Northern Ireland’s Troubled Peace
Every time Paula McCartney drives across a bridge to the Belfast neighborhood known as the Markets, she crosses the River Lagan, which she now associates with the deaths of both of her brothers. One died by suicide in 2000. The other was killed in a last gasp of paramilitary violence five years later.
“For a long time, I would just try to avoid driving on the bridges,” Paula told me. “It was all just too painful and too close to home to think how we lost first Gerard and then Robert. The river just always brought it all back.”
[Read: The Good Friday Agreement in the age of Brexit]
The McCartney sisters, all five of them, had gathered in the parlor of a pleasant home with a garden off a suburban cul-de-sac just outside the city, a world away from the menacing, narrow warrens of the Short Strand neighborhood, where they’d grown up amid Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence known as the Troubles. They lived in a predominantly Catholic and republican area on the east bank of the River Lagan, hemmed in by traditionally Protestant loyalist communities of East Belfast, patrolled by British soldiers and bristling with paramilitary organizations. One of the sisters, Catherine, left the Short Strand for this quiet suburb in 2003. Paula eventually moved in across the street, and several others now also live nearby.
The sisters, who range in age from 47 to 59, gathered at
