From raging guns to a cautious concord

The mural known locally as the "Mona Lisa" follows you as you walk by. But this is no classic work. This is a grubby council estate off Belfast's Shankill Road. Fiercely Loyalist, proudly Protestant. And the giant painting isn't that of a Florencean lady; it is a depiction of a gunman in a ski mask pointing a machinegun at the street. And using the same artistic technique as developed by Leonardo da Vinci centuries ago, the gunman's barrel seems to keep you in sight as you pass.

It is a deadly warning.

This is the heartland of Loyalist Ulster, a corner of Belfast where long-standing hatreds are slowly softening more than a decade after Northern Ireland's warring partners signed the Good Friday Peace Accord and agreed to share power. Here, in a housing estate more aggressively British than anywhere else in the United Kingdom, Union Jacks fly over most homes, kerb stones are consecutively painted red, white and blue, and murals depict scenes of defence of this British hinterland by Protestant paramilitary organisations, such as the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, during more than three decades of "The Troubles".

Hostile by association

And at the peace wall, a 20-metre-high metal-and-wire barricade that separates this area from the Catholic and Republican neighbours on the Falls Road, Israeli flags fly. "One of the reason why the Northern Irish are such good golfers is that they practise by chipping balls over the peace line," quips Ken, a black taxi driver from Protestant east Belfast. "The Israeli flags are on this side because the Republicans identify with the Palestinians."

According to Ken, before the Israelis started work on their own wall around Jewish colonies, they came to Belfast to see how it works separating Protestant from Catholic, Loyalist from Republican.

Everything here in Belfast is largely black and white. Thirteen years after the peace process began, both sides are still trying to find a unity of opposites.

Despite the fact that ceasefires between the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Loyalist paramilitaries were declared in 1994, the peace lines dividing the city's communities still exist. Only two gates are open around the clock, and the other five are locked at midnight lest trouble flares.

And in the past two years, trouble has flared — though nothing to the extent of the darkest days between 1969 and 1994, when about 3,000 people were killed and countless thousands injured by bomb and gun attacks.

"The peace process is supported by the vast majority of people," notes James Simpson, a software developer. As a skilled graduate, he could have had a job anywhere around the globe. Instead, he chose to stay and, hopefully, make a difference. "These are troublemakers who yearn for the days when paramilitaries were in control and were the godfathers of the city. There is no going back on either side," he says.

Listening to him talk, it is hard to tell whether he is from a Republican or a Loyalist area of the city. In the dark days, not giving away clues, such as an address, a school or a name, could have meant the difference between a beating or worse from the wrong hands.

"Take a look at the River Lagan now," he says, referring to the once-stagnant tidal river that flows through the city and on which Belfast's once-prosperous shipbuilding industry was focused. It was on the Lagan's shipyards of Harland and Wolff, where 35,000 once laboured, that the Titanic was built. (A popular Titanic-themed T-shirt on sale in Belfast reads: "It was OK when it left here ..." Or as nationalists, who were discriminated against from working in the shipyards, say: "Protestants built the Titanic. Catholics built the iceberg.")

"On the Lagan, we have seals now, whereas before, it was old tyres and shopping carts. It took years of pumping oxygen into the Lagan for it to come back to life — but it has, and that says as much about Belfast as anything else. This is a resilient city," Simpson says.

Indeed, in an effort to rebrand the city, it has been broken down into quarters. The shipyards are now the Titanic Quarter, gentrified with new apartment buildings, a Titanic-themed visitor's centre, a state-of-the-art film studio where the HBO series Games of Thrones is wrapping up, and the Odyssey Centre, which played host to the MTV Music Awards.

"The people of this city never had much, anyway, regardless of which side you were from," Simpson notes. "Today there are jobs, and there's development and investment. Before, you could not come into the city at night. It was dead. Now it's lively and it has a great nightlife. One of the benefits of the Troubles has been that Belfast now has a very low crime rate."

In the Cathedral Quarter, revellers crowd small alleys celebrating Belfast's newfound prosperity and peace. The Duke of York bar, where Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams worked as a barman up to 1971, has been rebuilt after it was blown up in 1972.

"Look around you," Simpson says. "It has been a generation since the Troubles ended. There is a whole generation which does not know what it is like to be searched in the streets. It is a generation which does not know what it is like to be searched simply to come into Belfast. It is a generation that does not know what it is like to have soldiers patrolling the streets in full-body armour. That is an amazing change. Yes, the pace of change is slow, but we are now a generation removed from violence."

For Simpson, change, slow and sure, is better than no change at all.

