Manifestations of Conflict in a post-conflict state: material, memory and meaning in contemporary...

RUIN MEMORIES: MATERIALITIES, AESTHETICS AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE RECENT PAST SECTION – Abandonment Laura McAtackney (School of Social Justice, University College Dublin) [email protected] TITLE -‐ Manifestations of conflict in a post-‐ceasefire state: material, memory and meaning in contemporary Northern Ireland ABSTRACT: The Northern Irish Troubles formally ended with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Despite this political consensus aiming to consign violence to the past the material traces of the conflict continue to haunt the peace process. In a post-‐conflict, but still divided, society the experiences of the recent past continue to inform identity, memory and how we deal with the enduring material presences of violent confrontations and societal fractures. Using the case-‐studies of Long Kesh / Maze prison and segregation walls known as ‘peace lines’ that remain in working class areas of Belfast, this paper will explore the various materializations and meanings of abandonment and ruination in this context. This chapter will argue that continued material presences act as inhibitors of forgetting but can also have active and disruptive impacts on contemporary peace. In engaging with the themes of ruin and memory it will be demonstrated that these enduring material presences – and the form and scale of their abandonment -‐ act to expose the impossibility of completely ignoring the tumults of the recent past and reveal material critiques of the peace process. KEYWORDS: Northern Ireland, Troubles, conflict, memory, ruination, abandonment, material, structures, prison, peace lines, walls, memorials INTRODUCTION The signing of the Good Friday Agreement (hereafter ‘the Agreement’) in 1998

publically confirmed the political consensus that the long-‐term internecine

conflict in Northern Ireland – euphemistically known as ‘the Troubles’ (c1968-‐

c1999) -‐ had ended. Considered a low-‐level guerilla war, it was one of the longest

running civil conflicts in post-‐World War II Western Europe. There were over

3,600 deaths (McKitterick et al 1999) and over 40,000 injuries as a direct result

of the violence. Estimates have suggested that almost half of the province’s small

and close-‐knit population knew someone who could be placed in either category

(Fitzduff and O’Hagan 2000). Despite a number of high-‐profile political crises

since the Agreement – including the need to restate the principles of peace in the

St Andrews Agreement (2006) -‐ the paramilitary ceasefires have fundamentally

held. The period since 1998 has not inappropriately been known as ‘the peace

process’. One of the key issues that have emerged through this transitional

period has been the meaning and treatment of physical remnants of the conflict.

They have continued to be prominent, if decaying, material presences in both

countryside and cityscape.

The importance of this issue is hardly surprisingly given the range and scale of

remains that materially persist into the peace process. From ephemera to

monumental structures, remnants of the Troubles have continued to manifest

the presence and threat of violence as they uncomfortably co-‐exist with peace

process narratives of normalisation. They survive as sporadic presences whose

very existence exposes the fragility of peace. I argue that the public significance

placed on these remnants of conflict reveals the uncertainties engendered by the

incomplete nature of the political Agreements, particularly the deliberate

sidelining of the issue of ‘how the past should be remembered and explained’

(McGrattan 2009: 164). This ambivalence about how to deal with the past has

particularly materialised in a small number of celebrated, contested cases – such

as Long Kesh / Maze prison -‐ but the limbo of abandonment and ruination

through deliberate forgetting has been the fate of the majority of Troubles-‐

related remnants.

Largely ignored by local media, who initially emphasized a perceived public

demand to materially represent the transition to peace by “tearing down the

past” (Belfast Telegraph 29 July 2005) and taking the “first steps to

normalisation” (Irish News 28 August 2005), the physical remnants of the

Troubles have nevertheless maintained a high public profile. Over a decade after

the ‘end’ of the conflict, its material presences continue to hold an elevated

position in the post-‐conflict context, particularly in discussions of how the past is

remembered and who are the victims, victors and losers of the peace. They act as

a material representation of how the past is being remembered in the present

and how society has, and has not, moved on. This chapter will dissect how a

number of ‘troubling remnants’ (Jarman 2002) have developed and interplayed

with narratives and realities of obsolescence, abandonment and ruination since

1998.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MATERIAL, MEMORY AND THE RECENT PAST IN

CONTEMPORARY NORTHERN IRELAND

During the course of the three decades of civil conflict in Northern Ireland

manifestations of abnormal social relations proliferated from overtly military

constructions to encompass, at least in part, virtually all civic infrastructure. This

militarization of society was most obvious in the development of a visually

prominent and overt military infrastructure. Vast army bases were placed in

strategic, flashpoint and Republican areas and previously inauspicious police

stations becoming heavily fortified ‘castles of the North’ (Clarke 2005: 2) in both

urban and rural contexts. The vast increase in imprisonment figures that

resulted from the civil conflict saw Northern Ireland swiftly transforming from

having one of the smallest prison populations in Europe in 1968 – around 700

prisoners immediately prior to the Troubles (Feldman 1991: 148) – to estimates

in 1973 that the population was nearing 4000 (NIO/14/6, PRONI, 1973). The

elevated presence and impacts of mass political imprisonment have had ongoing

repercussion throughout and beyond the conflict including the prominent role of

many ex-‐prisoners – and their perspectives -‐ into peace process politics.

