The Magical Line

“If ye ask me, the border’s a magical line,” said Colin. I was in a trendy café in Derry/ Londonderry. Colin, the barista, had just asked me to stop interviewing his customers. I told him why I was doing so. “It’s a divided city,” he said, with an apologetic shrug. Colin, born Protestant but brought up Catholic, now lived twenty minutes’ drive away, in the Republic. He loved it there: away from the UK Tories’ increasingly chaotic kingdom, he felt he could count on the government of the South “if everything goes bad,” as it increasingly looks as if it could.

 The walled city still has something of a siege mentality. It’s not hard to know when you’re in a Protestant part of the city: kerbs are painted red, white and blue; murals and posters commemorate Loyalist heroes, British soldiers and Protestant civilians. Across the city, in gruesome symmetry, the Catholic Bogside area displays Republican heroes brandishing guns and exhorting neighbours to support the violent struggle.

 Away from Derry, in Lisnaskea, County Fermanagh, a mixed Protestant-Catholic couple told me how their families and friends were completely supportive. They went to twelfth of July parades together, where he marched and played the Lambeg drum and she, a Catholic, enjoyed the family festivities. He would good-humouredly tease her mother, a devout Catholic, over Catholic rituals. For her part, she gave back her share of banter and sometimes accompanied them to Protestant church services.

 Later the same evening, I interviewed two sisters, aged eighteen and seventeen. They were middle class, blond and pretty, just emerging into adulthood. At the start, I didn’t know whether they were Catholic or Protestant. I asked them whether they played sports. They did. Gaelic games? No: back in the day, they told me, Gaelic games were set up for the children of the IRA. Oh, I said dumbly, you are Protestant then? They nodded. Would they ever marry a Catholic? No. Never.

 At the time, a storm was brewing. In Dublin, the Irish women’s soccer team had qualified for the World Cup. In the euphoria of dressing-room celebrations, the team chanted a pro-IRA slogan. The chant was caught on video and went viral. To anyone victimized by the Troubles, it was beyond offensive. To diehard Loyalists, it confirmed their siege mentality; the Belfast Newsletter published a pie chart showing how IRA violence was responsible for the majority of victims, including Catholic victims.

 Among moderates in the South, the incident caused soul-searching about sanitization of the brutal past. Yet the past has never really been dealt with. The Good Friday Agreement that (mostly) ended the violence was an outstanding example of the power of politics and goodwill in a seemingly impossible situation. Yet it did not solve the underlying problems: the divisions persist and, like marsh gas, they bubble up occasionally with a putrid smell.

 Whether it’s the Troubles in Ireland or Canadian residential schools, those who have not been victimized can never truly understand. After a generation, memories become abstract things, detached from the reality of experience. Yet when you talk to people, reality comes through, cold and hard. I will never forget the steely blue eyes of that teenage girl as she told me, with absolute conviction, that Gaelic games were for children of IRA supporters.

 Progress has been made in reconciling communities, but the machinations of Brexit have stalled and even reversed it. It is a fiction to say there is no hard border in Ireland: the border separating communities may not be physical, but it is hard as granite. The magical line—the line that separates us from the past—can only be crossed with great effort.