BELFAST, Winter 2001, page 4

“Your Holiness, I hope you will see a people ready to settle old differences.” -- NORTHERN IRELAND'S FIRST MINISTER DAVID TRIMBLE, in welcoming the Dalai Lama to the conference.

THESE ARE OLD DIFFERENCES INDEED. I don’t profess to have any great understanding of the complexities of The Troubles as they unfolded in the six counties of Northern Ireland, which are more commonly known as Ulster. Shootings and other violence have long bubbled across Northern Ireland, but the onslaught of the worst years began about 1969. The violence prominently claimed the world's attention in 1972, the year of “Bloody Sunday” in Derry. That was when British troops fired into a crowd of non-violent Catholic protesters, killing 14 of them. Three days later, the British embassy in Dublin was burned down. Then the IRA bombed a British barracks. The bombs, riots, assassinations, internments, house ransackings and yet more tit-for-tat bombs and shootings would soon cascade out of control.

At its worst, an average of 275 people fell dead each year from The Troubles, in both Ireland and England, as the IRA took the battle over the Irish Sea to what it saw as the source of the problem. You could pick and choose among the statistics for the one most grim. Would it be July 21, 1972, known as "Bloody Friday," when no less than 22 bombs exploded in Belfast in one day, killing nine people? Or maybe just the totals for the high water mark year of 1972, when 467 people died, with 10,500 shooting incidents and 1,380 explosions?

Back in my country, we scratch our heads at what seems like a befuddling habit of hatred. After all, the only Catholics and Protestants who kill each other in America are the ones who accidentally drive their cars into each other on the highway. Yet just as in the Middle East there is more going on here than just differences over how to worship God.

This fight has as much to do with the deep-seated fears that Northern Ireland’s dominant powerbrokers -- the Protestants -- have of losing their power and becoming a minority if predominantly Catholic Ireland were ever to reunite all its 32 counties under a single Irish flag. (Ever seen the bumper sticker showing a silhouette of Ireland and the numbers “26 + 6 = 32”? That’s an Irish nationalist sympathizer at the wheel.)

This fight also has to do with Northern Ireland’s viciously subjugated Catholic minority and its own vicious response to that long political, social and cultural suffocation --- a.k.a. the IRA.

BUT TO GET AT THE DEEPEST ROOTS of this “tribal conflict,” as Northern Ireland history expert Brian Barton calls it, would mean looking far back into the history of colonial tension between the British and Irish. The “core event” in Ireland’s long struggle between Catholics and Protestants was the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, writes Thomas Keneally in his book “The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World” (Random House, 1998).

In that year, King William of Orange led his Protestant army in vanquishing the deposed King of England James II and his Irish Catholic allies at Ireland’s Boyne River. The hammer soon came down on native Irish Catholics as the British overlords consolidated their rule:

“To prevent any further Catholic uprising a series of Penal Laws were passed in the years following aimed at keeping the Irish powerless, poor and stupid,” Keneally writes. “The Catholic Irish were barred from serving as officers in the army or navy, or from practicing as lawyers... They could hold no civic post or office at all under the Crown. At the death of a Catholic landowner his land was to be divided amongst all his sons unless the eldest became a Protestant, in which case he could inherit the whole.”

A Catholic was also prohibited from owning a horse worth more than 5 English pounds, could not live within five miles of an incorporated town, and was proscribed from attending or keeping school, Keneally writes. He quotes 18th century orator and House of Commons member Edmund Burke, fulminating against the Penal Code as “a machine as well fitted for the oppression and impoverishment and degradation of the people, and the debasement of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”

But it would be just as wrong to say that pig-headed relations between Catholics and Protestants have always been the norm in Northern Ireland. There is a whole other history of well-intentioned, earnest attempts by Catholic and Protestant leaders, Irish and British, to try to build bridges between the communities and to create a more inclusive, balanced society in the six counties. Yet the failure of all such attempts to fundamentally alter the reigning social order cleared the way for the worst demons on both sides to take over once push really came to shove. And they did.

Given this past history, that is why the Good Friday Agreement (sheperded in no small way by American diplomacy led by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, Bill Clinton and others) is so groundbreaking and hopeful. The peace process has inched forward for several years now -- fitfully and painfully, it is true, and sometimes held together only by spit and long suffering patience, it has seemed. And there are those who would like to see the agreement derailed. These include the splinter group called the “Real IRA,” responsible for the horrific 1998 Omagh car bombing that killed 29 people, plus die-hard Protestant Unionists and other hard cases and old guard doubters on both sides.

But Ireland need only look to the weekly body counts coming out of Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip to know the cost of returning to old familiar habits of hatred.

“I hope the wavering men of Ulster Unionism are watching the agony in the Middle East... Look long and hard because it might stop you making the biggest mistake of the peace process.”
--FERGAL KEANE in an October, 2000 issue of The Independent, on political maneuvering in Northern Ireland.

THE DALAI LAMA AND FATHER FREEMAN disappear for long stretches from the Way of Peace conference. They flit between Derry and Belfast to meet political and religious leaders, as well as some of the many unsung peacemakers who worked quietly for years on the front lines of The Troubles, helping to lay the groundwork for the current detente. And -- at the Dalai Lama’s request that he meet average folk -- he and Father Freeman walk the so called “Peace Line” in West Belfast, the divided neighborhood which is ground zero for The Troubles in the city.

Those of us at the conference can chart the swath the dynamic duo of monks cuts across Northern Ireland by scanning headlines of Irish and English newspapers in Belfast shops:

“You Have to Live Side by Side," shouts one headline from the Belfast Telegraph, quoting the Tibetan leader.