One of the most notable impacts of the conflict on Northern Irish social relations,

was the intensification and increasing materialisation of segregation of working

class communities. This includes a move towards materially defined ethnic

enclaves. Segregation continues to be evident in urban planning, including the

creation of major road schemes that also acted to divide antagonistic neighbours,

and changes in public housing projects. Traditional working class rows of back-‐

to-‐back terraced housing have been sporadically replaced by American-‐style

defensive cul-‐de-‐sacs, which have been described in their original US context as a

means of social control and differentiation (Blakeley & Snyder 1995). Separation

has been further emphasized by the insidious growth of so-‐called ‘peace lines’.

These linear structures take a variety of forms including monumental walls,

lengths of fencing, roadscapes and/or facilitated liminal areas and continue to be

used to divide ethnic communities.

The enduring existence, and even extension, of the material presences of the

conflict coupled with the lack of government engagement with the difficult

recent past interlinks with collective identity and memory in a potentially

dangerous way in this context. Maurice Halbwachs asserts that collective

memories stem from individual memories that draw on a specific group context

at a particular time (1992: 22). Such a distinction reveals that although

memories are essentially personal and unique they draw on collective aspects.

Therefore, collective memory is critical in the societal selection of what is

remembered and what is forgotten. Cillian McGrattan asserts that in transitional

societies such as contemporary Northern Ireland the past, and how it is collectively

remembered, remains a difficult and disruptive influence on the present (2013: 10).

McGrattan has argued that this situation arises because in such societies ideas of the

past are innately connected to ideas about contemporary identity (2013: 7). Without

consensus as to what the past means or how it should be remembered the material

presences of the conflict are latent but potentially divisive reminders of an unspoken

past. They have the potential to retain memories and disrupt the peace process.

Material remnants of conflict have had a number of fates in Northern Ireland since the

1998 Agreement. While a small number have transformed into politically contested

sites of dark heritage (including Long Kesh / Maze prison, see McAtackney

forthcoming) they have often been abandoned, partially cleared and / or left to the

margins of society. In the absence of governmental guidance and disengagement with

the recent past they have, at times, been acquired and become the subject of partial

interpretation by interest groups who wish to direct and circumvent particular

understandings of the past. This has been most apparent in the proliferation of

geographically-specific Troubles memorials in working classes areas that have been

most adversely impacted by the conflict (see Viggiani 2006). However, I argue that

despite attempts to direct, control and often promote singular and self-serving

identifications with the past the continued existences of ruins of the Troubles means

that they retain the potential to provoke a range of contradictory experiences and

understandings.

Alfredo Gonzáles-‐Ruibal has highlighted the role of both remembering and forgetting

for archaeologists of recent, difficult pasts. He has cautioned against both producing

too much remembrance – ‘the saturation of memory’ - as well as highlighting the

dangers of absence and denial (2008: 258-259). In the context of Northern Ireland

attempts to reify particular memories of the past, that direct and maintain specific

community narratives, while downplaying others have had other consequences. The

‘saturation of memory’ in places that were most adversely affected by the conflict

rather than resulting in ‘banality’, as Gonzáles-‐Ruibal warns (2008: 258), are in

danger of creating singular, dominant narratives of the past. These narratives tend to

fit particular contemporary interpretations of the conflict that sustain pre-existing

community hierarchies while suppressing minority, marginalised or contested

narratives. In this context McGrattan has argued that the discrepancy between

reificiation and denial of individual and communal memories in Northern Ireland

links directly to questions of contemporary power – who is heard and who is not, who

is acknowledged and who is denied (2013: 9).

