Kanga And Wombats Adventures

Day 20

We never intended to visit Derry (or Londonderry, depending what your creed is), but several of our B&B hosts had recommended it, and we’re so glad they did!

We didn’t know Derry was a walled city, a fact that we soon realised makes it not only compact, but provides an automatic barrier between warring factions. We were there on a Sunday so it was relatively quiet, but there was still an air of menace about.

Derry is 2/3 Catholic, and following the Partition of Ireland, its politics were blatantly discriminatory against the Catholic majority who were denied basic civil rights regarding housing and employment. A huge civil rights march in 1968 was confronted by the Protestant police force causing rioting and injuries. This clash was seen by many as being a catalyst for the Troubles, and the IRA was born shortly after. After Bloody Sunday in 1972, when 14 innocent protesters were killed by British paratroopers, the Catholic area known as Bogside, became a no-go area for Protestants. Similarly, on the other side of the walled city, the Protestant area was a no-go area for Catholics. I might be wrong, but it certainly felt like nothing had changed!

We walked the entire length of the walls, and what we saw along the way was an eye opener. The Protestant area of Fountain Road, tenements long since gone, proudly wears the slogan ‘West Bank Loyalists Still Under Seige. No Surrender’. Even the lamp posts are coloured red, white and blue.

Walking around towards Catholic Bogside, the closely built houses looked like patchwork on the hill.

Venturing down into Bogside was eerie. 12 Murals, called The People’s Gallery, dominate the end of terraced housing.

The Republicans have their own painted slogan,

which stands as a background to the Bloody Sunday memorial, situated bizarrely in the middle of a roundabout.

Derry is trying to change. The opening of the Peace Bridge in 2011, a curved shaped structure symbolically linking the Protestant east bank with the overwhelmingly dominant Catholic west bank, was seen as helping rebalance the communities.

This mural proudly celebrates the successful Netflix series ‘The Derry Girls’.

But most poignant of all was the sculpture ‘Hands Across the Divide’ on the banks of the River Foyle.

Poignant because it was so beautiful, yet having walked around this city, I couldn’t feel anything other than it was a tokenistic gesture of reconciliation. I just felt really sad.