“Good fences make good neighbors,” insists time and time again the man who lives adjacent to Robert Frost’s narrator in his poem “Mending Wall.” They also make for great photographs, as any American study-abroad student who has posed in front of the Berlin Wall, Prague’s John Lennon Well or the Great Wall of China will tell you. With a Facebook feed covered in photographs of friends posing in front of any one of the aforementioned “fences” with a “like”-maximizing caption, I set out to break the 100-like threshold on my trip to Belfast. However, when I had a friend take a photograph of me standing in front of the Peace Wall, upon viewing the picture, I realized that the shot was “un-postable.”
Over my right shoulder, the words “f*** peace, kill a prod” were scrawled in silver Sharpie. As I approached the wall to examine the particularly aggressive graffiti sample, I noticed not far from it, an equally brash scribble of intolerance: “all cats must die.” In fact, the whole entire wall was decorated with violent and contentious slang embodying the conflict between the two Christian denominations in Northern Ireland. For every innocuous script sketched on the wall, there was a religiously charged message bleeding ink from the bricks.
After spending 15 minutes at the Peace Wall, it was easy to see why such a massive construction project was undertaken in the first place. The division between the Catholic and Protestant communities in the British country’s capital is one of geopolitical nature that is four times as old as the Republic of Ireland itself. After suppressing the Gaelic lords Hugh O’Neill and Hugh Roe O’Donnell in Tyrone’s Rebellion, Great Britain was able to successfully proceed with its plan to exert colonial control over the entirety of Ireland. Upon establishing the Plantation of Ulster—the largest British colonial settlement in Ireland—Great Britain was one step closer to fulfilling its objective. The settlers were almost all Protestant and loyal to the Crown, and they displaced the previously held Catholic majority. To be an Irish Protestant is to have a debt-induced and cultural loyalty to Britain, which has historically oppressed Catholics in Ireland, and to be an Irish Catholic is to have a generations-old hatred for British interference, of which the Protestant community is an extension.
Such sentiment was the reason for the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, which partitioned Ireland into a mostly Protestant and ethnically British country and a mostly Catholic and ethnically Irish country, which would eventually become Northern Ireland—a top-level constituent unit of the United Kingdom—and the independent Republic of Ireland. The division of Ireland into two states engendered the Irish Civil War between the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which wanted a completely independent Irish island, and the National Army, which was content with a free southern republic. In response, to the Irish Civil War, Protestants in Northern Ireland endeavored to consolidate power through preferential treatment of unionists, which was perceived by the IRA as anti-Catholic discrimination. After several decades had passed, the IRA decided to take action against what it considered to be injustice in Northern Ireland, and loyalist response by groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) plunged the region into a long-lasting military conflict known as “the Troubles.”
During “the Troubles,” 48 peace walls were constructed in Northern Ireland in an effort to reduce violence between Catholics and Protestants living in the same communities. For the residents of Belfast and other Northern Irish cities during “the Troubles,” a “good fence” was unequivocally a “good neighbor.”
All of this was explained to me by four tour guides—two Protestant and two Catholic—who joked at each other’s expense in between nuggets of information as the paint on murals dedicated to IRA and UVF soldiers chipped behind them. “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” one said, as he pointed to a mural of Stephen McKeag, a loyalist paramilitary and the Ulster Defense Force’s most prolific assassin. Arm-over-shoulder, they roasted each other about the most traumatic aspects of “the Troubles,” as if they were trivial occurrences. Clearly, the tension had dissipated.
And yet, the Protestant tour guides still had concerns. If the 48 peace walls, which snake through Northern Ireland, are torn down, a feat, which the country intends to accomplish by 2023, the Protestant community is at risk. Violence poses little threat, but demographic decline could mean the end of an ethnically British Northern Ireland. If the walls come down, and Catholic neighborhoods merge with Protestant, which are less densely populated and experience lower birth rates, Protestant communities will cease to exist. Although the walls no longer serve their original purpose, many Protestants consider them necessary for the preservation of Northern Ireland’s identity.
In the “Mending Wall,” the structure that separates the narrator’s and the neighbor’s residences is constantly under threat from natural forces. Although the wall appears impractical to the narrator, as neither he nor his neighbor owns livestock, it still serves the purpose of providing distinction between the two properties.
In an a globalized world, such distinctions are, too, under threat from natural forces, which is why the idea of the Great American Wall was so tempting to so many on election day. Naturally, as the world becomes more connected, the concept of the nation state is undermined. Countries become less about shared values and more about shared geography, which makes governance more difficult and reduces borders to arbitrarily drawn administrative lines. However, globalization has many benefits. Tearing down the walls that divide us creates an empirically more productive world devoid of unnecessary boundaries—a notion that the neighbor in “Mending Wall” refuses to even entertain as he incessantly repeats his phrase of choice.
The past few years have challenged the Western world’s notions of progress. The benefits of globalization have become a contentious point of discussion. In one of my classes the week after my journey to Northern Ireland, my professor praised Ireland’s island geography for allowing it to regulate immigration more effectively than the rest of the European Union, but conceded that he was being “racist” simultaneously for not wanting to accept refugees because assimilation may be difficult to achieve. Keeping in mind the concerns of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland, I don’t think it’s racist to at the very least consider the value of cultural uniformity within one’s borders.
We should strive to foster a culture of debate, in which either side may be swayed one way or another by reason, rather than allowing stubborn thought to determine the future because we consider the subject taboo. We should speak freely about the impact that walls we construct may have and we should consider their value holistically, not just by the rhetoric surrounding them in the form of both crudely drawn graffiti and speech. Whether discussing the peace walls in Northern Ireland, the current Syrian refugee crisis, Mexican immigration or free trade partnerships, we must not be afraid to ask: “Does a more connected world unite us or divide us?” We must strive to unearth the substance behind each other’s positions, as opposed to just sheepishly repeating the same adages—“good fences make good neighbors” and “that’s racist”—so that we can determine the when the time is for bricks and mortar and when the time is for wrecking balls.
Jacob Weiss is a Trinity junior studying abroad in Dublin. His column, "ulysses," runs on alternate Thursdays.
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Jacob Weiss is a Trinity senior. His column, "not jumping to any conclusions," runs on alternate Fridays.