Clearly, despite the desire for Northern Irish society to move from a traumatic recent

past, there is a need to overtly engage with these issues of how the memory is

controlled and how the past is used to sustain the present. Following McGrattan, this

entails explicitly articulating, ‘the idea that not only does the present shape how

we think about the past, but that the past is not entirely mutable since

experiences and interpretations of events often endure’ (2013: 7). One needs to

overtly engage with the enduring material culture of conflict and the

archaeologist’s role in exploring the interlinking of material, meaning and

memory in this context. Contemporary archaeology has a significant role to play

in extracting hidden and suppressed memories through dissecting and

interpreting the various meanings of often (partially) forgotten and discarded

conflict-‐related ruins. As Harrison and Schofield have argued, the conducting of

contemporary archaeology is not just about extracting how the past engages

with the present but also ‘actively and creatively with the recover of lost memory

and the therapeutic process of reconciliation’ (Harrison and Schofield 2010: 9).

However, this process of archaeological examination is not a straightforward or an

objective, academic exercise. In conducting such archaeologies the archaeologist

needs to incorporate the multiple meanings of the past, how memory functions in the

present and the politically-motivated and selective use of the past in maintaining

aspects of collective identity. The ultimate role of the archaeologist in this situation is

to complicate our understandings of the past and allow contradictions to emerge from

the material remnants that endure into the present.

TROUBLES REMNANTS AND THE PEACE PROCESS

In order to exemplify how the material ruins of the Troubles haunt the peace

process two case-‐studies will be explored in detail. They are comparative in that

they both can be described as encompassing remnants of conflict that maintain

some degree of ongoing monumental material presence. They contrast in that

one case-‐study, the defunct prison Long Kesh / Maze, has become a highly

politicized benchmark for divergent understandings of what these structures

meant in the past and their potential role in the present. The other case-‐study,

peace lines, is an insidious infrastructural device that is largely ignored; they are

widespread and naturalized to the point of invisibility. These case-‐studies have

been selected in order to reveal the differences in chronology, understanding

and impact of ruination on both the highly public and largely forgotten remnants

of the Troubles.

Long Kesh / Maze prison and Belfast peace lines highlight that the lasting impact

of the conflict is not consistent across time and space. As Fay, Morrissey & Smyth

have stated: “There has not been one uniform conflict in Northern Ireland, rather

the Troubles are a mosaic of different types of conflict. Accordingly, the ‘reality’

of the Troubles is different for people in different locations and in different

occupations” (1999: 136). The study of Long Kesh / Maze and the Belfast peace

lines as examples of modern ruins further reveals their inadvertent role as a

material critique of the peace process. These enduring sites of memory

materially contradict the promise of the ‘Declaration of Support’ from the 1998

Agreement that states: “… we firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of

reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust …” (the Agreement, 1998: 1).

Tracing the sensory experiences of abandonment and ruin at Long Kesh / Maze

and the peace lines in Belfast is a complicated task. For the former case-‐study the

lack of unrestricted access to this high-‐security site curtails viewing the prison

consistently and in totality – with access controlled through the government

guardians (Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister [OFMDFM]) -‐ and

for the latter there is the issue of scale. With regards to Long Kesh / Maze the

lack of access can be arguably beneficial. I have accessed the site via a

government guide on four occasions between 2005 and 2011 and the changes

evident to the structures and landscape between each visit heightened the sense

of the intervening processes of abandonment and ruination. In contrast, access

to peace lines is unrestricted in that they are placed in open view – if often

hidden from the main thoroughfares -‐ and in heavily populated urban areas.

However, the creeping and uncoordinated nature of segregation means that

there are vast variations in form, location, intention and material presence that

make selection necessary. To counteract any attempt to be overly conclusive and

reductive of the (im)materiality of segregation this chapter will explore a range

of examples rather than concentrate on one specific case-‐study.

Gonzáles-‐Ruibal’s exhortation to explore places of ‘slow’ destruction in

contemporary society because ‘they manifest something crucial about our era,

provide relevant political lessons’ (2008: 248), is especially relevant to the

material remnants of the Troubles. These case-‐studies show that the processes

of abandonment at both Long Kesh / Maze and at various Belfast peace lines

occur at varying speeds and for numerous reasons. Ruination is not simply due

to the ‘inevitable’ forces of nature but is the result of decisions made (or not

made) about the present meaning and use of place as related to its meaning and

use in the recent past. It is rooted in decisions made to deliberately abandon as

well as decisions not made that have resulted in post-‐construction neglect.

However, abandonment and ruination does not equate with forgetting and

erasure but instead, as Timothy Edensor has argued, ‘ruins are exemplary

alternative sites of memory’ (2005: 830). As Long Kesh / Maze and the peace

lines evidence the enduring materiality of the Troubles into the peace process

maintains their latent potential as alternative narratives of the peace process.

These abandoned ruins act as ongoing interruptions of the past into the present

and its continued, if contested, meaning.

