SPEAKER_16: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Some companies are big, others are small. To Robert Half, their hiring needs are equally huge. At Robert Half, our specialized recruiting professionals elevate their expertise with proprietary A.I. tools to transform candidate discovery, assessment, and selection. Whether sourcing talent locally or in any geography that works for you, Robert Half can pinpoint hard to find candidates in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, we know talent. Learn more at roberthalf.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Good evening. A historic day at Stormont after two years of talks and after a generation of bloodshed and decades of division and acrimony, a new era of peace.
SPEAKER_01: In 1998, political leaders in Northern Ireland signed a peace agreement.
SPEAKER_16: They hoped it would end the sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants who'd been fighting each other for decades. At the root of the conflict was the question of whether Northern Ireland should reunite with the rest of Ireland or whether it should remain part of the United Kingdom.
SPEAKER_16: That's Scott Gurian. He's the creator of the Far From Home podcast. Most Catholics were nationalists, meaning they wanted to govern themselves as part of a united Ireland.
SPEAKER_13: Most Protestants were loyalists, also called unionists, who felt a stronger allegiance to the British crown. Paramilitaries on both sides had carried out kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations. More than 3,000 people had died.
SPEAKER_16: But the peace accord aimed to end that violence. I look forward equally to a new era of friendship and reconciliation between unionists and nationalists, in which each tradition can learn truly the value of the other.
SPEAKER_16: That was more than 20 years ago. And while the political situation in Northern Ireland is certainly better today, it's hard to say that friendship and reconciliation are the norm. Northern Ireland remains divided. In some cases, quite literally.
SPEAKER_05: So, on your left, you can see the wall. The big brick wall, yeah. So here we have a physical interface that separates two communities. Okay? This is Ian McLaughlin. He's part of the Lower Shankill Community Association, which works to improve conditions in his neighborhood.
SPEAKER_13: He took me on a tour of Belfast, Northern Ireland's capital city, where he lives and works. The wall that we're at now, Scott, is called the Million Brick Wall, because there's exactly a million bricks in it.
SPEAKER_05: You have a Protestant community on your left, and you have a Catholic community on your right.
SPEAKER_13: There are so many walls like this in Belfast, which physically separate Protestant neighborhoods from Catholic ones. Ian showed me short walls and tall walls. Some are more like fences that you could see through, while others are made of bricks and steel. Many have clearly been reinforced over time. A cinder block wall topped with corrugated iron, topped with razor wire stretching up towards the sky. Here we have the Protestant community on the left, heading behind a security wall with metal fence.
SPEAKER_13: There's even a wall right near Ian's house. So I live here.
SPEAKER_12: Is this where you grew up? Yep. Could we perhaps get out in your moment? Is that okay? It's a tidy neighborhood of modest brick homes.
SPEAKER_13: Two blocks away, the street dead ends at a combination wall and fence that's 30 feet tall. Ian explains it's been there ever since 1972, when he was 11 years old.
SPEAKER_15: So do you remember when this wall went up? Like, do you have clear memories of when they were building it? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you remember?
SPEAKER_05: Well, I remember that you had almost a 24-hour constant military or police presence in these streets, because at that time, the opportunity to engage in physical violence presented itself every day and every night, because there was no physical barrier between people. So that's why the things were created in the first instance. It was designed to prevent physical interaction.
SPEAKER_16: In Northern Ireland, there seems to be a euphemism for everything. The walls are called peace lines. The neighborhoods they cut through are called interface areas. And the period when many of the walls went up was a violent time in the 1970s and 80s, that everybody just calls the Troubles. Decades later, you'd think the walls would have come down, but they haven't.
SPEAKER_13: Almost all of the walls remain. They cut across communities, like monuments to the conflict, etched into the physical landscape. And removing them isn't going to be easy. It could be that perhaps at one of these barriers or structures, you lost a loved one, you lost a husband, a partner, a brother,
SPEAKER_05: and you have never had closure for that. So that event that happened 40 or 42 years ago, it may as well have happened four years ago for some people, because they live yesterday, every day, every day, every day. The Irish conflict goes back hundreds of years, and it can be tough to pinpoint exactly when it began.
