Day Five: Bridges to Peace in Londonderry
LONDONDERRY — Our fifth and final full day started with a panel on the healing process in Northern Ireland and the connection between trauma, art and reconciliation. The class heard from Archdeacon Robert Miller, actor Michael Doherty and playwright Jonathan Burgess.
While we ate pastries and drank coffee and tea at the office of the Diocese of Derry and Raphoe, the three men sat across from us and shared how their work facilitates healing for themselves and others.
“The problem is we have the same history but remember it differently,” said Doherty.
As we asked questions, the meaning of his words became clearer and clearer. Between the panelists themselves, the same historical events triggered different emotional reactions and memories.
The Good Friday Agreement, the deal designed to end the violence of the Troubles and signed in 1998, made great improvements in initiating peace, but the conflict persisted in subtler ways.
Burgess talked about how Brexit was a “disaster” in the progress Northern Ireland had made. Being a part of the European Union was a wider geopolitical identity used as a unifier for Northern Ireland, and when that identity was stripped away, it felt like another division to some, he explained.
One of the problems that persists in post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland is that trauma gets in the way of reconciliation. Burgess, as a playwright, tells lesser-known stories of working-class Protestants.
Miller shared a quote from Abraham Lincoln that inspires hope.
“Do I not destroy my enemies completely when I make them my friend?”
The Role of Women in Peacemaking
After the main panel ended, our host Karen Campbell and Professor Liz Donovan sat down at the front of class to discuss the role of women in the peace process and how to interview sources about their traumatic life experiences in a way that gives them agency.
Campbell explained that most women did not have a role on the front lines, but instead worked behind the scenes. Prayer was a tool for many women in the conflict. "Prayer can move move mountains, especially when you don’t have a voice in public,” she said. After hearing many male voices this week, this conversation was a great way to learn from another perspective on this nation’s history.
Reporting Time
In the afternoon, we all split up to report or explore Londonderry.
Dana Binfet, a student reporting on Druidism this semester, met with Bryan Sutherland, a Druid who grew up in Londonderry. The two met at a cottage-style restaurant on the day of the Spring Equinox, a day of spiritual significance in the Druid faith marking the beginning of spring. The source took Binfet on a tour of Londonderry, highlighting important landmarks in the Druid tradition. The religion, which fundamentally believes in the spirituality of nature, incorporates the natural world into daily rituals — such as gathering near trees, interpreting their symbolism in human relationships and recognizing them as sacred elements in shared experience.
“He emphasized that the religion is on the rise because people are seeking something that will return them to nature despite global warming and other things that are going on — it’s just really encouraging,” Binfet said, reflecting on the interview.
The source, who is autistic, is part of an interfaith acting group for people with disabilities. Their shared experience of living with disabilities transcends their religious differences, offering an example of how peace could be bridged in the country.
Another student, Hayley Duffy, met with a woman who works for Soul Purpose Productions, a theater company that seeks to illuminate social and public issues. They met at the source’s Londonderry office, located in a building that is partially a converted convent with the other half a modern building. The woman is working on a digital exhibition featuring stories of survivors from Magdalene Laundries and mother-and-baby institutions.
These facilities housed more than 10,500 women from their inception in 1922 until their demise in 1990. The institutions were prison-like environments where women were often abused, causing them long-term physical and mental health problems.
Duffy is reporting on survivor perspectives regarding the fate of these buildings — whether they should be demolished, repurposed or memorialized.
She is also investigating whether survivors feel empowered in the decisions being made about buildings the institutions were once housed in, and how they want them to be remembered, if at all.
It’s taken a lot for these women to come out and share their stories. Duffy is working to carefully report the story, given the trauma that remains for many women in Northern Ireland.
Student Abbie Hopson had an interview with a source named Mikey Cullen. Cullen is a poet from Dublin featured in a pro-Palestinian collaboration by over 100 artists. The project is about “relating this anti-colonial struggle” between both Ireland and Palestine. A main theme in Cullen’s piece is the role of women throughout Irish history and in the pro-Palestinian movement in Ireland. “The biggest leaders, a lot of them are women,” said Hopson. The song written by Cullen celebrates these leaders, but also grieves for the mothers in both Ireland and Gaza who have lost their children to violence. Hopson found a lot of connections between this interview and the earlier discussion with Campbell and Donovan, which will help inform her writing.