LONG KESH / MAZE

Long Kesh / Maze prison is considered one of the icons of the Troubles: a high

profile prison whose biography is intimately connected with that of the conflict.

The internment camp / prison was in use from 1971 to 2001 and was directly

connected to the ebbs and flows of the low-‐level war as the main site of political

incarceration in the province. It was a focus for dissension at the legal

mechanisms used to hold many of the men and indeed the role of the British

government during the course of the conflict. Ministers had to constantly defend

the quality and suitability of the prisoner accommodation, including releasing

details of International Red Cross inspections (NIO/12/30 & NIO/10/13/2A)

and claiming: ‘The accommodation in the blocks is as good as any in Western

Europe’ (NIO/12/160A). It is a unique prison landscape with two manifestations

of prison form – the re-‐use of extant World War II Nissen huts arranged in a

Compound system (until closure in 1988) and the later purpose built H Blocks in

a more traditional Cellular system (from 1975 until 2001). Both sites operated

side-‐by-‐side but independently for over a decade. It is estimated that Long Kesh

/ Maze held at least 10,000 prisoners, including the vast majority of the most

notorious, dangerous and influential, during the course of its life as a place of

political imprisonment. (Purbrick 2004: 91).

Long Kesh / Maze closed in 2001 as a result of the conditional release of

prisoners sentenced for paramilitary-‐related offences as part of the 1998

Agreement. Almost immediately it become a touchstone for how the material

remnants of the Troubles were to be engaged with, remembered and dealt with

in the post-‐conflict context. There have been two masterplans for the future of

the site (2005, 2006) and one redevelopment competition (2012), which have all

attempted to address the seemingly incompatible desires by the Unionist

community for demolition and the Nationalist community for retention of the

site. With each lurching political crisis and change of government minister the

theoretical fate of the site has continually altered. Simultaneously, behind the

enduring perimeter wall, the material reality of the site has less dramatically

deteriorated in response to its ongoing, and partially active, abandonment.

The Nissen huts of Maze Compound were officially abandoned with the closure

of the Compounds in 1988, over a decade before the prison closed in totality. A

documentary filmed nearly 15 years later -‐ featuring the ex-‐Loyalist prisoner

(turned politician) Billy Hutchinson -‐ revealed that their abandonment had not

resulted in immediate ruination. Although not necessarily representative, the

Nissen hut that the documentary crew entered with Hutchinson revealed its

continued existence as a type of penal Marie Celeste (McLaughlin 2004). The

huts were still structurally stable and everyday objects – from furniture and

crockery to a frying pan complete with cooking oil –peopled the interior as if

expectantly awaiting imminent use. The mundanity and quantity of these objects

was both striking and evocative, as evidenced by Hutchinson in his reactions to

them. Supporting Edensor’s argument of the potential of ruins to evoke memory,

the Nissen hut proved able to produce, ‘an excess of meaning, a plenitude of

fragmented stories, elisions, fantasies, inexplicable objects, and possible events

which present a history that can begin and end anywhere.’ (2005: 834)

By 2004 the range of different material conditions within the Compounds was

notable. A significant number of structures had collapsed or were demolished

due to their precarious state, however, many examples still stood erect without

serious structural problems. This variation in survival was striking, like a

deliberately defiant act (Figure). The uniformity of the institutional setting was

being actively contradicted by inconsistency, what Edensor calls ‘the

fragmentation and decay of some memories and to the capricious persistence of

others.’ (2004: 834). Despite long-‐term abandonment they continued to house

innumerable ‘small things forgotten’ (Deetz [1977] 1996) from personal items,

prison-‐issue furniture, walls covered in posters and murals, graffiti carved into

the structures, and remembrances of long removed focal points, such as lopsided

TV brackets.

Human interaction with the Compounds was now limited to invited and

permitted visitors. In the post-‐closure context of the wider prison landscape they

were a mere pit-‐stop on the frequent guided tours, however, various human and

non-‐human interactions continued. Many artefacts had been removed to be

placed or stored elsewhere on the site as the Nissen huts were being demolished.

Others simply disappeared. On a guided tour some ex-‐prisoners pried barbed

wire from the Compound fencing as a trophy to be maintained in private or

shared publicly outside of this abandoned carceral environment. Over time the

impacts of the abandonment increasingly eroded the exteriors and interiors. The

weather infiltrated, vermin and insects penetrated leaving their own, more

recent traces and new ‘smellscapes’. These odors are what Edensor describes as

a ‘heady brew’, of positive, negative, expected and unexpected aroma (2004:

838). On entering the Nissen huts these smells were one of the most potent

evidences of the transition in the life of the structure. Moving from the warm

aroma of body heat associated with an active container of humans to a largely

abandoned, cold shack that smelt of damp, moss and earthiness. Its smellscape

reflecting the transition from a contained, heated structure to one increasingly

infiltrated by the nature that was once kept outside.