SPEAKER_16: But for our purposes, let's begin this history lesson in 1922.
SPEAKER_13: That's when, after decades of demands for self-governance and a bloody guerrilla war, Ireland gained its independence from the UK, with its capital in Dublin. Around the same time, the island was partitioned, with six counties in the north remaining part of the United Kingdom, forming Northern Ireland. Protestant loyalists were the majority there, and they went about creating a social and political framework to make sure they remained in power.
SPEAKER_16: A framework that much of the Catholic population found inherently unfair and even discriminatory.
SPEAKER_03: You couldn't vote if you didn't own your own property or own a business, but then you couldn't get access to business and property if you didn't get access to money, and you couldn't get access to money if you couldn't get a job. And you couldn't get a job necessarily because you were a Catholic.
SPEAKER_13: Johnny Byrne is a senior lecturer at Ulster University. So, you know, Catholics didn't have senior positions in the civil service, for example, didn't have access necessarily to further education,
SPEAKER_03: and they couldn't change the system because they couldn't vote in people from the particular background that they came from. Though the two groups lived close to each other, it was like they were in totally different worlds.
SPEAKER_13: Here's Ian McLaughlin again. I had sadly no interaction whatsoever with kids from a Catholic background, no.
SPEAKER_05: Protestant families like Ian sent their kids to the state-run schools, while Catholic children mostly attended schools run by the church.
SPEAKER_16: And each group usually lived in separate neighborhoods with people of their own kind. All the communities had their own many infrastructures. You had your own shops, you had your own schools to go to.
SPEAKER_05: Which meant that Catholics and Protestants could live their whole lives without really knowing anyone from the other community.
SPEAKER_13: This segregation meant sectarian divides just got deeper and deeper. My grandparents were very, very militant, unionist and anti-Catholic.
SPEAKER_05: And Ian still remembers some of the things they used to say.
SPEAKER_05: You know, this is what we're always going to have in the country with these people. We need to drive them into the sea. And I suppose the alarming thing today when I think about it was that they actually meant it. They physically meant that. Drive these people into the sea, you know. How can you live here with these people?
SPEAKER_16: Those kinds of anti-Catholic attitudes had real and serious effects on people's lives. Well, I remember the first job application I applied for.
SPEAKER_06: This is Joe O'Donnell. He grew up in a Catholic nationalist household and he considered himself Irish, not British.
SPEAKER_13: And on that first job application he filled out, it asked for his nationality. I wrote down Irish and my mother was reading over the job application and she says,
SPEAKER_06: you better change that, you'll never get that job. And she was right, I didn't. By the late 1960s, the list of Catholic grievances had gotten pretty long.
SPEAKER_16: Not only were they discriminated against in employment, they didn't have equal access to public housing, and gerrymandering reduced their political influence. But their demands for change were met with strong and sometimes violent loyalist resistance. So, after being frustrated with the slow pace of progress, they began to protest in the streets. But change wouldn't come easily to Northern Ireland.
SPEAKER_13: The police responded to the marches with arrests and imprisonments, which only made the protests grow larger. Eventually, the protests turned into riots, which in turn sparked more riots.
SPEAKER_16: Especially in urban areas like Belfast, Catholics and Protestants live right on top of each other, making the situation even more explosive. I can recall various incidents as a young child.
SPEAKER_05: In Belfast, the British army is once again back in the old routine.
SPEAKER_10: Men in the middle, keeping peace between two warring factions. But this time, it's not Aden, Cyprus or some far-off colony. It is incredibly in Britain's own backyard, Northern Ireland.
SPEAKER_13: By 1969, the British military was dispatched to Belfast to maintain order. But many people had already started taking matters into their own hands. Residents in Ian's neighbourhood of Shankill started building makeshift barricades between the two communities. They used burnt-out cars, construction debris, rubble from vacant houses, and basically whatever materials they could find to protect themselves from the other side.
SPEAKER_16: Finally, after a summer of unrest, Northern Ireland's Prime Minister had had enough. On September 9, 1969, Major James Chichester Clark went on television and made an announcement.
SPEAKER_00: We have now decided that the army will erect and man a firm peace line to be sited between the Divvy Street area and the Shankill Road on a line determined by a representative body from the city hall.