"Don't think for a minute, though, that things are normal," he cautions, however. "There are still people on both sides who have a vested interest in keeping the threat of violence alive. These are gangs who control neighbourhoods, racketeering, the drug trade. It's in their interest to keep control of things. Their influence and power mean money."

"The ceasefire is great," says Terry Hooley, a music promoter. "Nobody has tried to kill me in 12 years, and I haven't been beaten up in three."

Hooley, known locally as the Godfather of Punk for discovering The Undertones and bringing youth from both sides together in the darkest days, proved a threat to paramilitary groups. "They wanted to control things and it was dangerous bringing punks together. The punks just wanted to hear music. They didn't care about politics," he says.

A film is being made on Hooley's life and he hopes it will be ready for next year's Berlin Film Festival, or Toronto, at the latest. Indeed, Hooley's scarred and craggy face tells the story of several beatings at the hands of Loyalists — he lost his left eye in a horrific beating for refusing to sign a punk band that included racist material in its songs. But despite Hooley's belief, there are still signs that all is not right in the city. At St George's Market, a covered red-bricked building where locals come for their daily shopping, fish and fresh produce, a stand is openly selling Nazi regalia, including swastika busts and Iron Cross medals.

"Why is this?" a shocked German visitor from Hamburg asks as she looks at the items that are illegal in her homeland. Because right-wing thinking and bigoted political philosophies go hand-in-hand with extreme patriotism of Loyalists, another visitor to Belfast explains, embarrassed by the sale of the Nazi memorabilia in his country.

But if there is one thing that the residents of the city have learnt, it is how to work together to make the city a better place for everyone. And this is an expertise they are sharing with other troubled places in the world.

Susan Timoney, a city-hall employee, has just returned to Belfast after a secondment to Kosovo. There, she was trying to bring the Serbs and the Kosovars together, getting them to work on projects of mutual concern, finding common ground, solving problems.

"We have a bit of experience in this," she says. "We don't have a monopoly on sectarian and political divisions, but we do have experience in getting people from different perspectives to work together."

At Stormont, Northern Ireland's parliament building, Unionist and Nationalist politicians share power together, with Cabinet portfolios divided between parties, former enemies sitting around a Cabinet table as one.

"The deal isn't perfect, but it is a means to an end," Simpson notes. "The sad thing is that the deal is basically the same as that offered under the terms of the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974. That was scuttled by Ian Paisley and the Ulster Workers' Council general strike. It took another 24 years of bloodshed before that same basic deal was accepted by everyone. And how many thousands of people were killed, and how many thousands were injured? Both sides have had to learn to compromise and move from entrenched positions. It's a peace process, and a process infers that it isn't perfect and that it will take time. We have to find our own way forward."

On the Shankill side of the peace line, visitors are encouraged to mark their presence by adding to the graffiti and political slogans such as "No Surrender" and "Never" — hardline phrases from the dark days of the Loyalist lexicon where any peace deal was seen as a sell-out to the Irish Republicans and nationalists.

The atmosphere is one of a people under siege, where attitudes are slow to change but where prosperity is a welcome benefit of the peace process.

"If this place is ever going to change, we need integrated education," Ken, the taxi driver, notes. "Right now, only 7 per cent of schoolchildren are in integrated schools. Until such time as that percentage changes, old attitudes will be slow to change."

On the Republican side of the peace line — literally a stone's throw from the Shankill — green, white and gold tricolour flags from the Republic of Ireland are hung from buildings.

This bastion of nationalism and Republicanism is known as the Gaeltacht Quarter — named after the ancient Irish language once spoken throughout the island but banished into near-oblivion by British laws and educators when London ruled Ireland. Now, Gaeilge is enjoying a resurgence — children are learning the language in schools and there are bilingual street signs on every corner.

Unlike its Loyalist neighbourhood, the area has been revitalised since the ceasefires. Gone are army patrols and matte-green armoured Land Rovers patrolling hostile territory. Instead, community and art centres flourish, and the housing estates appear less intimidating. Instead of guns and gunmen, the community murals depict struggles such as those endured by the Palestinians, or nationalist figures such as solicitor Pat Finnucane, who was murdered by Loyalist paramilitaries acting in collusion with British security forces, or Bobby Sands, the Republican hero who died on hunger strike while in prison.

"There is a very close parallel between Irish nationalists and Palestinians," Simpson observes. "Both have a unique identity and have struggled to gain international recognition, and their right to self-determination has been thwarted by an interloper. There is a certain solidarity between the two causes."

