Word: belfast
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...classroom of the Stella Maris Secondary School, a brick-and-stucco series of afterthoughts that could pass for a warehouse. Stella Maris is in an unusual position because it is a Roman Catholic school located in a Protestant area, and it holds a special place in modern Belfast history because Bobby Sands is an alumnus. Yet the Stella Maris students make no big thing of their connection to the hunger striker. A couple of boys were once caught playing a game called Bobby Sands, but that's about the extent of it. Ask Stephen and Malachy, both 15, what they...
According to most accounts, Paul is a very odd, timid exception in a city that has become famous for its violent children. In fact, the reverse is true. There are plenty of violent children in Belfast, to be sure: kids who kill time stealing cars for joyrides or lobbing petrol bombs at the army. But they are a small knot of a minority. Most Belfast children are like Paul. They have not all suffered so directly from the Troubles, but their response to the Troubles is similar. They carry no hatred in their hearts, they show a will to survive...
...wires hold. Belfast is rich in wire, coiled and barbed, and in corrugated iron. (You could make your fortune in corrugated iron here.) Great sheets of it are slabbed up in front of government buildings and on the "peace line" that separates the Catholic Falls Road from the Protestant Shankill. In the centers of the streets are "dragon's teeth"?huge squares of stone arranged in uneven rows to prevent fast getaways. Downtown in the "control zone," no car may be parked unattended. Solitary figures sit like dolls behind the wheels to prove there is no bomb. Armored personnel...
...Belfast children have been touched by the violence...
What has happened over the long years is that chaos has become normal, and in its normality lies a basic feature of a child's life in Belfast. Alexander Lyons, a Belfast psychiatrist, points out that in a chaotic world, antisocial behavior is acceptable. That is why he finds so little of what might be termed "emotional disturbance," in the clinical sense, among the Belfast children, since, in a way, the whole place is emotionally disturbed. The kids play war games, but there is nothing unique in that. Indeed, their war games are made more normal by the fact that...