Rosario Del Valle, Liza Monasebian and Laine Immell wanted to hear about the younger generations’ outlooks on the division in their city, so they went to Richmond Shopping Centre to find some. The mall was filled with teenagers hanging out after school. One young woman they met said it wasn’t common to be exposed to a perspective different from your community’s until university. Because of this, the tension of the past wasn’t really present while they grew up in the Londonderry area. They also spoke to a couple. The young woman was a Protestant from the city center, while the man was a Catholic from the Bogside. They didn’t let the violence between their communities in the past impact their relationship, though, and claimed to not think about the conflict in general outside of schooling and history.
Jake Angelo met another young man in the Yellow Yard, a vintage store in the city center. His name was Callum and he was from the Bogside. Much like the teenagers in the mall, Callum told Angelo that he rarely felt the tension in his community. However, he did say that on St. Patrick’s Day, the Protestant Orange Order had an unsanctioned march through the mostly Catholic Bogside neighborhood, which made many people wary. It seems that, while young people in Londonderry don’t experience the conflict at the forefront of their lives, moments of uncertainty still exist.
Our Last Supper
We reconvened after our various adventures that afternoon at the Maldron Hotel. Once the group was whole again (minus one student, Bella Bromberg, who had traveled back to Belfast to meet a source), we set off on our journey across the River Foyle to dinner. The Peace Bridge, a towering blue-and-white pedestrian bridge, connects the Catholic and Protestant sides of the river.
As the sun set across the water, we took pictures to commemorate our final night before heading inside Walled City Brewery.
Once we were seated and our drinks ordered, Professor Greg Khalil clinked his glass, quieting the group. He introduced the game for the evening. The rules were simple: Each person would say the moment that impacted them the most during the week. Then, they would toast a person in the group who inspired them or who they admire. The person toasted would then repeat the process.
Slowly, over the three-hour meal, each person divulged their favorite moments of the trip and celebrated one another. It was an evening of appreciation, respect and reflection. After a week of tours, interviews and powerful, though sometimes difficult, conversations, this dinner was a moment to fully appreciate the rare opportunity we had been given in this class.
After the dinner, the group went to a pub called Lizzie O’Farrells for live music and our last drop of Irish culture. As we sat around a table talking, laughing and playing games, the two-person band began to play “Linger” by the Cranberries. We all gathered by the stage to listen, swaying and singing together. With the hustle and bustle of New York, Columbia Journalism School and our normal lives waiting for us in the morning, we listened to the song wishing we could linger here just a little longer.
Image at top: Robert Miller, Michael Doherty and Jonathan Burgess talk about peace-building (Photo by Rosario Del Valle)
Day Four: The Road to Londonderry: Physical, Political, Spiritual
LONDONDERRY — When Nobel Prize–winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney traveled from Belfast north to Londonderry on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 1972, the day was bleak and dreary. He wrote in his poem “The Road to Derry” of the “wet wind in the hedges” and “dark cloud on the mountain.” Heaney then described the “flags like black frost / mourning that the thirteen men were dead.”
Heaney was on his way to the funeral of civil rights protesters killed by British soldiers in Londonderry (also called Derry, a controversy to be addressed later) on Jan. 30, known as Bloody Sunday.
Our road trip from Belfast to Londonderry on a Wednesday in 2025 couldn’t have been more different. But by the end of the day, we knew a lot more about those dark, troubled times in Northern Ireland’s second largest city.
Prayer, Music and Sheep
Our bus voyage began, appropriately for reporters in a Covering Religion class, with a prayer. The Rev. Karen Campbell, our host for this leg of the journey, read a passage from Isaiah 32:1-8 that described rulers who lead with righteousness and justice. The result of their wise leadership?
Then the eyes of those who see will no longer be closed.
and the ears of those who hear will listen.
Solid advice for a group of journalists.
Unlike Heaney, we had clear skies, wispy white clouds, and plenty of fluffy sheep chewing emerald-grass grass in verdant pastures to gaze at during our two-hour trip to Londonderry. Professor Ari Goldman pulled out his harmonica and soon had a group of students in the back of the bus singing campfire songs like “You Are My Sunshine” and “Morning Has Broken.”
What’s Its Name?