SPEAKER_13: By firm peace line, he meant that the army would dismantle the barriers the residents had built and replace them with a more official-looking five-foot-tall barbed wire fence. Construction began the following day.
SPEAKER_10: The army moved in to build their peace line on the site of the Protestant barricade. Work proceeded smoothly.
SPEAKER_16: The Shankill peace line was meant to be a strictly temporary measure. The thinking was that the barrier would give people on both sides a chance to cool down and stop the violence. One British Army major predicted that the fence would be gone by Christmas. But things didn't go quite according to plan.
SPEAKER_13: Instead of being removed, that barbed wire fence was later replaced with corrugated iron sheeting that was twice as high. And the army even added observation posts and floodlights.
SPEAKER_16: Ten months later, the army put up a second iron wall between two neighbourhoods in North Belfast, again insisting that it was just a temporary measure. But it turned out things were just getting started. Here's lecturer Johnny Byrne again.
SPEAKER_03: So the whole plan was to get the communities to talk and then to start taking the walls down. But then what happened was we normalised the policy. From 1969 onwards, our response to violence, or the threat of violence, was physical segregation. Even as the walls went up, the fighting continued.
SPEAKER_16: And as the fighting continued, the response was to build more walls. They were an imperfect solution. But Byrne thinks they probably prevented things from being even worse.
SPEAKER_03: The reality is, and I don't support it, but segregation works if you've got two communities who live feet apart, with members of them who are threatening to kill each other, who both feel vulnerable, who both feel fearful, who are asking the state to do something in response. Then a physical wall limits the opportunities for both communities to meet each other and to engage in violence and disorder.
SPEAKER_13: Over the next two decades, the government and private landowners constructed close to 100 additional barriers in communities across Northern Ireland. Ian remembers how they started sprouting up everywhere. You know, the state didn't publicly advertise for plan of permission to erect these structures.
SPEAKER_05: They just went and put these structures in place. So you could have quite literally driven down or walked down a street one day, and the following day you went back to it, there was a structure across the street preventing you from doing the same thing.
SPEAKER_13: One wall even ran through the center of a city park in Duncairn, a formerly dangerous neighborhood of North Belfast.
SPEAKER_08: As far as I know, it's the only park certainly in Europe that has a peace fence or any sort of a segregation barrier. Kieran Shannon grew up nearby in a Catholic nationalist home.
SPEAKER_13: The wall is made of corrugated steel and covered with graffiti, and it kind of snakes up and down this grass-covered hill. And basically it cuts the park in two.
SPEAKER_08: So where we're standing at the minute, this would be regarded as the Catholic nationalist side. The other side of the fence would be regarded as the Protestant Unionist side, even though it's one part.
SPEAKER_16: Finally, in 1994, it seemed like all the violence and wall-building might finally subside. The Provisional Irish Republican Army released a statement agreeing to lay down their weapons. A cassette of the statement was also handed over.
SPEAKER_02: We are therefore entering into a new situation and a spirit of determination and confidence.
SPEAKER_16: They promised to shift their tactics to political negotiation. The announcement was met with a mix of skepticism and celebration. Many people in Northern Ireland felt it was a historic development. Which is what makes that wall Kieran showed me in the park all the more remarkable.
SPEAKER_13: Because there's one thing I failed to mention. Do you remember when this wall was put up here?
SPEAKER_15: Yeah, it's an easy date for people to remember because it was the first of September 1994.
SPEAKER_08: When work started on it. That date is significant because on the 31st of August 1994, the day before, was the day that the IRA announced their ceasefire.
SPEAKER_16: That's right. This wall was built after the ceasefire.
SPEAKER_15: I guess people would hear this story and they would think that's unusual that the ceasefire was signed.
SPEAKER_13: But then the very next day, a new wall was erected. Does that seem strange at all to you?
SPEAKER_08: Well, in the context of the time it wasn't. Because the bitterness between the two sides of our community was still there. And we're still manifesting itself on the streets.
SPEAKER_16: A few years later, in 1998, the troubles officially ended with the signing of the peace agreement. But that didn't stop even more walls and fences from going up. At the interfaces between Catholic and Protestant communities, the same old tensions remained. The most recent fence was built in 2013. Eventually, the government enacted an official policy of wall removal.
