In the shadow of the peace walls

Belfast's new Victoria Square resembles the rebuilt Potsdamer Platz in Berlin - but the Northern Irish capital also features darker reminders of the once-divided German city

There are now 40 of them and, unlike pre-1989 Berliners or Palestinians on the West Bank, the people of Belfast who live their lives in the shadow of a wall want them to stay.

peacewallBLOG.jpgThe main peace wall beside Cuper Way in west Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photograph: Paul McErlane

On September 10 1969, just under a month after the loyalist onslaught on Catholic homes between the Falls and Shankill Roads in west Belfast, the British army's most senior officer made the following rash prediction.

Surveying a series of barriers the army had erected to fence off arterial routes between the two rival areas, Lieutenant General Sir Ian Freeland said: "The peace line will be a very, very temporary affair. We will not have a Berlin Wall or anything like that in this city."

Belfast's walls have of course survived the Berlin Wall; they are now permanent features of the cityscape in the west and north of the city and they have even become a must-see stop on the so-called "terror tours". The one wall that most resembles the old one in Berlin even has similar graffiti art adorning and, just like the West Berlin side had, the names of tourists painted and drawn on the barrier.

The 40 barriers are each a monument to failure, namely to the enduring sectarian divisions that continue despite the historic power-sharing coalition at Stormont still led by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness.

Last month a survey of people living on either side of the walls was carried out by the US-Ireland Alliance. The findings showed that residents had a split attitude to the peace-lines.

While more than four fifths of respondents said they wanted the barriers to be ultimately taken down, over 60% said it was too soon to do so. A majority also said that they didn't have enough confidence in the police to protect their communities in the event of the walls coming down.

Given those statistics, it seemed to be a brave (some might argue electorally foolhardy) move on Monday when the nationalist SDLP proposed a motion to Belfast city council to support the reduction and ultimate removal of the peace lines.

Almost immediately, the SDLP's North Belfast councillor Alban Maginness, who proposed the motion, was bombarded with cries of hypocrisy.

Two Democratic Unionist members of the council pointed out a party colleague of Maginness's had recently lobbied for the construction of a peace wall in the Mountainview area of North Belfast. One of the DUP councillors said that he had been contacted by elderly members of his community pressing him to block any moves to pull the walls down. Many OAPs, the DUP said, would move house if the barriers were no longer there.

The debate became so heated inside the council that the DUP accused Maginness - in reality a moderate, thoughtful, quietly spoken man - of being guilty of trying to "raise concerns, inflame situations and raise tensions".

However it wasn't just their unionist opponents who started unpicking the Maginness proposal. Alex Attwood, the SDLP assembly member for West Belfast, stressed that "we need to build walls to protect lives and property but at the same time we look forward to the day when those walls can come down".

Attwood's remarks clearly reflected the divided opinions of those surveyed by the US-Ireland Alliance: nice idea, but not yet, thank you very much.

So Belfast will remain for quite some time a city with two faces.

The new face is typified by Victoria Square, a new, gleaming, dome-topped cathedral for shopping, eating and drinking in the city centre, which was officially opened on Thursday night by Paisley and McGuinness.

The complex was built to represent post-ceasefire 21st century Belfast and bears an uncanny resemblance to the Sony Centre in Postdamer Platz in central Berlin.

But those other reminders of cold-war Berlin stand defiant around sectarian hot spots in north and west Belfast.