Our introduction to Londonderry, or Derry, or Derry/Londonderry, was a sign welcoming us to “The Walled City,” one of the city’s nicknames; other monikers include “the Maiden City” and “Stroke City.” Confused? So were we. Our guide on an afternoon walking tour explained the controversial name origins. Back in the sixth century, the site was known as Doire Calgaigh. “Doire,” Irish for oakwood, morphed into Derry. After King James I of England planted English and Scottish settlers there in the 1600s, and London investors financed a new town, the city’s charter added “London” to the beginning (i.e., medieval naming rights). Over the years, and especially after the Troubles erupted in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, unionists/loyalists have preferred Londonderry, while republicans/nationalists favor Derry.
“Walled City” refers to the fortifying stone walls built around the city center in the 1600s. The “Maiden City” comes from the walls’ “never been breached” status, even during a 105-day siege by King James II in 1689. “Stroke City” refers to the slash punctuation mark (called a “stroke” in the U.K.) in London/Londonderry. After much dispute, including a court case, a judge said he didn’t want to get involved, so pick your preferred name.
Before our tour along the ancient stone walls, however, we visited a part of Londonderry outside those walls that for many years was close by, yet worlds apart: the Bogside. This neighborhood down the hill, originally underwater until it became marshland, was home to a mostly Catholic population for hundreds of years while Protestants lived inside the city walls.
Remembering the Humans of Bloody Sunday
Our first stop was a visit to The Museum of Free Derry, which tells the story of the area’s history from 1921, when the U.K. split Ireland into the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, leaving a Catholic minority in the North governed by Protestants loyal to England. In Londonderry, however, even though Catholics were a majority of the population, they had no political power. Gerrymandering, internment without trials, and voting rules that stated only property owners could vote led to oppression, poverty and a civil rights movement. The concept of “Free Derry” came from a slogan written on a gable wall in 1969 that read “You are now entering Free Derry,” which in turn came from a similar sign at the University of California at Berkeley.
On Jan. 30, 1972, 15,000 marchers in the Bogside who planned to protest their treatment were shot at by a British elite military regiment. Thirteen men were killed and 15 people wounded (one later died).
The museum humanizes this incident by highlighting the victims and march participants. As we walked through the exhibits, we heard their voices on speakers, singing “We Shall Overcome” and describing the carnage they witnessed. Video footage taken that day shows the violence and its bloody aftermath in fuzzy but frightening black-and-white detail.
One object was particularly haunting: a coat worn by one of the men killed, 20-year-old Michael McDaid. Just below the rear right sleeve of the olive-green and blue plaid sporty jacket was the exit hole of the bullet that hit him — the size of a dime, but as large as a half-dollar taking into account the shreds and tears. A photo of McDaid wearing the coat just before he was shot is shown next to the coat.
A photo of the funeral that Heaney attended for the victims shows all their coffins lined up at the front of a church; Heaney mentions the coffins in his poem.
The museum also explains the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, with a British judge declaring three months later that the soldiers had done nothing wrong. Prime Minister Tony Blair announced a new inquiry in 1998 that lasted all the way until 2010 and found that none of the victims had done anything wrong, a huge victory for their families. Prime Minister David Cameron at the time said the killings were "unjustified and unjustifiable."
The former soldiers’ names remain anonymous (in public), and none of them have been convicted. A museum employee, however, told us of a surprising development: On Friday, it will be announced whether one such Bloody Sunday veteran, known as Soldier F, will face charges of murder and attempted murder (stay tuned for a longer story on the decision by student Nichole Villegas).
As in Belfast, murals, signs and graffiti around the Bogside indicated solidarity with Palestine. Someone had spray-painted the bottom of a giant “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” sign with the words “Show Israel the Red Card,” in reference to calls for FIFA, the international soccer body that holds the World Cup, and the Union of European Football Associations to expel the state (“Israel” was painted in red like dripping blood and a bloody soccer ball was depicted at the bottom).
Derry Girls and Walls
After a lunch break, we went on a two-hour walking tour of the Derry Walls with guide Sorcha Bonner of Martin McCrossan City Walking Tours. We started on a light note at a giant “Derry Girls” mural on the site of Badgers Bar and Restaurant (16-18 Orchard Street) that has become a huge tourist attraction thanks to the hit Netflix series about a group of teens growing up in Londonderry during the Troubles. We took a group photo in front of the mural, which depicts the show’s five stars.