From 2006 all but one ‘representative sample’ of the Compounds were

demolished. This act finalized the abandonment and accelerated the ruination to

active destruction. The landscape of the Compounds is no longer crowded with

wires cages of metal huts but exists as a landscape of facilitated wilderness. The

authorities are actively allowing the encroachment of the surrounding

countryside, facilitating a supposed return to its pre-‐prison pastoral state. The

Compounds are now only presenced by their foundations, the remnants of the

Nissen huts, Compounds and original landing strips haunting the site. This

attempted erasure may have removed the standing physical traces but the

‘absent present’ (Buchli & Lucas 2001: 12) of the footprints of the site that

remains betray their previous existence. These limited traces continue to have

agency, what Edensor describes as ‘the silences marked on space … broken by

the insistent claims of the too hastily buried.’ (Edensor 2004: 836). At the time,

the fait accompli demolition was reported factually in the local media, without

heated debate. This perhaps reflecting the tacit public consensus that

representative rather than complete survival of the site was the only way

forward and that more contentious remains persisted in the latter Cellular

elements.

On closure of the Cellular structures of the H-‐Blocks in 2001 the transition from

abandonment to ruination was hastened by superficially innocuous decisions

made by the government guardians. The structures were no longer heated and

the resulting dampness – from the high water table of this boggy rural site -‐

made the use of electricity dangerous hence its supply was cut off. Perhaps most

damaging was the decision to counteract the dampness by ‘airing’ the buildings –

with doors and windows being left deliberately ajar – ensuring that infiltration

from outside and the impacts of decay became increasingly noticeable. Although

adding interest, and even at times being aesthetically pleasing in comparison to

the deliberately repetitive drabness of the institution -‐ and what the

photographer Donovan Wylie calls ‘its ability to disorient and diminish’ (Wylie

2004: inside jacket) -‐ the resultant decay accelerated and increased ruination

(Figure). Visitors to the site were guided to the same representative H Block

until it was demolished in 2008 to be replaced by a new representation structure

(which had held in a suspended state due to a longstanding enquiry into a

prisoner murder in the structure).

It was clear on visiting the Cellular structures that a number of these later

buildings had experienced more protective treatments than the earlier

structures of the Compounds. Selected administrative and infrastructural

buildings – such as the central administrative area, prison hospital and non-‐

denominational church – were maintained and lockfast. On my first visit to the

church in 2011 the maintenance of the structural integrity and internal aesthetic

– with only the pervading smell of damp -‐ were notable in comparison to the

extensive mould and more extensive deterioration of my previous visits to the

now demolished H Blocks (Figure). Likewise, the prison hospital displayed

relatively few signs of decay and ruin (perhaps not unrelated, it remains the only

government listed building at the site).

The previously mothballed H Block was especially notable in comparison to the

active decay of the structure it replaced. Its aesthetic was crisp, clean and

clinically white in contrast to the actively decaying structure of the now

demolished H Block of previous visits. To my surprise these lesser signs of

abandonment, decay and ruin seems to remove some of, what Caitlin DeSilvey

has described as the ‘curious loveliness to the transformed scene’ (2006: 330).

This sanitized H Block was aesthetically devoid of the layers of character and

afterlife that the processes of abandonment had added to the now demolished H

Block. Far from negatively affecting the structure, these signifiers of decay had

left material traces of the impacts of abandonment on the structure. They

provided material evidence of deliberate dereliction that referenced years of

political indecision on the walls and roof of the structure. The existence of these

traces of decay revealed the ambivalences of dealing with the material remains

of a contested past. They had the potential, as DeSilvey has asserted in her

exploration of abandoned buildings, to ‘contribute to alternative interpretive

possibilities’ (2006: 330). Demolition signaled that the post-‐closure, afterlife of

the site was being ignored, if not eradicated. These evocative senses of memory

from what Edensor calls ‘undervalued, undercoded, mundane spaces’ (2005:

834) were being discarded in preference to sanitization and reversion.

The factors that enabled and facilitated the material deterioration of the majority

of the structures at Long Kesh / Maze reveal an official desire existed to hasten

the eradication of much of the site prior to a final public decision on its future

being made. Indeed, the special treatment – and hence better survival -‐ of a small

number of structures, specifically the prison hospital (whose importance stems

from its historical connection to the dying Hunger Strikers of 1981), indicates

that abandonment took different temporal and material forms and scales.

