‘If you remove fear, you can build trust’: young people, peace walls, and Belfast’s future

‘If you remove fear, you can build trust’: young people, peace walls, and Belfast’s future
by Allan LEONARD
15 October 2026

A screening of Two Sides to Every Wall, a documentary about young people living alongside Belfast’s peace walls, brought young people, community practitioners, a social anthropologist, and a government official together at a Good Relations Week event hosted by Springboard. The gathering offered a forum for candid reflection on one of Northern Ireland’s most visible and enduring legacies — and on whether the communities that have grown up in its shadow should be the ones to decide its future.

The Wall to Wall programme

The documentary emerged from Springboard’s Wall to Wall programme, a cross-community initiative funded by the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) and supported by NI Screen. Over two rounds beginning in 2021, 32 young people from communities on either side of the Cupar Way peace lane took part in structured sessions exploring the history of the area and their experience of growing up alongside a barrier most had long ceased to consciously notice.

Sam McCaw, a coordinator at Springboard, situated the programme in a striking statistic: a 2019 IFI study found that 76% of respondents living closest to peace walls wanted them to come down, but did not expect it in their own lifetimes. “If peace walls are gonna come down in kids’ or grandkids’ lifetime,” McCaw said, “we can’t obviously just expect that just to happen. We need to start engaging with young people and generations that’s coming after them.”

A central component was an international exchange: participants travelled to Nicosia, Cyprus, to meet young people from Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities navigating their own division.

Evan Marshall of NI Screen, which contributed archive footage including rare colour film of the barriers being erected in the late 1960s, reflected that the film would itself become a piece of record: “It’s going to be a snapshot of what you thought now about these peace walls in 2026.”

A city more shared and more divided

Professor Dominic Bryan, a social anthropologist, delivered a contextualising address before the screening. He drew attention to Anthony Hewins, a British Foreign Office official who sat on a Northern Ireland Parliament committee in 1971 and wrote a minority report (19 April 1971) arguing against making the walls permanent. “If we leave these walls up,” Hewins argued, “they will be here in 50 years’ time.” He was exactly right. Bryan framed contemporary Belfast in a phrase that captured its central paradox: the city is, he said, “more shared and more divided than any other point in our history” — its city centre now host to Irish cultural festivals, LGBTQ+ events, and the Orange Order’s Twelfth of July, while residential segregation at the interfaces persists largely unchanged.

He ended with a provocation. The Cupar Way wall is built over the River Farset, the river from which Belfast takes its name. Bryan wondered whether its removal might offer an opportunity to restore the river and build a park around it: “The river which this city is named after could be one of the answers to the problems.”

Hearing from both sides

A panel discussion followed, moderated by Caitlyn McKissock, who had been a participant in Wall to Wall before becoming a peer mentor. She had not crossed the Cupar Way gates until 2023, when the programme gave her the opportunity.

Alan Stewart of the Department of Justice, whose work involves the removal and softening of peace walls, described the complexity of community engagement. During a recent consultation, two neighbours had expressed entirely opposed relationships to the same structure: an older resident whose windows had been broken 25 years earlier would not countenance the wall being touched; a newcomer had simply seen a large structure at the back of their garden and had not known it was a peace wall. The department works on the basis of maximum cross-community consent, sometimes bypassing elected representatives to hear from residents directly. “If you remove fear, you can build trust,” Stewart said.

Steph O’Rourke, who led the Wall to Wall programme, drew on more than 30 years of Springboard’s experience: “It takes time. It takes time and consistency. It takes showing up.” The biggest lesson was a deceptively simple one: “We need to work with people and not on them.” She was also frank about the limits of community-level work: “The walls could come down in the morning, but we’re still gonna have things like poverty and trauma. So it’s a whole community approach.”

Seeing your own conflict from the outside

Desiree Birinci, from northern Cyprus and now studying in Belfast, brought a comparative perspective. She had crossed into the south to attend school from the age of eleven; her mother’s instruction was not to tell classmates where she was from. Encountering Belfast’s interfaces had prompted a shift in how she understood her own context: “It moves you to a more bird’s-eye view of your own context and makes you a bit more humble.” She pointed to the Home for Cooperation in Nicosia’s UN buffer zone as an example of the kind of neutral ground both societies need: a space neither side has to cross into the other’s territory to reach.

Birinci also offered the evening’s most personal note. Peacebuilding, she said, is rarely as gentle as the word implies: “Peace is a nice word. It’s often associated with flowers and Volkswagen vans and stuff. But when you’re involved in peacebuilding, you can get bullied at school, you can get questions from family members.” What the next generation needs, alongside programmes and shared spaces, is something harder to legislate for: the conditions in which courage can grow. “Courage,” she said, “and then the space for that courage to actually flourish.”

Two Sides to Every Wall does not prescribe whether Belfast’s peace walls should come down. What it asks is whether the conversation about their future is happening in the right rooms, with the right people — and whether those who have inherited their legacy are being given the space to shape what comes next.