At the bottom of Falls Road, close to the city centre, sits the Divis Street Flats. Once the tallest building in the city — it has since been surpassed by a higher condominium development — the flats were used for snipers to shoot at British army patrols. To counteract that, the British army established an observation post on the roof, and the building became likely the most notorious address in the province. Now, under the peace dividend, the flats complex has been completely renovated and refurbished — a desirable address within a few minutes' walk of downtown.

Former linen mills — Belfast was the world's leading centre for the production of linen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — have been converted into swanky lofts.

"On the Falls there is a palpable atmosphere of renewal," Simpson says. Or, as his friend Debbie notes: "When Republicans went to jail, they studied and received an education. When Loyalists went to jail, they pumped iron." Now, former jailed fighters on both sides have been freed and have received amnesties.

Animosities between the two communities flare during "Marching Season" — the period around July 12 when Loyalists celebrate the victory in 1690 of William of Orange over King James's forces at the Battle of the Boyne. That victory assured Protestant domination of the island until the overwhelmingly Catholic south gained independence in 1921.

But in Northern Ireland, those Orange loyalties dies hard. Bomb fires are still lit and provocative marches take place in Loyalist areas. The city is trying to scale back the political ramifications of the celebrations, trying to turn it into a cultural "Orangefest" instead.

"What the Troubles did do," Ken says, "is allow anyone with sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies to carry a gun and go out and kill people." Perhaps the most infamous of those characters was the Loyalist henchman Johnnie "Mad Dog" Ahare, who now lives in Scotland, afraid to return home to the Shankill because of scores to be settled with former friends and enemies. "Mad Dog's gang gave me a horrific beating and left me for dead," Hooley says. "I was beaten to within an inch of my life by his men, all because I refused to promote one of their racist bands."

But in the past 15 years of peace, the former ghettoes of hardline opinions are slowly changing — in ways that community leaders from either Republican or Loyalist sides couldn't have imagined.

Belfast's former gasworks — once dirty, dark and decayed — have been transformed into loft-style offices, green spaces, canals and hotels.

And along the Loyalist ghetto of the Sandy Row, the red, white and blue signage has been replaced by Cantonese. English shop signs have been replaced by Mandarin, with Caucasians in the minority as students slurp bowls of rice noodles topped with barbecued duck in the cheap restaurants that are everywhere.

"Belfast is a very friendly place," says a student, Lee Ho, as she and her friends sip green tea at a noodle house. "Yes, we hear about the fighting that used to be here, but we have never seen it."

Her family moved from London a decade ago, and she speaks English with the hard-accented brogue of both Catholics and Protestants alike.

"I don't know what the murals mean. Is it to do with the fighting?" she asks.

But the slow pace of progress in the peace process is leading some to long for the good old, bad old days when gunmen shaped the province's fate.

Two British soldiers, sappers Mark Quinsey, 23, and Patrick Azimkar, 21, were murdered in 2009 as they picked up pizzas from a deliveryman in Antrim, by weapons used in similar attacks on army bases during the Troubles.

High-profile Republican Colin Duffy, 43, from Lurgan, and Brian Shivers, 46, from Magherafelt, deny two charges of murder and the attempted murder of six others — three soldiers, two pizza-delivery drivers and a security guard. The murders, which took place four years after the Provisional Irish Republican Army claimed it had decommissioned its arsenal, were carried out by breakaway dissident Republican terror group the Real IRA.

A violent minority

In October, a dissident Republican was jailed for 12 years for trying to buy weapons and explosives in Lithuania. The plot was foiled by British, Irish and Lithuanian intelligence agencies, which believe the explosives would have been used to mount a terror campaign in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland.

"What these people don't realise," Simpson says, "is that Northern Ireland has moved on. There is no appetite on either side for a return to the dark days. We have peace now. There is no popular support for anything else. Those who want a return to violence are in a very small minority — there's probably less than a hundred of them. It's also very interesting to note that Martin McGuinness has called these people traitors. That's loaded language for someone in Sinn Fein to use, but it shows how far both sides have come."

Both sides may have progressed, but the city's police stations still make an intimidating impression with high razor-wire fences, reinforced gates and blast-proof exteriors. Since the peace accord, the force has been renamed from the Royal Ulster Constabulary to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Its ranks, though, are still overwhelmingly Protestant.

On the Shankill, Ken's outlook on the future is pragmatic.

"During the Troubles there were a lot of people who made a lot of money through racketeering and controlling neighbourhoods," he says. "The racketeering is mostly gone, but there are still people who want to control neighbourhoods. Nobody wants to turn the clock back. We've had a taste of peace and of working together. Everyone is benefiting from that now, not just the few who controlled things before. That's been the biggest and hardest lesson for a lot of people to learn in this city."