Growing up in a divided North, imagining a better future

As humans we all share 99.9 per cent of the same DNA. We share overwhelmingly more in common with each other – regardless of where we live or come from on the planet – than not. Yet we build difference into everything – “let’s build walls”, the cry goes out. “Them versus us”, we hear over and over. Or the more insidious mutterings of, “you should stick to your own kind”. What does that even mean when we are all the same kind? Humankind.

These were the types of identity issues and questions I struggled with as a child, then teenager, growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s – a time when the Troubles were in full swing and things were very different to how they are now.

I did not grow up in a violent place. That often surprises people when they ask about what it was like to grow up in the North back then, because we all carry cliches and shorthand images of the world in our mind’s eye. My hometown was – and is – a beautiful village nestled in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains.

But difference is persistent. It seeps into everyday discourse, to small actions and decisions taken. The atmosphere of tension, conflict, danger was always there. You would check under a car after a night out at the cinema – “just to be sure”. Or when out driving after dark as a teenager I was schooled in how to say where I was travelling from and to, invented journeys – as place names were political and religious triggers that could make for a long or a short stop at an army checkpoint.

The same thing happened with surnames. Conversations in the North would often follow a predictable pattern, “Where are you from?” or “What school did you go to?” – these identifiers being tells that could place you in the conversation which would then continue on, each knowing where the other stood, Catholic or Protestant, depending on the answers. There was nothing subtle about it.

Education was segregated on religious lines – a situation improved upon now – but back then it was considered “just easier”.

Aged 11, I chose Francis as a confirmation name – because he was the saint of peace. As an idealist and as a child I was hopeful. Peace – there was something worth having. It was a talisman I carried with me.

I grew up used to bomb scares, checkpoints, the constant buzz of helicopters overhead. When I would sketch Carlingford Lough, the view from in front of our house, each picture would have the military ship out there on the water – as if it was normal. Because it was, in a way, normal. It was what we knew.

And I knew early on that I didn’t see the world in those terms. If politics were to be divisive and to drive people to fighting and killing each other over religion, then I wanted to live in a different way.

One day, aged 16, I was walking in Belfast up in the university quarter by Queens, when a man came up to me, jabbing me on the arm, shouting and spitting in my face, calling me a “Fenian b****h”. I was horrified. It was the middle of the day, in a busy place and people just walked around us like it wasn’t happening, and I couldn’t understand his anger and his hatred – come, it seemed to me, from nowhere, so sudden and visceral. But it symbolised to me the tribalism and violence rooted so deep in my country. Soon after that I started making plans to leave.

I loved languages and learning about new cultures. My parents encouraged this curiosity and my love of travel, bravely letting me go off from an early age to find my way in foreign settings – it was a great gift they gave to me. I became a global citizen, interested in the wider world.

Identity for me back then was so complicated – was I Irish? Not quite, though I felt Irish in many ways – but there was a border to cross, and the South was over the other side of the lough – startlingly close and yet so far away. Northern Irish? Well yes, but what was that really when you had two communities so at odds with each other. British? As a teenager, being British didn’t feature as a part of my sense of identity – it was simply “across the water”.

Aged 18 I packed a rucksack, and began my life outside of Northern Ireland. I needed space to see the world differently, and I was happy working, studying and living in new places, with people from all around the world – all different to me, yes, and yet with whom I felt so much shared in common. For the truth of it is, we all hope the same, love the same, care for family, wish for stability and peace, laugh and cry the same.

And it’s that hope that I’ve carried with me into my adult life and my writing. I will always be interested in how conflict shapes lives and how that can be overcome. Writing about our world, speaking about it, understanding, as Hannah Arendt so aptly described, is the way in which we humanise our world and ourselves. I will cling on to that idealism of my youth – unfashionable perhaps in a cynical world – but without it we are lost.

In dangerous times of division, when walls are being raised once more and communities divided by fear; and as indifference to the plight of those in desperate need grows, coupled with the increasing dehumanisation of others – we need to remind ourselves that we all share 99.9 per cent of the same DNA. We are one humankind – imperfect in an unequal world, deeply flawed, yet also beautiful, remarkable and astounding by turns.

So if you ask me now, "Where are you from?" I will say proudly, I am Northern Irish, Irish and European – but I am also a citizen of the world. Humankind – that is where I am from. What about you? Where are you from?
Laura McVeigh's debut novel Under the Almond Tree is published today by Two Roads Books, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton. Prior to writing full-time, Laura was Director of PEN International, the writers' organisation promoting literature and campaigning on freedom of expression issues around the world. She has also served as Global Girls Fund Director, empowering girls and young women worldwide