SPEAKER_13: They even set a target of 2023. But when you talk to people on the ground, there seems to be widespread agreement that the target is completely unrealistic. And it's not even clear if most people want the walls to come down. One of the newer walls sits in the Whitewell neighborhood of North Belfast.
SPEAKER_16: It runs right through Joe Hughes' backyard. I'm your fellow Najaris tonight.
SPEAKER_12: Hello, how are you? Joe has been surrounded by violence for much of his life.
SPEAKER_13: He recalls being a kid and hiding under his bed while gunshots rang out in the streets. His family moved at one point in search of safety, but the new neighborhood was even worse. So after he and his wife got married, they moved yet again to a new house in a new development. And it seemed like finally the situation would improve. There was a lot to look forward to.
SPEAKER_04: So there was especially the area being newly built and being mixed.
SPEAKER_16: Mixed meaning a place where people of different backgrounds lived together, which was perfect since Joe's Catholic and his wife is Protestant. Their hope was that they could start over with a clean slate in an area that didn't have the sectarian baggage of other places that they lived in the past. And they were hoping to raise their daughters in a non-partisan environment. We were all for that, you know, as a way forward to bring them up.
SPEAKER_04: We wanted them to be able to go anywhere they wanted and not be held back because of religion and bigotry and stuff. Which we didn't like because we were never brought up like ourselves, you know.
SPEAKER_13: But after four or five years, things got bad again. It was the mid-2000s by now, years after peace had been declared, but summertime violence began to flare up once more. First, Joe's neighbor was attacked, and then he says another incident hit even closer to home. It was nearly midnight, totally dark. Joe and his wife were in bed.
SPEAKER_04: Next thing we're woken up with a banging, a smash of the bottles, and then the bricks and getting fire at the windows and stuff.
SPEAKER_16: Three Molotov cocktails, or petrol bombs as Joe called them, slammed into his back wall. Within minutes, his house was engulfed in flames. It was quite frightening. So it was people, you know, could have been killed or burned alive on it.
SPEAKER_13: Joe began to seriously question whether he and his family should leave. He had always been opposed to peace walls in the past. He says he didn't understand them, and he felt they did more harm than good. But now that he had kids, he saw things differently. In the end, it was the construction of a two-story tall mesh fence that convinced Joe and many of his neighbors that it was safe enough to stay.
SPEAKER_04: This peace wall that we have, it's not intruding on anyone, and it's not ugly in any shape or form. What it does is give us peace of mind. It's important that people do have security.
SPEAKER_16: Joe says almost all the people on his block supported this wall at the time it was built, and the vast majority continue to support it today. Even though Joe says there hasn't been any more violence in the 12 years since it went up, he thinks that's precisely why it needs to remain where it is.
SPEAKER_04: The people in the street have sort of said that they don't want to take them down. They can sleep in their bed at night instead of worrying about when an exit tax come up from.
SPEAKER_09: Take it over? Yeah. I'll go check. Are you ready? This is Leah, by the way, Scott.
SPEAKER_13: But not everyone thinks more walls are a good idea. Just down the hill from Joe in the Whitewell neighborhood, Geraldine O'Kane is looking for ways to create a community without them. She works for an organization that's trying to build connections between young people from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds. The whole idea, she says, is that it's hard to throw a stone at a friend.
SPEAKER_16: But her work has sometimes made her a target. Six years ago, someone snuck into the building where she works with the kids and left an explosive device in the courtyard. A bomb disposal team got rid of it.
SPEAKER_09: But if the young ones had been in on time, that door was always open and they were allowed to come out here and play. So they would have kicked it, not knowing what it was.
SPEAKER_13: Even as Geraldine drove me around her neighborhood, I could see that the tensions from the past were still very much alive. On the left-hand side. As you can see, the Union Jacks.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, Protestant neighborhood? Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: We have two bus stops there. We have a Protestant bus stop and a Catholic bus stop.
SPEAKER_15: So the people, Protestants and Catholics, they would wait at separate bus stops, though, and they would all get on the same bus, right?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. But just, uh, interesting.