Ruination was not an inevitable consequence of closure. Examining this process

of abandonment and deliberate, if piecemeal, ruination at such a politically

significant site is at the crux of what Shannon Dawdy considers the potential

importance of historical archaeologies. She argues that such archaeologies

‘uncovers things not yet forgotten. But it could do even more dangerous and

productive work, I argue, by uncovering things thought best forgotten.’ (2010:

769)

PEACE LINES

Until relatively recently the peace lines in Belfast have not been actively engaged

with as political and physical entities of the Troubles, despite their vintage and

undoubted link to the conflict. Akin to Long Kesh / Maze their first official

manifestations date from the early stages of the Troubles with ‘walls of

corrugated sheets of iron bolted to metal posts sunk in concrete’ (Mulholland

2001: 73) between the Falls and Shankill Roads in West Belfast. These haphazard

erections eased the initial escalations of community tensions from transforming

into internecine violence but also inadvertently materialized a semi-‐permanent

rupture that facilitated enduring divisions and have – in most cases -‐ remained in

place indefinitely.

The urban environments of Northern Ireland have always experienced degrees

of segregation – which ‘increases more in bad times than it eases in good times’

(Hepburn 2001: 93) -‐ but it was during the Troubles that acceptance of

segregation as an unofficial policy appears to have occurred. Of the 27 per cent of

the Northern Irish population who live in social housing, the figures for Belfast

from 1999 onwards reveal almost 100 per cent ethnic segregation (Jarman and

O’Halloran 2001: 4). Such stark separation reveals an official acquiescence with a

societal preference for segregated communities, which although expedient in the

short-‐term is obviously problematic in the long-‐term. Indeed, a repercussion of

allowing ethnically distinct communities to ghettoize in a divided society is that

there often develops a desire to maintain these divisions materially at their

points of contact, hence the proliferation of peace lines. Peace lines remain the

only manifestation of the Troubles that have continued to grow into the peace

process (Jarman 2002: 287).

Attempts to quantify the number of peace lines are difficult. Definitions as to

what constitutes a peace line and whether extensions of existing lines constitute

new walls or should be included with existing figures remaining unresolved. The

Community Relations Council reported in 2009 that 18 acknowledged peace

lines existed in the early 1990s; this number had increased to 88 by 2009

(Community Relations Council c.2009). Some commentators would argue the

number is substantially less. In contrast to the highly public and politicized

debates regarding the future of Long Kesh / Maze prison, peace lines have been

allowed to insidiously develop with minimum public debate and official

intervention after the point of construction. While they are not consciously

abandoned the lack of consideration as to their post-‐construction life means not

only is there no provisions for their destruction (Community Relations Council

c.2009: 38), but many develop the aesthetic of ruination through lack of ongoing

engagement and maintenance.

In contrast to Long Kesh / Maze prison, peace lines are a more diverse and

geographically disparate phenomenon. They can be viewed as a loose collective

rather than repetitive infrastructure as there is a huge variety in form and scale

and location of peace line landscapes within the wider Belfast area. A number of

working class areas within West, East and North Belfast have a substantial

number of physical and psychic barriers in a relatively small area that often take

different materials forms and function in different ways as forms of segregation.

In North Belfast, which has a particularly mosaic-‐like distribution of ethnically

segregated communities, there are at least 25 separate walls of varying lengths

and dimensions (Jarman and O’Halloran 2001: 4). While Neil Jarman and Chris

O’Halloran have stated that peace lines have a ‘distinctive physical appearance’

(Jarman and O’Halloran 2001: 5), I argue that, on the contrary, a concentration

on the more monumental examples denies the importance of less obvious

manifestations of segregation (McAtackney 2011). There is a need to include the

open and fenced liminal zones that surround the monumental walls, the scrap

land that is ‘owned’ by one side, the hinterland of insecurity that the wall

materializes in landscapes of abandonment and ruination that abut them. When

exploring peace lines one needs to include widely defined material and psychic

divisions – the abandoned social housing, waste grounds and even strategically

placed, arterial roads -‐ and not just the most obvious manifestations, such as

monumental walls.

The ‘abandonment’ of peace lines has been facilitated by the unofficial and

almost secretive nature of their construction and their placement in the urban

environment. Peace lines -‐ despite the durable materials often involved in their

construction, their typical monumental nature and their longevity -‐ are

considered temporary constructions and as such do not require planning

permission or appear on official maps. Their construction is not controlled by

one, centralized body and forms of peace lines have been erected by a number of

public bodies including the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, Northern

Ireland Office and Belfast City Council (Community Relations Council c.2009: 11).

