In the first episode of the most recent season of “Derry Girls,” the sitcom about Catholic schoolgirls growing up in Northern Ireland in the nineteen-nineties, at the tail end of the Troubles, an effort is made to bring the teen-agers of Derry together. A group of local Protestant boys are bussed in from a nearby school, and the students are asked to list their similarities and differences on a chalkboard. They start large (“Protestants are British and Catholics are Irish!” someone calls out) and end small (“Catholics have more freckles!”; “Protestants hate ABBA!”) until the board is full of differences. No similarities.
“It just resonated with me so much,” Alistair Hamill, who teaches teen-agers of a similar age in Lurgan, about forty-five minutes outside of Belfast, in Northern Ireland, told me recently. Hamill is fifty-one, and genial, with a shock of white hair. He moved to Lurgan in 1992, several years before the Good Friday Agreement brought a tentative peace to the area. He took up a post at Lurgan College, a red-brick, majority-Protestant school founded in the eighteen-seventies, with some trepidation. Because it was built before the town was segregated, the school is located on the Catholic side of town, and Hamill, housed in teachers’ quarters nearby, often felt nervous about his safety. During the Troubles, County Armagh, where Lurgan is located, suffered five hundred and twenty fatalities—more than anywhere outside of Belfast. So-called tit-for-tat murders filled the news: One day, in Belfast, in 1998, a Protestant man was shot inside his carpet shop, and, hours later, in retribution, a Catholic taxi-driver was killed. Six months before Hamill arrived in Lurgan, a bomb set by the Irish Republican Army destroyed several buildings in the center of town. “Totally decimated,” Hamill said. “And that was my introduction to Lurgan.”
Today, Lurgan is a mostly quiet town of about thirty-five thousand residents, split between Protestants and Catholics. There’s a main street that’s lined with shops and restaurants and strung with festive lights during the holiday season. There are no peace walls separating the two populations, as there are in Belfast, but evidence of Lurgan’s past is everywhere, if you know where to look. An invisible line runs down Union Street, in the center of town, dividing Catholics and Protestants. They have separate housing, schools, sports fields, and green spaces. Most shops and restaurants close at 5 P.M., a practice intended to avoid outbursts of late-night violence, though it also leaves the streets eerily dark and empty. It is possible for a Catholic teen-ager to leave for university without ever having met a Protestant her age. “Even if they wanted to meet up an evening in their own town,” Hamill said, “Where are they going to go?”
Recently, in the frenzied run-up to Brexit, the divide has been made more visible. In Lurgan, as elsewhere in Northern Ireland, party allegiance tends to fall along religious lines. When I visited in early December, just before the U.K.’s general election, posters for the D.U.P, or the Democratic Unionist Party, which has historically fought to keep close ties with the U.K., hung in the Protestant area. Signs for Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party, which wants a united Ireland, hung in the Catholic neighborhoods. (The Sinn Féin signs were written in both English and Irish; the Irish Language Act, which would make Irish a second official language, has become another lightning rod for debate about the region’s future.) Many Catholics in the region have been worried that Brexit will involve a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which would undermine the Good Friday Agreement. Boris Johnson’s new plan could instead put an economic border in the Irish Sea, cutting Northern Ireland off from the rest of the U.K., infuriating many Protestants.
The uncertainty has reinvigorated questions of identity in the region that might otherwise have continued to recede, slowly, into the past. In April, in Derry, a journalist named Lyra McKee was killed during a riot. In July, police intercepted a bomb in Craigavon, on the outskirts of Lurgan, believed to have been set by the Continuity I.R.A. In Lurgan, old fears of violence are rising to the surface again. “There’s still very definitely an undercurrent of fear,” Michael Walters, a police officer who has served the area for ten years, told me.
At Lurgan College, in addition to teaching geography, Hamill oversees the school’s Shared Education Programme, part of an initiative across Northern Ireland to bring young people from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds together. Last year, he enlisted Hannah Murtagh, a geography and religion teacher at St. Ronan’s College, a Catholic school across town, to take part in a mapping project. Walters signed on to help. One snowy day, they rented a bus and took forty-five students on a tour of Lurgan, stopping at sites that are meaningful to each community. Some of the stops were obviously related to the Troubles—like an I.R.A. memorial—but others were not: a section of a public park, the town center. The students were asked to rank how safe they felt in each place, anonymously, on an app on their phones. They created a map of their fears in real time and then analyzed the data. The final product was a rendering of the town’s sectarian segregation. The students found that both Protestant and Catholic teen-agers could identify the town’s invisible dividing line and felt uncomfortable when crossing it. All of the students felt comfortable in both schools, which felt like neutral territory. Not so at a dimly lit underpass outside of St. Ronan’s, where everyone wanted out.
After word spread about the project, three student representatives, along with Hamill, Murtagh, and Walters, were invited, improbably, to a conference in San Diego, where they presented the project at a conference, in front of nineteen thousand people. In a video of the presentation, the students look a little shocked to be there, but they are serious about the data. “We can see the clusters of surveys that have been collected at each location, which I will analyze next,” Leon Van Der Westhuizen, then thirteen, told the audience. (“We did a lot of practice,” he told me later. “It was still a bit scary.”) “As geographers, and citizen scientists, our data adds another layer on top of the census data, representing our lived experiences,” Hannah Trew, from Lurgan College, said. She mentioned her fellow-presenter, Aiesha Mouhsine, who wore a red St. Ronan’s jacket. “Aiesha and I are both the same age, live in the same town,” she said. “However, if it weren’t for this project, we would have never met.”
Nearly a year after the study, on a bright, cold morning last month, Hamill and Murtagh set out to repeat it. This time, they were working with researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, and they had refined some of their questions, including adding options for gender and age. They gathered a new set of students from each school in a classroom at Lurgan Junior High. Laminated posters on the wall listed desirable character traits (“kind,” “sensible”) and translations for the word “welcome.” Hamill, who wore a suit, addressed the group. He described the route, which would run through fifteen stops and end at Lurgan College, where they would analyze the data. He asked the students to be honest with their answers. He turned a little emotional. “The people that are making decisions genuinely are listening,” he said. “You guys have a voice today, and I think that’s tremendously exciting.” The students, in their uniforms, shifted uncomfortably, then formed groups, of two Protestants and two Catholics each, and left for the bus.
The first stop was a community center on the Protestant side of town. It was decorated with a large plaque for the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.), a loyalist paramilitary organization that’s now classified as a terrorist group by the U.K. During the Troubles, the U.V.F. planted bombs and staged targeted attacks, killing some five hundred people, before formally decommissioning its weapons, in 2009. The building was squat and on the main road out of town, with cars whizzing by. Below the U.V.F. sign was a poster for the Craigavon Protestant Boys Flute Band, established in 1966, with the inscription “Our only crime is loyalty.” The students logged their emotional responses on their phones. At a later stop, near the entrance of a large public park, we stopped at another Ulster memorial. Laura Butler, a cheerful seventeen-year-old from Lurgan College, who had two pencils tucked into her blazer pocket, said she felt just fine. “Everywhere we’ve been so far has been on our side, you know what I mean?” she said. Scott Morrow, who wore a “Head Boy” badge, said, “We’re so used to it. Our primary school is just up the road.”
