Word: belfasters
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...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...
...means I'm a Prod. But if I had said hatch, I'd have been a Taig." She laughs mockingly. "Still, most of the time it's not the children who are the bigots. It's the parents." She adds that she feels a lot closer to Catholics in Belfast than she does to Protestants in England: "You see, we have shared an experience here?a life...
...other, yet there is an unspoken affinity between the two sides as well, an affinity that does not exist between the Protestant Northern Irish and the English, or even between the Catholics in the north and south. The connections show up in indirect ways. Teen-age girls in Belfast adore the romantic novels of Joan Lingard, especially Across the Barricades ("when Catholic Kevin and Protestant Sadie are old enough for their hitherto un acknowledged attraction to flower into love"). It is not wishful thinking, exactly; Bernadette admits she would never date a Prod, because "nothing could come...