Northern Ireland's Invisible Border (Part 1/2)

you have a population that considers itself essentially irish and a population that considers itself essentially british i was shot four times and shot twice in the chest and once in each arm five soldiers and patsy were blown to pieces there was no body there was just bits there's sort of constant cycle of rebellion and suppression rebellion and suppression these communities are left they reckon room the levels of mental health unemployment deprivation the high levels of suicide in the city is crazy it's national crisis we've just replaced one master by an hour all those deaths and what for before [Music] nothing [Music] so this is the uk side i'm about to come up to the border and i think this this literally right here is the line the color of the lines on the side of the road changes from white to yellow this is it you would have to really be paying attention to recognize that any of this is is here that you're going from one country to another but then this sign we have a sign right here that pretty much tells you everything you need to know it says welcome to northern ireland but the word northern in northern ireland has been painted out little things like that tell you that this is actually an incredibly contested border that people are not happy that it's here that people are willing to at a minimum to face property to to express their feelings about it and do a lot more than just to face property [Music] thirty years ago this border crossing was bombed by the irish republican army [Music] the attack was part of the troubles a civil conflict fought essentially over this border ireland is divided in two the republic of ireland is sovereign and independent while northern ireland is ruled by the united kingdom irish nationalists and republicans reject that division to them the british in the north are an illegitimate occupying force so they took up arms to kick the british out and unite ireland into one country in short to get rid of the border that's why in october 1990 the ira bombed the koch quinn border checkpoint even in a conflict known for its atrocities the attacks stood out for its cruelty hi there how are you doing i'm fine how are you david i am you're more than welcome would you like to comment yes please thank you so this is euron patsy that's me and pattie kathleen gillespie and her husband patsy didn't think of themselves as political people but patsy had a job in a british army barracks and in the eyes of the ira that made him a collaborator he was a helper for the chef and the kitchens and fort george it didn't matter what you did in the camp if you're a civilian worker they said that you'd be targeted one night kathleen and patsy came home to find a group of masked gunmen holding their children hostage i was pushed into the living room where jennifer my daughter she was 12 at the time she was sitting in an armchair crying there was a gunman standing over i think they left three in the house with us and two went away with fancy in the car uh they drove over the border koshkon see what happened was uh patsy was chained to a van then he just drove into the checkpoint where he was told to drive it was detonated by remote control and five soldiers and patsy were blown blown to pieces there was nobody there was just bits hurry can somebody sit down around the table and plant something like that how do you think about the mentality of people like that who can just sit down and cold bloodedly plant stuff like that [Music] to answer that question you have to know the story of how the irish border came to exist in the first place it's a very old story england has been trying to colonize ireland for more than 800 years in the early 1600s they sent waves of protestant settlers to the northeast corner of the largely catholic island they turned the city of derry into a colonial outpost and renamed it londonderry so these walls were built by the protestant british settlers to protect themselves from the population they were colonizing the irish population the intention was actually to replace the irish gaelic population and turn this into a protestant british territory it did establish a majority protestant population in this part of ireland but it also triggered a sort of constant cycle of rebellion and suppression rebellion and suppression [Music] ireland won independence from the uk in the 1920s [Music] but rather than let go of the mostly protestant north the british simply drew a line around it and kept it for themselves that's where the border came from and it left two groups of people inside northern ireland that to put it mildly don't see eye to eye even though to an outsider like me these populations don't look different they don't seem particularly different they consider themselves massively different you have a population that considers itself essentially irish and a population that considers itself essentially british [Music] you can see that divide everywhere you go in northern ireland and you can hear it too we're pulling into a tiny little village called green castle in the middle of rural northern ireland and we're here because tonight at the local pub there's going to be a performance of traditional irish rebel songs which is the body of old folk songs about the irish nationalist struggle against the british [Music] oh [Music] everyone inside knows the lyrics to every single one of these songs even if they're not actively singing along and um he's been playing for over he's been playing for like an hour and 15 minutes and he's still not out of [Music] songs [Music] [Applause] is [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the people on the other side of the divide call themselves unionists or loyalists because they're loyal to the british crown they have their own musical traditions we're in castle durg which is a small village that's right on the border it's like less than a mile from the border this is a loyalist youth marching band [Music] for young people like