"Bosom Buddies,” says a headline in The Irish Times, atop a photograph of the Dalai Lama with Gerry Adams, the famous Irish nationalist leader and head of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA.

“Ulster Is Urged to Heed Way of Dalai Lama,” says The Times of London.

“Dalai Lama Rises Above the Doubters,” says the Irish Times.

This last headline refers to the fact that not all in Ulster welcomed the smiling man of Tibet. “My feeling is that this visit will be treated with a considerable degree of cynicism as yet another attempt by a foreigner to meddle in our affairs, which does not have any real chance of success,” newspapers quoted Belfast’s Lord Mayor, Sammy Wilson, as saying. Wilson, whose pro British party lambasts the Good Friday pact as a sell-out to Catholic Irish Republicans, managed to be away on “civic duties” when the Dalai Lama came to Ulster City Hall for the session with Mary, Richard and Alistair. The High Sheriff of Belfast and lesser dignitaries instead greeted the arrival of the monk’s entourage at the front door to City Hall that morning.

The Irish, a self-aware folk, seemed well aware of the possibility that Wilson might be right in his dour view of the visit’s impact, given how enthusiastically Catholics and Protestants cling to tribal identities and hatreds. In West Belfast, the Dalai Lama planted a symbolic sapling along the Peace Line, a sort of mini-Berlin Wall separating the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. The following day, a cartoon on the Belfast Telegraph editorial page showed a beatific Dalai Lama beside the sapling, his hands steepled in a namaste of blessing as three glowering Irish thugs face him down. The lead thug thrusts an accusatory finger in the monk’s face and shouts: “Yeah, but are you a Protestant Buddhist or a Catholic Buddhist?”

“When human emotions come out of control, then the best part of the brain in which we make judgments cannot function properly.”-- THE DALAI LAMA, in remarks while planting a “peace tree” in West Belfast

MY FRIEND MICHAEL AND I set out early Sunday morning to walk the Peace Line ourselves. To get there from downtown, you can shell out six or seven pounds for a tour of these sectarian neighborhoods via one of the city's “Black Cabs” (so-called because they are black not because of the city’s funereal history although it could work either way). We decide to stroll there on foot. This makes for a more personal encounter with the colorful, surreal and often disturbing murals and markings of West Belfast.

Like dogs or wolves marking territory, Catholics and Protestants mark theirs in various ways. A curb or a pole daubed with orange, green and white (colors of the Irish flag) means you’re on Irish Republican turf. If the pole or curb bears blue, red and white splashes (British flag colors) you’re in Loyalist territory. (Belfast newspapers had reported the prior month that some Catholic homes had been the target of “paint bomb” sacks, full of blue, red and white paint.) Angry political graffiti and signs abound: “Disband the RUC child killers,” says a Catholic wall sign, referring to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland’s police force.

But it is the murals painted on entire walls that shout out the battle cries and deep losses, the fury and dark divisions between Catholics and Protestants. The most hallucinogenic one is found on the side of the Sinn Fein office building on Falls Road in Catholic West Belfast. In Technicolor glory, a mural perhaps 75 feet high and 50 feet across depicts a smiling, long-haired Bobby Sands looking much like a rock star. “Everyone, Republican or otherwise, has their own particular role to play,” it reads to the left of his boyish grin. And on the right: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” Sands’ body is buried right up the road in Milltown Cemetery.

Three blocks over in Protestant West Belfast, several walls are populated by figures hoisting assault rifles, dressed head to toe in black Ninja outfits, with only spooky eye and mouthholes visible. These murals glorify the alphabet soup of Protestant Ulster’s paramilitary outfits like the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) or the UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters). “Lamh Dearg Abu,” cries one, in Gaelic: “Ulster to Victory.”

The Peace Line itself is anything but peaceable. It is actually a high brick and sometimes metal wall, topped by corrugated sheets of rusted metal and matted tangles of barbed wire. On either side of this tangible manifestation of The Troubles lie depressing, rubble-strewn lots, graffiti splashed walls and yet more barbed wire, a shared dead zone that keeps Catholic and Protestant residents out of each other’s spaces and faces.

When the Dalai Lama and Father Freeman had come this way the day before our visit, they accomplished a rare feat. Locked gates which lead from Protestant quarters onto the Catholic Springfield Road near the Peace Line were thrown open -- the gates are unlocked rarely during the year -- and Catholics and Protestants came out to mingle at the tree-planting ceremony. “Brilliant” is what the Irish say when they want to remark on how great something is. “To see Catholics and Protestants standing together, it was brilliant,” one Catholic woman was quoted in the papers about the event.

Yet the day after the monks’ visit, grey clouds thickly coat the sky. The day is cold and not brilliant at all. The Peace Line is a gloomy place. But our eyes catch a spot of color. It’s a vivid row of green, yellow, white, red and blue prayer flags still hung over the road. They twist in the wind or tangle up in places on the clumps of barbed wire atop the walls. Area school children from both sides of the wall made the flags for the Dalai Lama’s visit, decorating them with Buddhist and Christian images. They waved them in greeting when he arrived. (And if you think Buddhist monks are always models of equilibrium, note one Belfast reporter’s description of that moment: “The cheers from the local schoolchildren waving prayer flags appeared to overwhelm the Buddhist leader...”)

A string of the flags decorated with Buddha heads and lotus flowers now dragged upon the pavement. Michael takes out a pen knife. We each cut off one of the flags, which are about the size of a face cloth. My flag is shamrock-green and features a Buddha face stenciled on in red paint the color of the Dalai Lama’s robes. I stash it in my rucksack, a battle zone souvenir. I intend to frame it, to mark at least a cameo appearance by the Buddha in West Belfast.