step so that the State does not really present itself as failed, it wants to present us as people who are savage that can't get along we're gang against gang and we've had 100 years of that and it's been maintained and the British have maintained it by coercion by violence, you know, divide and conquer certain orange and green people, they've done it in Everywhere they've gone, they've done it in India, the Americans and the British did it in the divisions of Iraq, that's their nature, well, if you're up for sectarian conflict, yes, sectarianism, like the British, you know, make a section. of the community feel that they have more rights than others, give them all the benefits, give them all the jobs, employment, the reality is that all this isIt is collapsing here, in a sense, all the large factories that were extremely almost exclusively populated by the union community.

They're all gone and effectively people here can afford for these communities to stay, they think the mental health levels and the deprivation levels of youth unemployment, you know, the high levels of suicide in the city are crazy. , it's a national crisis, but I haven't heard of it, Australia has shown that it is a failure, no one can hold on to success, but my opinion on the assassination was there, many of these problems will be alleviated and the current situation they have now it is not. It doesn't work, that never addressed the central issue, the peace dividend that was promised to be sold, you have to understand that.

People were going through a struggle, problems, a cable, whatever level you want to put on it and people were tired of the war and I thought, well, this is a new beginning, but here we are now with almost a quarter of a century of garbage and for the people on the ground very little. has changed we just replaced one teacher with another one thing you hear all the time in Northern Ireland is that everything is political absolutely everything is politicized it is impossible to do something ordinary without even the name of the city becoming political in some way, TRUE? you're a nationalist you call it dairy if you're a unionist you call it londonderry um but people have been trying to stop that since the peace process we're about to meet someone who's a street artist and his Everything here, in this context, is Surprisingly controversial is simply making art in public places that is not explicitly aligned with either the nationalist or unionist cause, so we're on the corner of William Street, so let's move on. to the swamp site that is famous for our murals the town gallery is called in derry where donal grew up militant street art has been part of the urban fabric for decades it is a tradition that is trying to go further but not leave behind i think it is It's really important that these murals are here, I mean, this is part of me, it's part of my culture and my story of growing up too, but it's also just as important that the things that I do are part of our culture and also because We have such a vibrant city with amazing people.

Do you think things would be better here if the border simply ceased to exist? Me personally, yes, but it's not going to be easy, it's not going to be something easy, I mean, I think it would be. This is going to happen, it also has to be in the New Year and tolerance is the key to everything. People have to be very tolerant of each other and I think that is what has not happened in the past since partition, people were not tolerant of all our cultures. our identities and stuff, but we have to be in the world that we love, I know we definitely have to be um and with the lumen of Brexit which is like a scary Brexit and the whole idea of ​​rebuilding the borders is actually crazy when the Britain's vote to leave the European Union left Ireland divided between an EU country and a non-EU country, meaning that after 22 years of peace, Britain and Ireland will be separated again for some time. type of border.

It was probably the first time in my life that this was like this. absolutely speechless when I woke up I saw the news and I just saw that Brexit was happening in Northern Ireland it was never mentioned and the whole Brexit was fired it was never mentioned it was like it was like an afterthought like we were an afterthought last minute and that's what People feel like here we are like, wait, people have been working very, very, very hard for 20 years, everyone makes peace and does the best they can, but when someone else is taking decisions for you, is when all that is put at risk without any consultation and that is.

Which is really difficult and that's what I think is going to be counterproductive and that's what's scary. Do you think things are better now that the border is open than when this happened? Okay, there are no checkpoints stopping you, but I can't help but wonder what's going on underneath all this, you know, I don't think it's gone away. I still think there's a lot of underlying stuff going on there and I'm afraid it's going to creep back in ugly, terrified that it's going to happen everywhere. Again I think everyone is terrified, everyone is afraid that this isn't over with you.