mason caldwell these bands are social clubs but they also enforce this strong connection to the past what does it mean to you to be unionist that's just really the tradition that i've grown up right you know with my dad and then there was a stage i actually fell out with him over something because i i was about to go with a catholic with him and then he felt like oh my god he fell out you about about going out with a catholic girl i i didn't go out with her though i was close to her then i didn't yeah but i didn't really understand it and i started telling my stories about the things he grew up around kinda understood then like right i kind of have to like stick by this no type of thing so would you go out with a castle girl now not really suppose you can't really because i've got a girlfriend so no but i mean let's say you didn't have your curl cut girlfriend would you just in principle would you go out with a catholic probably not no all right especially because the bond was put so much into the band you know they kind of saw it just to go out with one and then get kicked out for it they would kick you out of the band for dating a catholic girl i would what is it that you understood what is it that he told you that that made you think about this differently just kind of explained to me all that happened throughout his lifetime and how something does start again and there's me protestant going with a catholic and so on started well i could probably be targeted easily you know so he was worried about it he was worried about me just in case something did happen again because you never know the ways and i could start up easily you know just as there were republican-armed groups like the ira there were loyalist paramilitaries as well fighting to keep northern ireland in the uk tit-for-tat killings between them created the misconception that this was essentially a sectarian conflict between catholics and protestants but that account leaves out a major player the british state it's helpful to think about it more as basically an insurgency a nationalist insurgency against the british state and as part of its counter-insurgency strategy that state in many cases allied and collaborated extensively with local paramilitary organizations loyalist paramilitary organizations like the ulster defense association and the ulster volunteer force the uda and the uvf obviously that counter-insurgency didn't work all it did was add fuel to the fire as counter-insurgencies often do this place is a perfect example of that and there are places like this all over the city it's a bookmaker's shop so a place where people go place bets in the middle of a predominantly catholic neighborhood in 1992 a loyalist militia the uda two gunmen came to this place just walked in and shot it up [Music] years later it was discovered that one of the firearms that they used to perpetrate the attack was actually provided to them by the police by the royal ulster constabulary it shows you that the british government wasn't like a neutral force british government was extensively collaborating with one side of the conflict which were the loyalists because the loyalists were essentially fighting on their behalf mark sykes survived the shooting niall murphy is his lawyer together they're trying to hold the british state accountable for the attack in court i was shot four times at least four times and shot twice in the chest and once in each arm and i still have a bullet large than my chest from my one week old i've lived in this area i've actually lived in the street so i know what this community went through but you had to live your life you had to go and do normal things and normal things for normal people was getting their bookmakers on a wednesday and having a bet on a horse race they weren't involved in politics they weren't involved in political parties that weren't involved in in the conflict there were people in there having a bet on a way anything the way that this conflict gets talked about often gives the impression that this was a conflict between two sort of warring ethnic tribes that hated each other and that's why they were killing each other and you don't tend to hear a lot about the role that the british state played in this conflict the greatest trick that they ever pulled on the international stage was to relegate it to a squabble between two sectarian tribes that was a lie when we get the truth about how our loved ones were murdered it shows that the state knew that its own citizens were going to be murdered with weapons that they supplied then it no longer becomes a civil conflict between two worn trades we see this agreement this treaty as addressing the wounds that have damaged our society the troubles ended in 1998 with the good friday agreement both sides put down their weapons the british withdrew their troops and the border was left open there's been violence since then but it's a shadow of what it used to be most people in northern ireland have moved on from the war even the ones you'd least expect gary donnelly is a dissident republican meaning a republican who to this day disagrees with the ira's decision to put down its weapons but he's opted for a different set of tactics he's now a local elected official and he helps run a community center for vulnerable people including former prisoners and veterans of the troubles breathing breathe once you breathe our bear start to disappear do you make god disappear i'm a little scared of the neck things [Laughter] who taught you this stuff my yoga teacher three yoga teachers come in the long cash and one we taught you the movements the heart hearty to breath and then the anatomy all cash is a prison one flesh is a prison right under 14 years two to season then voiced it [Laughter] we've got street cred in the city because of our past we're history and who we are i have a life legend say i can be sent back to jail at any given time this year breakfast thing is something that's cropped up because everybody coming here in the