Day One: In Post-Conflict Belfast, the Past Is the Present
BELFAST — At 8:41 a.m., after a six-hour direct flight, our airplane landed in Dublin. Twelve excited students, Dean Melanie Huff and adjunct professor Liz Donovan arrived chock-full of expectations for the journey. Our arrival was smooth until we reached border control, and things started to look bleak. Student Lauren Hartley had lost her passport.
She looked everywhere, and the flight crew even checked the plane, but it was nowhere to be found. Stress and nervousness overcame Lauren. She left the United States with her passport, but it was gone once we landed in Dublin. Liz stayed behind with Lauren while they figured out how she could enter the country.
In the meantime, the rest of us ate breakfast with Professor Ari Goldman and adjunct professor Greg Khalil, who met the group at the airport. Some of us bought a traditional Irish “mini breakfast,” which included toast and sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes and bacon. Others just ordered coffee. But all of us shared a common concern about Lauren’s situation. The faculty looked calm, so we followed their instructions, grabbed our luggage and went to the bus. Finally, around two hours after we landed, Lauren walked onto the bus, smiling and holding a temporary visa. The group cheered.
The bus set out from Dublin to Northern Ireland, and we encountered our first religious site — at the airport. A Catholic church, Our Lady Queen of Heaven, was a long, gray building with a cross at the top and the phrase “God Is Love” on the exterior.
In Belfast, Northern Ireland, we arrived at our hotel and met our tour guide, Gary Mason, a Methodist minister who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement. This peace accord, signed in 1998, brought an end to the Troubles, a three-decade period of conflict between unionists (often Protestants), who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, and republicans (often Catholics), who wanted it to be incorporated into the Republic of Ireland.
Reckoning with Legacy
Mason walked us past several memorials dedicated to Catholics and Protestants lost during the conflict. They included names, dates and symbols related to the Troubles.
“Do we need these on every street corner?” Mason inquired aloud to no one in particular as he gestured to a large banner that read “30 years of indiscriminate slaughter by so-called non-sectarian Irish freedom fighters.”
Mason noted that for young children born decades after the Good Friday Agreement, the constant divisive messaging and reminder of a conflict they were not even alive for could actually have negative effects.
More people in Northern Ireland have died by suicide related to intergenerational trauma in the last 30 years than those who died between 1968 and 1998, he added.
“I always say that the past is the present,” Mason said. “Because you’re living in it constantly.”
Throughout the tour, Mason emphasized that religion historically has been used to rationalize and justify violence and division. “People would take a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other,” he said of the paramilitary groups active during the Troubles. “You always gotta have a bit of religion in there.”
The Peace Gates: A Threshold Between Communities
During our walk through the murals, from a Protestant neighborhood to the Catholic one, we saw so-called “peace gates,” looming walls topped with barbed wire and covered in murals. Mason explained that the gates were closed during the Troubles at night or when there was palpable tension in Belfast to prevent clashes between the two sides. Those gates are still there, open and serving both as a symbol that the conflict lingers and as a sign of comfort for both communities. He likened them to a child’s blanket, necessary to feel secure while sleeping.
Parallels with Israel-Gaza
Mason noted that even though we are thousands of miles away, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is ever present in Northern Ireland, and support for each side is divided. Once we crossed through the peace gates from the Protestant neighborhood into the Catholic one, Israeli flags were replaced by murals and signage in solidarity with Palestine.
Group Respite
As the tour wound down in the afternoon, sleepy faces from a long travel day and jet lag were starting to show. Yawning, red eyes and dark under-eye circles were everywhere. It was time to take a break, check into the hotel and take a nap before dinner.
After one and a half hours of resting time, the group gathered in the hotel’s lobby to go out for dinner. The experience at the “Thirsty Goat” on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day included live music, spontaneous dances and traditional Irish food. Afterward, a 15-minute walk back to the hotel was the perfect time to reflect on the day we’d had and the adventures ahead.