A Wall of Fear, Mistrust in Belfast Neighborhood

In what qualifies as progress on the mean streets of Northern Ireland, Protestant demonstrators turned their backs on pipe bombs and stone-throwing Thursday but not on the hatred that often has made North Belfast a front line of the province’s sectarian conflict.

The Ardoyne neighborhood, where Roman Catholic girls and their parents walked a gantlet of abuse to school for the last four days, is a hard place with hardened people. The vocabulary of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord--words such as dialogue and tolerance--has not made its way onto these bloodied streets. Nearly a fifth of the 3,600 victims during the British province’s three-decade conflict died in the Ardoyne and surrounding neighborhoods of North Belfast.

The Catholic march to school between police lines, and the efforts of angry Protestants to stop the parents and children, is not a fight over integration as it was during the U.S. civil rights movement. It is a fight for separation, and for defining boundaries. It is a turf war between tribes that Protestants fear they are losing.

“They are moving in, and our community is getting crushed,” said Kimberley Orr, 36, who joined the Protestant demonstrators blowing whistles and air horns Thursday. “What we are saying is, this far and no further. They’re not getting it. . . . The solution is to build a wall.”

Walls already play a big role in the patchwork of Protestant and Catholic enclaves. Some of the approximately 7,000 Catholic and 1,500 Protestant residents of the Ardoyne are separated by a 20-foot-high corrugated metal partition called, with Orwellian accuracy, “the peace wall.”

On both sides of the divide, walls and lampposts are festooned with flags staking out territory: Orange, white and green flags signaling the struggle for a united Ireland on Catholic streets. Red, white and blue Union Jacks demonstrate loyalty to Britain on Protestant blocks. Banners belonging to the Ulster Defense Assn., the paramilitary group said to rule Protestant enclaves, also decorate some walls above windows covered in metal grates.

Meanwhile, a wall of the Ardoyne offices of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, bears this slogan: “It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can endure the most [who] shall win.”

Each side claims that it has endured--and endures--more: more rock-throwing, more beatings, more killings, more pressure to defend or cede territory in the Ardoyne, where Catholic numbers have grown over the years and Protestants have moved out.

The confrontation at Holy Cross Primary School began over such a territorial dispute.

Residents of the Glenbryn estates, a Protestant enclave between Catholic houses and Holy Cross, say one of their boys was hanging flags near the school in advance of a march by the Protestant Orange Order in July when he was attacked by a carload of Catholics.

The counterclaim is that a carload of Catholics was attacked by Protestant hard-liners, called loyalists, who were out hanging flags.

In either case, there was a fight that led Protestants to blockade the school to protest what they said were years of intimidation by Catholic hard-liners, called republicans.

Local leaders failed to resolve their differences over the summer, as the wider Northern Ireland peace process was collapsing over issues of paramilitary disarmament and policing. On July 12, police used water cannons and plastic bullets to break up a Catholic demonstration against Protestant marchers.

When school opened again Monday, Protestants resumed their protest, trying to keep Catholics from walking up Ardoyne Road and past Protestant houses to the front entrance of Holy Cross. They were determined to take a stand.

This time, however, the predominantly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary--Northern Ireland’s police force--vowed to keep the road open, further enraging protesters. The police, once treated to tea on the street corners, were turning against the Protestants. Like the Protestants’ dwindling numbers and boarded-up houses in the Ardoyne, this was further proof that the majority sectarian grouping was losing its grip on Northern Ireland.

Lesley Potts, 35, who grew up in the Glenbryn estates and attended Wheatfield state school across the street from Holy Cross, was among those who decided that it was time to defend her children. She dropped her 10- and 7-year-old boys off at Wheatfield--now half the size and with a third the student body it had in her day--before joining the protest at Holy Cross.

“Our kids have a right to grow up in a safe environment in their neighborhood. But they [the Catholics] come and throw bricks and steel bolts. They threw one in the window here last night,” she said, showing the piece of sawed metal rod lobbed into the community center.

She tells of being stoned by Catholics on her way to shops and the post office, of being called an “Orange bastard.” Catholic joy riders race up and down her street, she said, because “if they do it in their own area, they get shot by the IRA.”

Her brother-in-law was killed by the IRA eight years ago. They burst into his house and shot him dead in a case of “mistaken identity,” Potts said.

“This person was murdered, that person was murdered. It was just the environment we grew up in,” she said.

She does not support the pipe bomb attack that Protestant militants carried out against Holy Cross students on Wednesday, wounding two police officers. But she says the violence they are witnessing is not unlike the burning cars and sectarian riots she saw growing up. And she does not accept that she is partly to blame for traumatizing a new generation with violent protests.

“It is my right to come out and show that I don’t want these people to attack us,” she said. “It is their choice to bring their children.”

Elaine Burns, 34, who attended Holy Cross while Potts was across the street at Wheatfield, blames the protesters for traumatizing her daughters, ages 8 and 4.

“I try to protect my children from hatred and sectarianism,” Burns said. “But for 32 years children have always gone up and down that road to school. . . . I am not putting my children through anything. Those loyalist protesters are putting me and my children through this.”

Like Potts, Burns grew up in the Ardoyne’s sectarian violence. Police and army troops patrolled the streets, often bursting into Catholic homes in the middle of the night in search of explosives or IRA members. She remembers being roused from sleep several times as a child. Police have raided her home twice.

Her mother was beaten during a workers’ strike. She lost one uncle to a bomb tossed into a bar in 1971, and a cousin was shot to death while watching television at home 13 years ago. Countless friends and acquaintances died in the tribalism.

“We are a small community and we all know each other, so when someone gets murdered everyone knows him. Or if you didn’t know him, you knew his wife or daughters,” Burns said. “So we really know everyone who has been killed.”

Since she was a child, territory has been an issue in the Ardoyne, she said. “Whether you can see a boundary or you can’t see a boundary, we all know there are boundaries. People rarely cross over those boundaries.”

Protestants do not walk the streets where the signs are in Gaelic. Catholics do not wander where curbs are painstakingly painted red, white and blue.

But like the Protestants, Catholics say they are harassed on their own streets by members of the other tribe, stoned and called “Fein whores.” No one in either community will address the role of paramilitary forces in the Ardoyne’s strife.

Like other Catholics, Burns was furious early this summer when the Royal Ulster Constabulary would not keep the Ardoyne Road open to Holy Cross school but then forced out Catholic protesters to open Crumlin Road for Protestant marchers. So this week she decided to join parents shepherding their children past the protesters to Holy Cross.

“I understand the loyalist fears. The Catholic population is growing, and they’re in fear. I understand that, but they have to understand we’re not out to take their home,” she said. “And these kids aren’t responsible for the 30 years of violence.”