I have been documenting the daily life of teenagers in British working-class communities for almost two decades. After the Brexit referendum I focussed this work on Belfast in Northern Ireland. There was a serious concern that the final implementation of Brexit will threaten the Peace Agreement of 1998 that ended the armed conflict between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists who live in homogeneous neighborhoods that are divided by walls till today. These two communities in Belfast who seem to have irreconcilable differences, are more similar than they’d both like to admit. While they still stick to their own symbols of their identity and tradition, they wear the same clothes, have the same haircuts, listen to the same music, drink the same beer, take the same drugs and often the same worries such as violence, unemployment, social discrimination and therefore, lack of prospects.
Although these young people never experienced the bombings, attacks and reprisal attacks themselves, they grew up in strictly segregated neighborhoods. Only 7% of pupils in Northern Ireland go to integrated schools. Sinn Fein’s first-time majority in parliament and a Catholic majority in the country, which was never thought possible, are creating an increasingly tense situation again. When the teenagers see my photos of kids from the “other side”, they often say “oh, I know him”. And if you then hope that an approach already had happend and ask “where from?”, the answer is often “from fighting!”…
At the same time, apart from a few hardliners on the Loyalist side, nobody wants to go back to the old days. And in everyday life, more and more rapprochements are taking place that were previously thought impossible. A republican boy I met in 2017, who was often involved in skirmishes with loyalist teenagers, now has a baby with a protestant girl and lives in a loyalist community. These little steps give hope for a gradual normalization of the situation and the possibility of believing in a common future!
It is definitely time to overcome old rifts and ideas of identity or belonging and to look forward – in the sense of a better future for all young people in Northern Ireland!