We then moved up a set of stairs to the top of the Derry Walls for a 1-mile walk around the elevated ramparts. Along the way we saw St. Columb’s Cathedral, an Anglican church built in 1613, and the first cathedral in the British Isles built after the Reformation. Our guide told us the cathedral’s school is being transformed into an arts center that will include yet another school—for teaching circus skills.
The circus revelation led to a discussion of Londonderry’s status as a creative arts city. Bonner also lauded a few famed Londonderry artistic giants, including poet Heaney, who attended St. Columb’s College, as did playwright Brian Friel, known for his Tony-winning play “Dancing at Lughnasa.” Even Taylor Swift has connections to Londonderry, with ancestral ties to the town.
Innocence Lost
The walk around the walls, which included a lot of history about English people named James and William, and Derry’s former status as a shirt-making industry behemoth, ended where we had started the day: looking out at the Bogside. We saw the neighborhood's murals from high above, which somehow made them stand out even more.
A wall painted with the Palestinian and Ireland flags side-by-side read “Two Nations: One Struggle.” The wall was beneath a newly unveiled mural on the side of a building in honor of Nell McAfferty, a famous Bogside journalist who wrote about women’s rights. “Goodnight Sisters,” painted on the mural, refers to a phrase that McCafferty, a journalist who wrote about who died in 2024 at age 80, used as a slogan to end her appearances on broadcast radio.
Bonner pointed out a mural featuring 14-year-old Annette McGavigan, described as the first child to die during the Troubles. In 1971, she was shot in the head in the Bogside during riots. The mural, titled “The Death of Innocence,” portrays Annette in a green school skirt and tie and white shirt. Next to her is a broken rifle, and a butterfly flutters above her head. But the mural also contains signs of hope. When it was originally painted, the gun was larger. black and fully intact, and the butterfly was unfinished — just like Annette’s life. In 2006, after the Good Friday Agreement, the artists broke the gun and finished the butterfly to signify peace in Northern Ireland.
Heaney, in his poem “The Road to Derry,” ended with five lines equally full of futility and hope:
I walked among their old haunts.
the home ground where they bled;
And in the dirt lay justice like an acorn in the winter.
Till its oak would sprout in Derry
where the thirteen men lay dead.
Photo at top: Londonderry’s Bogside neighborhood includes the mural “The Death of Innocence,” which portrays 14-year-old Troubles victim Annette McGavigan, who was shot by British soldiers in 1971. (Photo by Karen Lindell)
Day Three: Perspectives from Across the Divide: Shared Grief Lingers Decades After the Good Friday Agreement
BELFAST — During our last day in Belfast we met 10 people, all of whom are an integral part of creating and keeping peace in Northern Ireland. We spoke to victims on both sides of the conflict, senior members of paramilitary groups during the Troubles, leaders of ethnic and religious minority groups in Northern Ireland, singers, teachers and columnists. This was all organized by our wonderful host, Gary Mason, who had a leading role in establishing the Skainos project, including a community center that provides spaces for integration and conversations between people on all sides of the conflict, in East Belfast. That is where our day began.
While we were there, Brian Ervine, a playwright, songwriter and former loyalist politician, graced us with a song titled “Her Majesty,” which tells the story of the RMS Titanic, built in Belfast. The room was silent, and a soft smile lit his face as he belted out the song without any accompaniment: “They said that she would last forever,” he sang. “Even heaven could not sink her, they never knew they never knew.”
Working Towards Peace
After a quick tour of Skainos, we met with two people who lost loved ones in the conflict, Alan McBride and Linda Molloy. While on opposite sides during the Troubles, they’ve since connected through the grief they both experienced. Now, they work with WAVE Trauma Centre, an organization that connects victims and survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland to share and process trauma together.
McBride is the coordinator of WAVE and a survivor of the conflict who grew up in a Protestant community. On Oct. 23, 1993, his 29-year-old wife, Sharon McBride, was killed while working in her father’s fish shop on Belfast’s Shankill Road when two members of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA) walked in and placed a bomb on the counter. Eight others also died.
