Young People and Interfaces Report - Institute for Conflict Research

YOUNG PEOPLE AND INTERFACES
If you were going in on your own it would be different like (Young Catholic male).
One young male spoke of his continuing reluctance to go in to the nearby Protestant area unless
some of his new Protestant friends were with him:
I would feel comfortable going in with ones from the other side, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable
going in with (another Catholic young person in the group). Just because we are both Catholic.
Even though nothing would happen, you’d just feel uneasy in case something happened
(Young Catholic male).
One cross-interface community organisation have been working in recent years to build
relationships between young people. As a result of the engagement over the past two years in one
interface location in North Belfast, a number of Protestant young people from one particular area
reported feeling safer and would now use a local garage which they would not have done before as
they had previously perceived it as ‘Catholic territory’. Indeed, some young Protestants now use a
local drop-in centre which is also located in a predominantly ‘Catholic’ area. As such improved
relationships between some local young people across the interface led to them asking one
another questions about their culture or religion, a process which one youth leader felt was a more
‘natural’ development over time rather than part of a more artificial attempt to bring young people
together prematurely.
While these young people now used the shop at the garage on the Antrim Road in the evenings
with their friends, again other young people who traversed the interface tended to do so as part of
a more formalised youth group or with school, and they would not feel as comfortable doing so with
their friends on their own initiative. At various times some young people also felt very aware of
which parts of the area would be ‘off-limits’ for individuals from ‘their community’, and felt they
could ‘tell’ someone’s community background based on how they moved around an area:
That’s what I am saying walking up to the Antrim Road, that’s how you know if you’re Catholic
or Protestant, what side of the road you walk on…If you walk on one side you are Protestant if
you walk on the other you are a Catholic (Young Protestant male).
You’d stay on this side of the doctors (Young Catholic male).
These issues in terms of being able to ‘tell’ someone’s community background impacted upon
which services and facilities some young people felt they could access.
3.6 Accessing services and facilities
The restricted movement associated with living at an interface impacted upon the majority of young
people, and it seemed to be the case that this impact was particularly significant for young people
from what could be termed enclave interface communities such as Suffolk or Short Strand. For
young males in Suffolk in particular, their dentists and GPs were all in Dunmurry and Finaghy and
very few services in wider nationalist West Belfast on the Stewartstown Road and beyond were
utilised. Rather than using the nearest leisure centre which was situated in Andersonstown, they
spoke about travelling to Lisburn:
We are surrounded basically...We can’t go to certain places that the likes of them can. They can
go up and round us. They don’t necessarily have to walk down Black’s Road, it’s the quicker
option, but they can walk round it (Young Protestant male).
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