SPEAKER_09: Which is crazy.
SPEAKER_16: Geraldine thinks that the walls in her community aren't doing much to stop violence. After all, every wall has a start and end point, so people who are determined can simply go around them. But she argues that there's also a larger symbolic reason for why the walls should be taken down. People who live near peace walls in so-called interface communities actually face a stigma because of it. These communities tend to be the most economically deprived in the region. They judge you, kind of. You know, they go, oh God, how'd you live in that interface?
SPEAKER_09: You're going, yeah. And there's a difference of the way they chat to you and talk to you as well. You know, if two kids are going for a job in Belfast and one comes from an interface and one doesn't, the one who doesn't will get the job quicker than the one in the interface, even though they've got the same skills.
SPEAKER_16: Ultimately, she says the decisions about whether the walls should stay or go need to be made by the people who live closest to them and are most directly impacted by the violence. Ian McLaughlin agrees.
SPEAKER_13: It can't be a top-down approach. He knows that in a lot of neighborhoods the idea of removing walls is unpopular, but he thinks it's possible if people move slowly and carefully. It has to be a process where people can come together and say, you know what guys,
SPEAKER_05: maybe the first step isn't to remove that structure. Maybe the first step is to take away the metalfencing. Go in stages. And let's see how we get along. Then you go back to the community and say, you know what, what might we do next here? That could involve, OK, if we take off layers and layers of certain things, layers and layers of certain brickwork, and then you have someone say, but what's in it for the communities? Is there going to be a play area created for kids? Is there going to be work opportunities for young people that take part in it? All those thoughts have to come into the equation.
SPEAKER_13: Even if it's slow, Ian wants the walls to come down, eventually. He sees it as a moral imperative because there are new generations of kids growing up around these structures, and he wonders what ideas they're absorbing from them.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, kids, being the most inquisitive little people, are going to say, Daddy, Mummy, why is that wall there? In this community, you may well be told that wall was put there to stop Catholics attacking your home. And on the other side of the gate, a child might be told,
SPEAKER_05: Oh, that wall was put there to stop Protestants attacking your home. Now, what are we doing? We're creating the seeds of sectarianism in kids for another generation. How it manifests itself in a generation's time is anybody's case.
SPEAKER_13: This point hit hardest for me when I visited a guy named Danny Walsh in a Catholic enclave of East Belfast called Short Strand. We stood in front of his house near a wall topped with spikes and painted with grease to prevent people from climbing it. He said it's always felt a bit gloomy knowing he can't interact with people on the other side. But it's the only neighborhood he's ever known.
SPEAKER_15: Do you like living here?
SPEAKER_17: Yeah, 100%. Like I said, I was born in the street and I've known nowhere else. So, good neighbors, friendly community. You have kids, right? I have two boys, yeah. How old are they? One is three and one is coming too. Do you have any fears of raising them in this neighborhood?
SPEAKER_14: You can hear kids playing football in the background just behind you there.
SPEAKER_17: Hold on. Sorry.
SPEAKER_14: And there's ice cream trucks. Like any other neighborhood, there just happens to be a big brick wall with a fence 30 feet high or whatever that is across the street from you. But, um, life goes on. That's it, yeah.
SPEAKER_13: I was struck by just how ordinary the whole situation seemed. Until Danny pointed out that this ice cream truck never crosses over to the other side of the wall. It's the Catholic truck. The Protestants have their own.
SPEAKER_17: Life goes on in two different worlds. So they have their own ice cream truck and we have ours. Simply because he's known this area. And they have their own at the other side of the wall too. It's a really strange thing.
SPEAKER_16: After the break, I'll talk to Scott about what continues to divide Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. And one very funny television show that helps bring them together. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls. Ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and improving the safety of women. And ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support. Allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Stay hydrated with new ways to help people's lives. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network. And switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. taking a trip or going to work or just running errands. Remember, T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at tmobile.com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at tmobile.com.
SPEAKER_16: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Did you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around. I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that. So you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. So I'm now talking with Scott Gurian, who's the reporter on that piece. Hey, Scott. Hey, Roman. So one of the things I was thinking about when we were editing this story was this really fantastic TV show called Dairy Girls, which is set in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. And in particular, there's this scene in the show where the kind of woo-woo progressive Catholic priest is brought in to talk to high school kids, both Protestant and Catholic high school kids, about their shared humanity and what unites them. Here it is.