After her death, McBride sat by his wife’s grave with a pen and paper, writing love letters about who she was as a person, wife and mother. For years he sent those letters to Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein from 1983 to 2018. Sinn Fein is the political arm of the IRA. He said the letters were a way to test a theory, to see if members of republican paramilitary groups were also just normal people. Initially, Adams didn’t respond to any of the letters. However, when McBride decided to send a letter in the Gaelic Irish language, almost an olive branch to the Irish Adams, the Sinn Fein president responded. He said he knows McBride is hurt, but Sinn Fein is doing the best work toward reconciliation. McBride wondered how that could be true when there were so many killings.
McBride also shared a post-Good Friday Agreement story of his daughter, who was two years old when her mother died. His daughter later became friends with a Catholic girl whose family invited the two of them to their house for a barbecue. It was July 12, an important date when Protestants commemorate the victory of Protestant King William of Orange over Catholic King James II at the Battle of Boyne in 1690. As McBride listened to the sound of his Protestant daughter’s laughter mingle with the laughter of her Catholic friend, he said he knew what part of Northern Ireland he wanted to be a part of.
Linda Molloy has also chosen to be part of a Northern Ireland working toward peace and reconciliation, even though she has never received closure for the killing of her son, John. She choked down tears as she shared how 18-year-old John was stabbed to death walking home alone from a pub on Oct. 10, 1996. He was ambushed by a gang of Protestants.
Police told Molloy they’d help her find justice after her son’s killing, but nearly 30 years later, the case hasn’t been solved. Like McBride, Molloy also found solace in writing. She read aloud a poem she wrote for her son, bringing several of our group to tears.
Her poem is titled “For Myself”:
How long since I gazed
Upon your face
Listened for your voice
Watched that slow smile
Oh! To turn back time
You just a little boy
Full of life, full of joy
Should I, could I
Have paid more heed
As you vied for attention
In a family of five
I wonder how it would be
To once more walk with you
Talk to you, share your dreams
Would you have taken a bride?
Would I have grandchildren
At my side?
They cut you down
Eighteen years your lifespan
Will we ever know the truth?
The tide of time ticks by
WAVE sends a cool breeze
A consoling calm
It holds me, carries me
As I work towards peace.
More Than Their Past
Students also sat together at the Skainos Centre with two men who were leading members of the republican and loyalist paramilitary groups. The men asked to stay anonymous because they now work together to have conversations across the divide. They’re more than their past, noted Mason.
Though they disagreed on some remembrances of the Troubles, they’ve since also learned to understand the other’s perspective.
“For us, it was a colonial conflict,” said the republican. He was quick to add, though, that for a Protestant, republican paramilitary groups killed someone from their community, their neighbor.
Republicans never thought about the loyalist communities when they debated reunification of the Irish State, said the republican. In 1976, however, after he was charged and sentenced to 10 years in prison for participation in a paramilitary ambush, he debated other republicans on reunification strategies from the perspective of a loyalist.
“We had to learn to compromise, see the world from other people’s perspective,” he said.
When the republican leader went to the polls to vote on the Good Friday Agreement, he didn’t want to say yes. He didn’t think the agreement went far enough to abandon the republican agenda, but he trusted republican leadership. “I voted for it,” he recalled saying to his wife after he left the polls in 1998. “I hope I’m right.”
“We’ve all done terrible things to each other,” the loyalist said. He also voted in favor of the Good Friday Agreement referendum, but said he wouldn’t vote for it today. “We’ve just stopped killing each other,” he said in reference to continued sectarianism in Northern Ireland. “If only it was so simple.”
The younger generation, whose parents grew up during the Troubles, doesn’t even know why they fight each other. We discussed how crowd psychology often replaces individual thought.
They offered two anecdotes to show changes and obstacles in Northern Ireland’s progress for peace. The loyalist said he went to a chapel to see his son marry a girl who speaks Irish. He said he wouldn’t have believed that possible 20 years ago. But the republican often resolves conflict among the younger generation; he recently mediated after an 8-year-old boy threw rocks at an officer.
Caught Between Truth and Justice
Later in the afternoon, students met Paul Nolan, Ph.D., an independent researcher in Belfast whose work focuses on the peace process. He spoke to the class about policing and accountability in a post-conflict country. The Good Friday Agreement called for a “new beginning to policing in Northern Ireland,” and Nolan noted how that finally came to fruition with the Police Service in Northern Ireland, founded in 2001.
