Northern Ireland's Troubles

"I think so. Imagined Communities , as I’ve already said, is the most enlightening of these books for the general reader, but the book I perhaps admire most is Northern Ireland’s Troubles: the Human Cost . This was written by a team led by Marie Fay and her colleagues in Belfast, and the reason I would go to that one is that these are not super high powered scholars like Anderson. And they also aren’t man-on-the-street voices like Survival in Beirut. They’re practitioners, actually social workers, who spend their whole lives in Northern Ireland watching the city suffer from its partitions – and there are approximately thirty of these so-called ‘peace lines’ – dividing Protestant and Catholic working class neighbourhoods in Belfast. They’re still there and they’re growing in number. Belfast has had the greatest progress of all these cities in terms of political progress, and the worst entrenchment of the physical reality of partition. It’s totally weird to me, I can’t explain it. Especially since Belfast, at least on paper, is the most affluent of all these places. Yes, so here’s a group of very dedicated professionals who made it their business not simply to lament the ethnic partitions, but decided to walk through every metric they could think of. They made this great decision. They decided not to rant ideologically or at least in ethical terms about what’s wrong with partition. They thought ‘we’re gonna tell you about the incidence of alcohol abuse, drug addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, cardiac arrest, depression etc etc amongst people who live near one of these walls. And sure enough the statistics go through the roof as soon as you get close to one of the lines. So that while all inhabitants of Belfast live from day to day with the weight of this situation what these guys showed was that the cost in terms of health and productivity and all the other economic generators that go with those things go up dramatically as you get closer to these things. It’s the first. Most definitely the first. And that’s what’s so brilliant about their work. Because they don’t just suggest it they prove it."