The Walled City

In the taxi from Derry Airport yesterday the driver was keen to let me know all about his home city, including the fact that Derry is known as The Walled City. Built at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the city's deep dark walls are celebrated for withstanding attacks by besieging armies in 1649 and 1689. This morning I grabbed an early breakfast and headed out with my camera to enjoy the mile-long circuit of the walls as the sun rose over Derry. Beginning at St Columb's Cathedral it was a really lovely walk, so quiet; no dramatic sunrise, but a lazy gentle blushing of the hazy sky as dawn unfolded. Information boards told the story of the walls and their city and of how the besieging armies had sought to starve the population into submission; I was reminded of my visits to Sarajevo and the suffering of that beautiful city.

My circuit concluded at The Bishop's Gate which is where I came across 'the peace wall'; tall double-fences acting like a kind of wire moat around The Fountains Estate, separating the Protestant community within from their Catholic neighbours. They felt like an ugly interruption; it came as a bit of a shock to the system to see these stark reminders of divisions which persist and I felt like a bit of a naive tourist.

As well as walls and fences there are other marks of the city's historic divisions; the kerbstones painted red, white and blue, the INLA graffiti, the murals telling two stories about Derry and its people. Some of these demarcation lines are worn and faded, but many are recent, fresh.

Walls, fences, barriers. We have so many ways of articulating who belongs where, of who may come in and who should keep out.

Walls, fences, barriers, we build them in our hearts and minds too. From the extremes of prejudice which seek to exclude whole groups of people from our lives, through to the daily fallings out which end up with someone muttering, 'I'm never speaking to that person again'.

The saddest truth is that when we build those divisions in our hearts, we are the ones who become besieged, who become cut off and isolated. When we build those divisions in our hearts, what begins to starve is our own humanity.