Though Catholic participation in the police force has increased, and PSNI is surveilled and held accountable more than any other police force in the world, Nolan said, but problems persist.
Police office staff is still predominantly skewed Protestant, paramilitary groups continue to exist—especially loyalist groups in large numbers—and the legacy of the Troubles continues to plague police leadership.
After the Good Friday Agreement, 1,186 murder cases were still unsolved. Police were caught in the middle between truth and justice, Nolan said. As outlined in the peace agreement, those convicted of murders related to the Troubles prior to 1998 probably won’t spend a day in jail.
Today, Nolan said, a lot of loyalist anti-Catholic sentiment has shifted to anti-immigrant, and the country has seen a rise in racist hate crimes.
Just before we spoke to Nolan, we had lunch with two men who shared with us their experience as Muslims in Northern Ireland in the face of rising anti-immigrant hate crimes associated with people of color.
Raied Al-Wazzan, Ph.D., executive treasurer of the Belfast Islamic Centre, came to Belfast in the 1990s to study at Queen’s University, arriving in the middle of the Troubles. Zein Ibrahim, also Muslim, was born and raised in Ballymena, a heavily unionist community. Both have experienced being treated differently because of the darker color of their skin and their religion.
Ibrahim said the way he identifies himself has recently changed. Growing up, he introduced himself as Northern Irish, but in the past few years, he is more aware of being an ethnic minority in a predominantly white country. Often when he introduces himself, people question how he is Irish because he has dark skin. He explains where his parents are from, that half of his family is white and Northern Irish and the other half is Sudanese. To avoid the follow-up questions, Ibrahim starts with the entire explanation when he introduces himself.
Al-Wazzan explained that because more immigrants and asylum seekers are coming to Northern Ireland, prejudice and hate crimes against people of color, such as someone pulling off a woman’s hijab, have increased.
The Muslim community is in a unique situation where they are part of the swing vote, Al-Wazzan said. He referred to a possible border poll, a vote on whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or join the Republic of Ireland. He doesn’t want a border poll because as a larger majority in the minority religions, Muslims would make a big impact in a swing vote. He worries that either side would blame Muslims, whichever way the vote goes.
For a border poll to be successful and peaceful, he said, “You have to solve the hate crime first.”
A similar sentiment was shared during dinner by two other men who said peace conversations must come before and along with a border poll or else there will be more killings and injuries.
Students from the class concluded the day at the Hoose Restaurant in East Belfast, a predominately loyalist part of town, where they spoke with Mason, Alex Kane and Chris Donnelly. Kane is a columnist and political commentator and was previously a communications director for the Ulster Unionist Party; Donnelly comes from an Irish republican background and is also a columnist and political commentator as well as a Catholic school principal in West Belfast. The two imparted advice to the student reporters on journalism as well as answered questions on the use of the label ‘the Troubles’ (Donnelly said the term is more neutral than “war” or “conflict” or “terrorist campaign versus the State”; Kane said the word makes the era easier to discuss), crises of identity, and the future of peace in Northern Ireland.
Donnelly said currently 7% to 8% of Northern Ireland’s schools are integrated, meaning both Catholic and Protestant children attend. These schools are essential because much of the housing in Northern Ireland is also segregated. He explained that either the school the children attend or the community they live in needs to be integrated. Earlier in the day we met Linda Ervine, who runs an integrated preschool called Naíscoil na Seolta in East Belfast. The school’s opening in 2021 was delayed a month because of violent threats from people against integrated schools. Naíscoil na Seolta focuses on children becoming bilingual in English and Irish, no matter their background. Despite the threats, the school opened and continues to grow.
Kane, a self-dubbed pessimist, said there’s relative polite peacefulness now because one day, both people in Ireland and Northern Ireland will have to make a very difficult decision, and peace won’t last. He also referenced the prospect of a border poll.
Donnelly believes one seems imminent, but Kane said problems need to be fixed before a referendum occurs.
"You don’t resolve an identity crisis after a border poll," he said.
