Rosaleen Petticrew once had compelling reason to appreciate the high walls that separated her Catholic part of Belfast from the adjoining Protestant neighbourhood.
For five dreadful months in 2000, she and other mothers from Ardoyne had to walk their daughters to Holy Cross school past a mob of loyalists who hurled insults, rocks and bottles. Even by Northern Ireland standards it was a vile protest and made headlines around the world. Walls did not cover the whole school route, but Rosaleen still valued them as a bulwark. “I’d never felt that hatred before.”
Retaining Troubles-era “peace walls” between Catholic and Protestant areas seemed advisable even though the 1998 Good Friday agreement had supposedly ushered in an era of peace and reconciliation.
The sentiment might have calcified, like