SPEAKER_07: OK, so I want you guys to give me examples of things that Catholics and Protestants have in common and things that they don't have in common. Let's start with similarities. Erin, why don't you get the ball rolling?
SPEAKER_11: OK. So we both, right? So we all?
SPEAKER_07: Anything at all, a small thing even.
SPEAKER_11: OK, so right. God, I'm actually drawing a blank here to be honest.
SPEAKER_07: Not to worry. Someone else, a similarity. Yes? Protestants are British and Catholics are Irish. So that's actually a difference.
SPEAKER_00: Protestants are richer.
SPEAKER_07: OK, so that's another difference. And I'm not sure that's actually, I mean, is that true?
SPEAKER_04: I would say so.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I suppose that's fair enough.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, Protestants like to march and Catholics like to walk.
SPEAKER_07: OK, can we just, Jenny, could you just? Oh, you've already written it down, have you?
SPEAKER_13: Catholics watch RTE. Protestants love cleaning. Pasta's are taller.
SPEAKER_10: Catholics have more freckles. Protestants hate Abba.
SPEAKER_07: And we'll wrap it up there.
SPEAKER_16: I find this scene so funny. And one of the things that's great is that if you freeze frame, the girl has written down all the different differences that the kids have shouted out. And it says things like Protestants love soup. And Catholics like statues. And Protestants like flutes. And all these really funny, tiny, trivial details that seem like the world to these kids. But if you look at the chalkboard that says similarities, it's completely blank. We can't find any similarities with each other. And it's played really for laughs, very effectively for laughs. But I think it says something really interesting culturally about the conflict.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, Roman, I think you're onto something because, believe it or not, from my own reporting, I could say that all these weird little perceived differences between Catholics and Protestants aren't just things that were made up for the TV show. Like these are things that people from the two groups really said about each other at one time, and to a certain extent still do. In fact, one of the things that was on the blackboard in that clip you just played was something I actually also heard from one of the people I interviewed, Joe O'Donnell. There is an in-joke here among people who live here.
SPEAKER_06: And they'll ask, well, if all of those things fail, how can you tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant? And the stop answer is their eyes are closer together. It's a joke. OK. Right.
SPEAKER_16: Your silence there in that moment where you can't tell if he's telling a joke or not is so funny to me. Where you don't know what to make of that assertion. I didn't know what to say. It's so foreign to me.
SPEAKER_13: I clearly didn't get the joke in the moment. But I think the point Joe was trying to make is just kind of how ridiculous this whole discussion is. Because yeah, there are legitimate historical grievances, particularly on the Catholic side. So people do see a difference between Protestants and Catholics. And it's not all just based upon Protestants like Soupmore. But in day-to-day life, as you're walking down the street, it's true. You really can't tell a Protestant from a Catholic.
SPEAKER_16: And I don't know if that fact is really inspiring or really troubling. Because as an outsider, you see how similar these groups are. And you think, well, if they are so similar, maybe this can all be solved. But it really speaks to the depth and the darkness of this history that everyone is holding on to the differences the two sides have, rather than their similarities. But it sort of makes me wonder, is there less of a conflict among the younger generations?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I think you do have this younger generation now that was born after the worst of the violence and doesn't have the memories of all the serious hatred for the other side. So they might be more open to removing some of these walls in the future. And I have to give enormous credit as well to people like Ian and Kieran and Geraldine, who were in my piece, who work with community groups, including young people, to get them to interact with each other and change their perceptions about their neighbors and hopefully bring about peace. And all that said, though, some of the progress that's been made, unfortunately, I think could be undone, depending upon what happens with Brexit.
SPEAKER_16: Well, that's interesting. So how does Brexit relate specifically to the situation in Northern Ireland and the generational divide?