Photo at top: At the Skainos Centre, Linda Molloy, overcome with grief, tells students the story of her son John’s murder. (Photo by Rosario Del Valle)
Edited by Liza Monasebian and Karen Lindell
Day Two: Pilgrimage and Peaks on Saint Patrick’s Day in Northern Ireland
BELFAST — Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! This morning started bright and early as we prepared for our adventure to Slemish Mountain, once St. Patrick's home and now a popular pilgrimage hike on his namesake holiday. As we left the city, Belfast’s pink double-decker buses and brick buildings gave way to green fields, grazing lambs and crumbling farmhouses. We first saw Slemish from our bus — the mountain rose out of the landscape, its curved face and steep cliffs equally exciting and daunting.
At the base, signs welcomed us with “Happy Saint Patrick's Day,” while locals milled about, preparing for Slemish’s slopes. But before the climb, we had to meet our mascots. A petting zoo at the bottom of the mountain featured guinea pigs, rabbits, chinchillas and hedgehogs. Students Hayley Duffy and Nichole Whiteley petted guinea pigs, while the more adventurous souls, Abbie Hopson and Dean Melanie Huff, befriended a corn snake. After got our mascots’ blessings, it was time to start our ascent.
The climb was no joke. Stone stairs and a defined track quickly gave way to the muddy footprints of strangers, tufts of shrubbery and loose rocks. Step by step, we edged up the mountain’s harsh face, breathing in the fresh air and taking in the view. The fields below started to look like patches on a quilt of emerald, sage, pine and lime. It’s easy to see why Johnny Cash was inspired to write “Forty Shades of Green” after flying into Ireland and gazing down at the landscape of rolling fields below.
The group pressed on, determined to reach the peak. People below started to look like little ants. Professors Greg Khalil and Liz Donovan clutched their coffee cups. In some places, the track turned into a pit of mud. We passed locals chatting with each other, their Irish lilt carrying on the breeze of the cold mountain air. Two small children with muddy knees and chapped lips stopped with their parents to enjoy a snack on the side of the mountain. Their mother told them, “Now, make sure you eat something healthy before you put the treats in your mouth.” It seems some parts of parenting are universal, from the streets of New York to the mountains of Northern Ireland. We pushed on, leaving behind the family as our legs ached and our lungs burned.
The view from the top was serene. The entire landscape opened up — we could see the misty haze of Scotland over the sea, smoke rising from little fires in the distance, tiny cottages dotting the landscape, winding country lanes, stone walls dividing fields below. Slemish was well worth the hike. There was a cross on top of the summit, a nod to the fact that the mountain is not just a beautiful spot for tourist photos and exercise — Slemish is a site for religious pilgrimages.
After checking out St. Patrick’s Chair, a divot in a boulder on the top of the mountain that is said to be where St. Patrick sat during his time as a shepherd, we braved the downhill climb. We reached the bottom with sore legs and full hearts. Slemish was unforgettable.
At the base of the mountain, we met James Moore, a young man from the Buckna Gospel Hall, a local church in County Antrim. Moore was handing out leaflets with the title “Paul, Patrick and You.” He explained the connection he saw between the Apostle Paul, who spread Christianity as a missionary throughout West Asia and Europe, and St. Patrick, who brought Christianity to the island of Ireland. Moore said three kinds of people hiked up Slemish on Saint Patrick’s day: those wanting the exercise, those there for the entertainment — the coffee cart, the petting zoo, the Irish music — and pilgrims, those there to climb the mountain to follow in the footsteps of St. Patrick. When asked if he was Protestant or Catholic, Moore described himself as a Christian. “I don’t believe there should be a division within Christianity,” he said.
We boarded the bus, ready for the next adventure of the day, as traditional Irish songs played on violins in the background.
Dancing in the Streets: The Spirit of Saint Patrick’s Day
After our hike on Slemish Mountain, and a lunch break, we headed back to Belfast. Even though we were set to arrive at 2:30 p.m. — an hour after the Saint Patrick’s Day parade’s start time — we decided to try our luck at catching the last leg. Many roads were closed and streets were crowded, so we weren’t positive we would get to experience much of the show. Thankfully, we caught the full procession’s finale, where it ended behind the gates of Belfast City Hall.
The Belfast Saint Patrick’s Day parade took a long circle around the city center, beginning at Belfast City Hall and weaving through crowded streets, until it finally arrived back at the starting point an hour and a half later.
