Facing the Wall: Looking for Liberation and Reconciliation Around Belfast’s Separation Barriers

One memory that sticks in my mind from my doctoral studies was driving down from Belfast to Dublin with my academic adviser to attend a seminar. He had the audio book of Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat Pray Love’ in the car, and we listened on the way.

At one point, Gilbert mentioned in her narration that she had received a five-figure advance from her publisher which, considering her book was about experiences in Italy, India, and Bali, was how she was able to write the book.

‘Just to be clear’, my adviser said, ‘no one is going to give you that kind of advance to write a book on theology…’

It was sound advice. Publishers don’t splash that kind of cash at theologians.

But we write books anyway. We write because it’s what we do. We use our skills and expertise to theologically reflect on the biblical text in the light of our experiences and convictions.

In light of that, I’m delighted to announce that my book, ‘Facing the Wall: Looking for Liberation and Reconciliation Around Belfast’s Separation Barriers’, is now available on Amazon.

For the moment, it’s available as an e-Book, but a paperback edition will be available in the next few months. You can purchase it here:

https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Wall-Liberation-Reconciliation-Separation-ebook/dp/B07HYJ7RT4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1546862782&sr=8-1&keywords=Facing+the+Wall+Jon+Hatch

The book had its impetus in two places:

First and foremost, it is a product of my years as a reconciliation worker in North and West Belfast, working with numerous projects and groups- Corrymeela, Community Relations in Schools, and various other groups and local projects- many different people, places, and experiences, but always with the end goal of helping people rebuild and live together well after Northern Ireland’s 30 years of civil conflict.

It also is a product of my doctoral work in Theology. Being involved in reconciliation work, I was familiar with much of the theology of reconciliation that was being produced out of the Irish peace process and beyond. I also have had an abiding fascination with liberation theology. I wondered what it would look like to apply the basic ideas of liberation theology to a context like post-conflict Northern Ireland, with its ongoing structural sectarianism and deep social divisions- a situation quite different from that experienced by its original proponents in Central and South America.

Simply put, I thought our process of reconciliation would benefit from a dose of liberation… and the liberation theological project would benefit from engaging with the context of human relationships healing after violent conflict.

Peacemaking is never easy or straightforward, and ‘Facing the Wall’ is about facing unpleasant facts. An overarching unpleasant fact is that while the 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought the armed conflict to a close, Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided place, but since far fewer people are dying, those divisions are seen in the corridors of power as basically acceptable …

And some divisions are not lessening, but getting worse.

This book is about one of them.

If you come to Belfast, it won’t be long before you encounter the separation barriers, sometimes referred to as ‘peace walls’ or ‘the peace line’, a vast network of walls, fences, gates, and unused tracts of land acting as ‘buffer zones’ located around or between areas of Belfast where the two majority communities- Catholic and Protestant, Nationalist and Unionist- live in close proximity.

The first one went up in 1969 as the conflict began to spiral out of control, when the British Army erected a fence between the riot-plagued Falls and Shankill neighborhoods in West Belfast.

British Army GOC Sir Ian Freeland declared at the time, ‘The peace line will be a very, very temporary affair. We will not have a Berlin Wall or anything like that in this city’.

49 years later, there are over 100, most of them having been built, or made longer or higher, after the peace agreement.

Why? What’s going on?

It wasn’t easy to find out. The separation barriers might not be the most critical issue facing Northern Ireland, but it is certainly one of the most enduring and overlooked.

In the dozens of books, papers, and articles I read about the conflict, photos of the barriers often featured prominently on many of the covers but- oddly- were rarely mentioned in the content;

In my years of working with churches and other faith-based communities on reconciliation projects, even though there was endless discussion of ‘divisions’ and ‘the barriers between communities’,  the actual physical barriers were more or less ignored;

 In the hours of discussions with colleagues and in all the lectures and talks I’d been to about building peace in Northern Ireland, the subject of the barriers rarely came up.  

When it did come up, it was indirectly, as a metaphor for something else;

‘Just as there are concrete barriers running through the streets of Belfast’, people would earnestly say, ‘so there are barriers in peoples’ hearts and minds’.

Over the years, I heard that phrase repeated to me dozens of times, and every time it was uttered as if the person had just thought it up.  

That was always the focus- the ‘barriers in peoples’ hearts and minds’.

I knew what they were trying to say. If you work in post-conflict social reconciliation, you’re well acquainted with the trauma, prejudice, resentment, and bigotry so many people in Northern Ireland carry in their hearts and minds. They had lived through political violence, through terror, through loss… Helping people live with or hopefully move beyond those deep mental and social wounds represents the bulk of what we do.

And yet (and this is what no one seemed willing to acknowledge) there were real, actual barriers, walls, fences, and gates of concrete and steel, some 6 to 9 meters high, running for miles through the city of Belfast… and they raised disturbing questions:

If the barriers were built to reduce violence, why had the majority been built after the ceasefires, the negotiations of the peace agreement, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, and the pull-out of the British Army?

If the barriers were built to make people feel safer, why had the vast majority of deaths occurred within sight of them?

Since the barriers were constructed and maintained at enormous cost from public funds, why did they run through the most economically-deprived areas of the city?

Why did the churches of Belfast, who had so much to say about the ‘barriers’ in peoples’ hearts and minds’, never mention the separation barriers, even when their church butted right up against one?

Most crucially, what were the physical barriers doing to us? What were they doing to peoples’ hearts and minds?

How could we do reconciliation work with any integrity in Belfast without grappling with the reality of publicly-funded, physically-reinforced segregation?

How could we do theology with any integrity in Belfast in the shadow of the separation barriers?

This book is an attempt to pick those questions apart. It explores what the barriers are, where they come from, why they matter, and what churches and people of faith can positively do to engage with them;

It seeks to transform the way the barriers are seen and understood by people of faith, how we do theological reflection in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and hopefully broadens our lens of what we feel we can reflect on;

Finally, it seeks to contribute to Irish theology by drawing on both liberation theology and theologies of reconciliation- but combining them in new, practical ways- helping us to better theologically engage with our post-conflict context- less violent, less deadly, but still divided, and still being divided.

If you’re interested in Irish history and politics, as well as in new forms of contextual and public theology, give ‘Facing the Wall’ a read and, if you feel it deserves it, please leave it a favourable review. Please also feel free to pass information about the book to those who might benefit from it or are interested in similar topics.

Hopefully you’ll find it interesting, thought-provoking, and beneficial…

Even if it never reaches ‘Eat Pray Love’ numbers…