They are generally erected at the request of communities and as such are a

reflection of multiple causes including those enumerated by Birrell: ‘fear,

intimidation and personal preferences’ (1994: 113).

The reality of their existence is that they often facilitate a wider environment of

abandonment, decay and, ironically, increased insecurity. Their very existence

manifests the pre-‐existing fear and insecurity of those who live on the interface

peripheries of their ethnic communities. As Paul Marcuse has highlighted in his

study of walls as divisions: ‘they represent power, but they also represent

insecurity; domination but at the same time fear, protection but at the same time

isolation’ (Marcuse 1994: 43). Inadvertently, they express negative meanings to

those who live beside them and by necessity interact with them. The walls placed

as peace lines are deliberately located to limit if not prevent communication but

their very existence and the insecurity that they represent visually transmits

associated negativity.

Peace lines are located at interface areas between communities, where

contestation and violent interactions, or fear of infiltration from community

expansion, most frequently occur. As such they are placed in areas that are

inherently liminal and marginal and are often abandoned and ignored by all but

those who live beside them. Their abandoned condition and materialisation of

ruin and neglect adds to their manifestation of fear and insecurity. Their

enduring material presence highlights the ongoing tacit acceptance of

segregation while their ruinous state reveals how it has become actively and

deliberately forgotten. Borrowing from Frederick Baker’s work on the Berlin

Wall, these peace lines are communicative: as both face (‘Wand’) and barrier

(‘Mauer’) (1993: 710) The ruinous existence of these marginal sites materializes

the deliberate forgetting of segregation while acting as a barrier to inter-‐

community engagement, However, as argued by Edensor, it is on the abandoned

margins ‘where ghostly memories cannot be entirely expunged’ (2005: 833) that

the impacts of segregation retain their material presence.

Peace lines inspire and facilitate other material reactions to segregation.

Memorials and murals can be found in locations where peace lines reside as

these simultaneously remove the view(ing) of the ‘other side’ while referencing

memories of previous acts of violence and confrontation. One example where

this occurs is Bombay Street located on the nationalist side of the peace line

between the Lower Falls and Shankill Roads in Belfast .The original Bombay

Street –the location of an infamous attack on Catholic housing by Protestant

vigilantes that was unimpeded by the security forces and is considered one of the

initiating acts of the Troubles (Mulholland 2001: 74) – was burnt in the late

1960s. Now relandscaped as a defensive cul-‐de-‐sac the burning of the original

street is remembered in a large scale memorial constructed in 2000 and abutted

by wall murals and a peace line.

The ‘Clonard Martyrs’ Memorial’ is a community created and maintained local

site of (directed) public memory (Figure). A form of dark tourism attraction

(Foley & Lennon 2000) and a focus for local political commemorative events it

simultaneously references and confirms the existence of the peace line it nestles

against. The form, meaning and location of this unofficial memorial suggests that

it is acting as lieux de mémoire. Following Pierre Nora this memorial confirms the

memory of events in this specific location as an important site, despite being

excluded from official narratives (Nora 1989: 21). The memorial presents

interpretation of historic violent interactions between the communities

crystallized to one event, which was a precursor to the erection of the peace line.

It allows this memory to be used to underpin broader interpretation that

extrapolates who were the ‘victims’ of the Troubles. The continued lack of

interaction with the ‘other side’ allows these interpretations to remain

unquestioned. The very existence of such a memorial acts as a material critique

of long-‐term segregation through monumental walls.

Peace lines – be they walls, roads or waste-‐ground -‐ are often fenced to create an

inaccessible liminal zone between the division and those who must live beside

them. Ongoing material interactions can be seen in the resting missiles– mainly

stones, bottles and pieces of broken brick – that collect around the fenced

hinterlands surrounding the walls. These missile scatters materially reference

the ongoing violent interactions that the peace lines have not resolved, merely

distancing their initiation. The fencing around the extensive walls on the

nationalist side of the Upper Springfield Road in Belfast contains an unexpected

remnant of the conflict: the foundational footprints of a long demolished failed

mixed housing estate. These foundations remain inadvertently, but poignantly in

the peace line no-‐mans-‐land. Like the footprints of the demolished Nissen huts

their continued material traces haunts attempts to forget them. Lying in the

shadows of the peace line they materialise a potential future that was not

realised. Their enduring material traces reference another, more positive,

present that failed and was engulfed in violent conflict. However, it also

references that this positive present will remain a failure while materialized

segregation is continued. The foundations act as a niggling remembrance of past

hopes and fears that remember the negatives of the past but also potentially

contradict the unquestioned existence and continued presence of the

neighbouring peace line.