The roots of Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in Belfast, and in the whole of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, are a more recent tradition than most would think. In Ireland, it became a bank holiday in 1903, around 300 years after the first reported celebration of the holiday in the United States. Catholics had observed the saint’s day as part of the liturgical calendar for centuries with a Lent-breaking feast, but not as a public holiday. After the split, Northern Ireland did not hold significant celebrations until the end of the Troubles in 1998, due to sectarian conflict.
The Belfast City Council has presented the Saint Patrick’s Day parade only since 2006, and although the day as a national holiday, sectarianism was evident. Back then, the city handed out multicolored shamrocks, because some unionists deemed green unacceptable.
Now, the celebration of Ireland’s most famous patron saint is widespread in Belfast and attempts to represent the city’s different communities.
In the streets of the city center, people gathered in green, faces painted with Irish flags or shamrocks, waving flags and cheering for the colorful performers as they went by. Everywhere around us, children sat on their parents’ shoulders and climbed onto any surface they could find to fly their flags, and teenagers danced to the music. According to the mayor of Belfast, Lord Mayor Mickey Murray, the parade gets larger every year.
In the procession were dance troupes, school groups, musicians, stilt-walkers, acrobats and mechanical horses, many run by the Beat Carnival company. One stilt-walker took an unfortunate fall in his final stretch, in front of our spot near City Hall, and required three or four people to help him stand up again. The stilt-walkers towered over the crowd with stilts as high as their heads, and he had been walking that way for nearly an hour and a half.
The parade included a variety of acts, from traditional Irish bagpipers to an Indian dance group in cultural dress. The Catholic religious holiday has become a celebration of Irish culture, heritage and local communities.
A City’s Pride: The Titanic’s Belfast Beginnings
After watching the colors and costumes of the parade, we headed to the site where the Titanic was built. We passed two huge yellow cranes that locals have nicknamed Samson and Goliath, the state-of-the-art Titanic Museum and the SS Nomadic, a tender ship that brought passengers, including the “unsinkable” Molly Brown, to the Titanic before arriving at the Harland & Wolff shipyard. Seeing the huge hole in the ground where the boat had been built was surreal — and the sense of the Titanic’s size and the scale of the project was palpable.
Nearly 3,000 workers were involved in building the ship, which took 26 months. Belfast locals worked as welders, riveters and platers, crafting the gargantuan ship that left its waters in 1912. Over 100,000 locals lined the dock to see her off on a voyage that never returned. We dropped by the Titanic Distillers, which specializes in Irish whiskey, located in the site’s historic Pumphouse, before heading to our next stop.
Stormont and the Shifting Tides of Northern Irish Politics
Our last stop of the day’s city tour was the Northern Irish Parliament Buildings, located in the Stormont Estate. Just past the childhood boys’ college of theologian C.S. Lewis, a long path winds through a grass field to the huge and stunning building, completed on Saint Patrick’s Day with flying Union Jack flags.
But the flags don’t always fly, explained our tour guide, Gary Mason. In 2012, the City Council voted to limit the days the flags are raised to the U.K. minimum for government buildings, 18 days per year, which in Northern Ireland occur on holidays. For nationalists, this change was a win, because the flag had previously been raised every day of the year, but loyalists responded with protests and riots, many of which were violent.
The Northern Irish Assembly, created with the Good Friday Agreement, has functioned for only about 40% of the time since 1998, Mason told us. Since its creation, disagreements have led to a back-and-forth of assembly suspension and operation, which was just restored in 2024.
Faith, Conflict and Reconciliation: Beyond Sectarianism: Is Reconciliation Possible?
Our day ended with a wonderful dinner at Millar’s Grill and Seafood, where we were joined by Gary and his wife, Joyce. Over the meal, Gary led a thought-provoking discussion on the relationship between religion, peace, conflict and violence. He outlined key features of sectarianism: the belief in a "one true church," where people are seen as either in or out; the idea that "error has no right," where tolerance is sometimes viewed as a weakness; and providence, where people believe God is on their side, justifying their actions as divinely sanctioned.
With these dynamics in mind, we grappled with a critical question: Is reconciliation achievable after sectarianism? How can journalists ensure that words do not normalize violence, but instead contribute to peace? As we reflected on the complexities of sectarianism, history and the power of storytelling, we left dinner with a deeper appreciation of the challenges and possibilities of this ideal.
Edited by Lauren Hartley
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.