morning there's nothing to do after a week stops everybody's left with their own mental health their own problems and what are we doing most guys would take the drink very few people i know from jail who don't drink and don't smoke you guys have people from unionist communities coming and using the services that you provide yes repeatedly it's all working class people so why wouldn't they have you know managers you know everyone always talks about you know republicans and loyalists national unions catholics and protestants people don't talk about people don't talk about it in class term if you're raising those issues and saying it's a class issue then somebody has to be responsible for the for the failures and that's a step so the state doesn't really portray themselves to be failing they want to portray us as people who are feral that can't get on we're a gang against the gang and we've had 100 years of that and it's been maintained and the brits have maintained it by coercion by violence by you know divide and conquer certain people orange and green they've done it everywhere they've went they've done it in india the americans and the brits did it in iraq divisions that's the nature of them well if you willing sectarian conflict yeah sectarianism such the british you know make one section of the the community feel that they have more rights than another give them all the the perks give them all the jobs employment the reality is that's all breaking down here in a sense all the big factories that were extremely almost exclusively uh populated by the unionist community have all gone and effectively the people here here can afford these communities are left they reckon rule that the levels of of mental health and the levels of youth unemployment deprivation you know the high levels of suicide in the city is crazy it's national crisis but you don't hear about it australia has shown that it's a failure nobody can hold on to success but my opinion about murder was in there a lot of this a lot of these problems will be alleviated and the current situation that they have now isn't isn't working that never ever addressed the core issue the peace dividend that was promised in order to sell that you have to understand people were coming through a a struggle troubles a wire whatever level you want to put on it and people were war weary and thought well this is a new start but here we are now almost a quarter of a century litter and for people on the ground very little has changed we've just replaced one master by another one thing you hear all the time in northern ireland is that everything is political absolutely everything is politicized it's impossible to do something ordinary without it becoming political somehow even the name of the city right if you're a nationalist you call it dairy if you're a unionist you call it londonderry um but people have been trying to move on from that since since the peace process we're about to go meet someone who is a street artist and his his whole thing which here in this context is surprisingly controversial is to just make art in public places that is not explicitly aligned with either the nationalist or the unionist cause so we're on the corner of william street so we're just going to head on to the bog site which is famous for our murals the people's gallery it's called in derry where donal grew up militant street art has been a part of the urban fabric for decades it's a tradition he's trying to move beyond but not leave behind i think it's really important that these murals are here i mean this is part of me this is part of my culture and my story growing up as well but it's also just as important that the stuff i do is a part of our culture and sid as well because we have such a vibrant city out with amazing people on it [Music] do you think things here would be better if the border simply ceased to exist me personally yes but it's not going to be easy it's not going to be an easy thing i mean i think if it was going to happen it has to be in new yearland as well and tolerance is the key to everything people have to be very tolerant of each other and i think that's what hasn't happened in the past since partition people were not tolerant for all our cultures our identities and stuff but we have to be in the world we love i know we definitely have to be um and with brexit lumen that's like uh scary brexit and the whole idea of building borders back up is actually insane when the uk voted to leave the european union it left ireland split between an eu country and a non-eu country that means that after 22 years of peace britain and ireland will once again be separated by some kind of border it was a probably the first time in my life where it was absolutely speechless when the woke up i watched the news and just seen the brexit was happening northern ireland was never mentioned and the whole brexit laid off it was never mentioned it was like it was it was like an afterthought like we were an afterthought and that's what people feel here we're like hold on people have been working really really really hard for 20 years they all pull peace and try their best but when somebody else is making decisions for you that's when jeopardizing all of that in jeopardy without any consultation and that's the thing that's really difficult and that's the thing i think is going to backfire and that's the scary thing [Music] do you think things are better now that the border is open than they were back when this happened it's okay there are no checkpoints to stop you but i can't help wondering what's going on underneath it all you know i don't think it's gone i still think there's a lot of underlying stuff there and i'm afraid it'll reach ugly ahead again terrified that that's going to happen all over again i think everybody's terrified everybody's afraid that it's not finished with [Music] you

Channel: VICE News

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Id: ndo6r2OMdhE

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021