In an interview on Divided Cities

Of course the reason we were talking about Survival in Beirut was because this was the private voice, the on-the-ground and intimately invested voice of the eye witness – as opposed to the expansive voice of Imagined Communities. Would there be a book balanced between the two?

I think so. Imagined Communities, as I’ve already said, is the most enlightening of these books for the general reader, but the book I perhaps admire most is Northern Ireland’s Troubles: the Human Cost. This was written by a team led by Marie Fay and her colleagues in Belfast, and the reason I would go to that one is that these are not super high powered scholars like Anderson. And they also aren’t man-on-the-street voices like Survival in Beirut. They’re practitioners, actually social workers, who spend their whole lives in Northern Ireland watching the city suffer from its partitions – and there are approximately thirty of these so-called ‘peace lines’ – dividing Protestant and Catholic working class neighbourhoods in Belfast.

There are still partitions in spite of the settlement?

They’re still there and they’re growing in number. Belfast has had the greatest progress of all these cities in terms of political progress, and the worst entrenchment of the physical reality of partition. It’s totally weird to me, I can’t explain it. Especially since Belfast, at least on paper, is the most affluent of all these places.

So Marie Fay and her colleagues are speaking with what you call the ‘empathic voice of field-based social workers’.

Yes, so here’s a group of very dedicated professionals who made it their business not simply to lament the ethnic partitions, but decided to walk through every metric they could think of. They made this great decision. They decided not to rant ideologically or at least in ethical terms about what’s wrong with partition. They thought ‘we’re gonna tell you about the incidence of alcohol abuse, drug addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, cardiac arrest, depression etc etc amongst people who live near one of these walls. And sure enough the statistics go through the roof as soon as you get close to one of the lines. So that while all inhabitants of Belfast live from day to day with the weight of this situation what these guys showed was that the cost in terms of health and productivity and all the other economic generators that go with those things go up dramatically as you get closer to these things.

And is it their thesis that the partitions exacerbated existing problems or that these partitions were actually placed along lines of conflict – with all the statistical implications of that – in the first place?

It’s the first. Most definitely the first. And that’s what’s so brilliant about their work. Because they don’t just suggest it they prove it.