SPEAKER_13: Well, first of all, I should set the scene for those who haven't been following Brexit closely. I should explain that Northern Ireland has been a main sticking point in the negotiation so far. Because here's the deal. Great Britain consists of England, Scotland, and Wales, is, of course, an island surrounded by water. But Northern Ireland is also part of the UK. And it has this 300-mile land border with the Republic of Ireland, which is a member of the EU. So that raises a number of questions. If Brexit happens, and the UK's new prime minister, Boris Johnson, says he's committed to making it happen, what then do they do at the border? And how does all that impact the Irish peace process, which, as we've discussed, remains kind of fragile to begin with? Many Catholics would view Brexit as kind of further separating the North from the rest of Ireland so that the tensions could unfortunately flare up again. And Ian McLachlan basically told me he thinks that if the UK goes ahead and leaves the EU, it would heighten longstanding political differences and make it all that much harder for these peace walls to come down anytime soon. And then back to the larger question of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, right now it's totally open and hardly even marked in many places. But in a Brexit scenario, many people are wondering if the government would then have to build an entirely new wall separating the two countries to regulate customs and immigration. No one on any side wants to see barriers or checkpoints. But we've just got a little over two months left until the Brexit deadline. And at this point, there's still a ton of uncertainty.
SPEAKER_16: So the result might be more walls. But in your reporting, you mentioned that the Northern Irish government has set a target date for 2023 of removing all these peace walls. In light of Brexit and in light of the other issues you brought up in your reporting, is there any progress towards meeting that goal? That's pretty soon.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, unfortunately, there hasn't been much progress. That goal was first set back in 2013. They set this 10-year target date. But it doesn't seem like much has changed since that time. I actually asked around, and not a single person I spoke to believed there's any chance at all that this will happen. In fact, one guy said, never mind 2023, the way things currently stand, it would be a miracle for all these walls to be gone by 21, 23. Oh, god. Well, that's grim. Yeah, yeah. And there's several factors that are working against progress. First of all, this power sharing agreement between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionist lawmakers in Northern Ireland collapsed back in 2017. And the two sides are still deadlocked. So the region has basically been without a functioning government for over 2 and 1-1-2 years now. You can't exactly get important things done without a government. There's also a demographic element to the conversation. Because in general terms, the Protestant community is aging. They're moving out of the city, while the Catholics have a higher birth rate. And they could one day be in the majority. So the fear among some Protestants is that if the walls were taken down, they would be overrun by Catholics and could lose their neighborhoods and their cultural identity. So there's kind of pushback from that angle. Everyone I spoke to, everyone told me that removing these walls is going to take time. And it's certainly not going to be easy. But as you said, 2023 is just four years away. And these difficult conversations about how exactly to go about this process have in many neighborhoods, these conversations have barely even begun. And then let me finally add that we're talking about 2023. But there's actually another date coming up in just a few weeks that I think is even more significant. September 9th actually marks the 50th anniversary of the construction of that very first peace wall between Falls Road and the Shankill. So here we are half a century later. And these supposedly temporary measures are still very much with us.
SPEAKER_16: Thank you, Scott. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Scott Gurian, edited by Joe Rosenberg and Delaney Hall, mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif, music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Truffleman, Chris Berube, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. You can hear more of Scott Gurian's reporting from around the world on his podcast, Far From Home, where he recently visited Chernobyl and he documented an 11,000 mile road trip he took from London to Mongolia in a ridiculously tiny car. It's called Far From Home. Check it out. Thanks to Don Duncan and Marcus Hunter-Neil for production assistance and to Monina Opre of the International Fund for Ireland. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too, but you can move freely between thousands of design stories at 99pi.org. Radio Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_16: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions with zoned comfort, memory foam, and a cool-to-the-touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
SPEAKER_11: I am new here, nothing to fear. I am strong, body of mine. I'll get through it. I can do it to myself. I will be kind. Introducing a new line of vitamins for moms from Centrum, the number one doctor-recommended multivitamin brand. Because for every bit of love you give your new baby, make sure you give yourself love too. Visit Centrum.com to learn how Centrum is collaborating with Postpartum Support International to help put moms first.
SPEAKER_06: If you get a friend a go-to order from McDonald's for free using points in the McDonald's app,
SPEAKER_07: you don't have to tell them you got it for free. Earn free food with the McDonald's app. Ba-da-ba-da-boom.
SPEAKER_16: And participate in McDonald's.