Despite these negative materialities there is some evidence for positive

engagements with the blank canvases of peace lines that reveal the desire for

positive visual surroundings and pride in locality. These attempts to subvert the

negativity of division should not be excluded. There are a number of examples of

community-‐based, and often officially-‐funded, creative interventions at these

divisions that have occurred during the peace process. This includes the creation

of the Shankill Road Graffiti Wall, on the reverse side of the peace line from the

Clonard Martyrs’ Memorial on Bombay Street (Figure). In collaboration with the

local community and Belfast City Council this substantial wall has been covered

with images created by a number of international graffiti artists. Many of these

examples consciously explore the themes of peace, segregation and tearing down

walls. They also create a more aesthetically pleasing backdrop than the barren

wall previously populated only by surveillance equipment and ad hoc sectarian

graffiti. The Shankill Graffiti wall has had the added impact of encouraging

tourism to this area – materially evidenced by the large number of signatures

added by tourists on the margins of the new images – which is an important

repercussion in such an economically deprived area (Independent Research

Solutions 2009, 92).

CONCLUSION

The Northern Irish Troubles may have been politically consigned to the past in

1998, but the material remnants of the conflict have not been so easily

eradicated or forgotten. Enduring conflict-‐related infrastructure, structures and

artefacts demand attention due to their continuing presence. Indeed, their

enduring material realities complicate the high level political narratives of peace

over a decade after the Agreement was signed. While the majority of the material

remains of conflict have been discarded or displaced, with little commentary or

regret, there have been a number of particular forms and sites that have not

been so easily consigned to obsolescence.

Long Kesh /Maze was an icon of the Troubles due to its heightened significance

as a place of political (and contested) imprisonment. Since its closure in 2001 it

has become the central focus of debates regarding how the recent past is

remember and whose past take precedence. It has been described as a ‘sum zero

heritage site’ (Graham & McDowell 2007: 363), due to the divisive nature of its

history, memory and meaning as a place of Republican triumph and Unionist

discomfiture. The controversial nature of this site has resulted in an extended

period of negotiation regarding its future, continued high security status and

unofficial but facilitated ruination as a result of post-‐closure abandonment. As

the future of the prison has remained in limbo the structures have silently

acquired their own patina of age. The subsequent decision to cover or demolish

these material signifiers of indecision and extended period of negotiation ignores

the uncomfortable but very real interjection of the past into the present. The

selective nature of this ruination has ensured that destruction of much of the site

could be justified but it has not taken into account how even limited physical

traces, such as the Compound foundations, continue to be sites of memory with

the latent potential to disrupt the present.

In contrast the peace lines of Belfast have continued, and indeed proliferated, in

the post-‐conflict context and, until recently, have not been included in these

public debates. The majority of the monumental walls that are categorized as

peace lines tell of abandonment and ruination that has been of a less deliberate if

equally insidious nature. As unofficial and ‘temporary’ constructions they have

often lacked continued, creative engagement to subvert their intention to

segregate and this has ensured that, with few exceptions, peace lines have

merely monumentalized pre-‐existing fraught community relations with few

positive attributes. There are some examples of official and unofficial

interactions with peace walls – that have both positive and negative impacts –

but they have been largely ignored in their post-‐construction state. Their

deteriorating physical forms act to embody the insecurity and tensions that pre-‐

existed at the location of their placement and indeed increase it through

escalating evidence of dereliction, ruin and abandonment.

The two case-‐studies reveal the political nature of enduring conflict remnants in

Northern Ireland and how ill-‐equipped the political elites and public services

have been in dealing with them. This chapter has critiqued attempts to move into

the peace process without dealing with the past through the disruptive nature of

these ruinous sites of memory. Remnants from the Troubles are not all the same.

They evidence both sporadic engagement in the material nature of particularly

troubling aspects and the agency of the ruin to maintain meaning and indeed add

its own material critique of the processes and priorities of the contemporary

state. This is evident in the patina of the peace process having been deliberately

removed from Long Kesh / Maze, while being neglected to accumulate on the

peace lines. Such different treatments of these remnants of the Troubles

highlight overt political engagement with high-‐profile prisons while

simultaneously ignoring the more widespread lived realities of working class

communities in contemporary Northern Ireland. However, from the patterns of

decay to the continued presence of foundations, the material traces of facilitated

abandonment allows these ruins of the Troubles to continue to haunt and

critique the deficiencies of the peace process.

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