Reebok and Gucci or the 'gypsy' look? Northern teenagers are wearing their prejudice on their sleeves, new research shows. Kate Holmquist reports.
The children of The Troubles are using designer clothes, shoes, jewellery and hairstyles as sectarian badges of identity as they venture onto what remain, for them, dangerous streets despite the peace process. Fourteen-year-old Protestants say big hoop earrings, cheap gold jewellery, dyed black hair and "gypsy"-style clothes are worn by Catholic girls. Their Catholic counterparts say Protestant girls wear more expensive jewellery, dye their hair blonde and wear Gucci, FCUK and Reebok.
Eighty-four 14-year-olds from north Belfast were interviewed by Madeleine Leonard, reader in the school of sociology and social policy at Queen's University, Belfast, for research commissioned by the Save the Children Fund. Some of her findings appear in Uncertain Ireland, a collection of sociological papers published by the Institute of Public Administration in Dublin and launched yesterday at the annual conference of the Sociological Association of Ireland at the Institute of Technology, Sligo.
Teenagers claim Protestant boys are clean-shaven, wear Rangers football jerseys and put the peaks of their caps up, while Catholic boys have moustaches, wear Celtic jerseys and put the peaks of their caps "way down". Some teenagers link rioting to Rangers v Celtic matches and wear Rangers or Celtic jerseys as a deliberately defiant gesture when travelling in mixed areas.
The pupils come from four schools in north Belfast, two Catholic and two Protestant. "We wear dead dear earrings. They don't sell them where they live," one Protestant girl said. Her friends add that Catholic parents cannot afford to "spoil" their kids because they have "too many".
Name-calling is routine: Catholic boys call Protestants "huns" who "love Hitler" because they allegedly originated from Germany. Protestant boys say Catholics are "Taigs" with "funny names" who "breed like dogs".
Leonard comments that teenagers in the North feel acutely sensitive to the social signals that brand teens as Catholic or Protestant. The lingering trauma of Holy Cross is strong in teenagers' minds, even if they were not directly involved, Leonard says. Verbal abuse is common and the teens perceive it as physical assault. Their clothes are more than fashion statements because they protect them from attack. The wrong clothes can result in them being wrongly labelled and beaten up by their own community.
Teenagers continue to live with sectarian threats on a daily basis, as well as threats from loyalist or former IRA community enforcers. When shopping or socialising in mixed areas, teens are cautious. They read the name-tags that shop assistants wear to tell if a shop is safe and change their names if walking anywhere they could meet someone from the "other" side. When attending leisure centres where Protestants and Catholics mix, the teens use their own informally agreed system of separate entrances and exits.
School uniforms are seen as negative sectarian badges and pupils take great pains to alter or disguise their uniforms when travelling in areas where the "other" side are likely to be. Leonard likens this to forcing adults to wear armbands categorising them as Catholic or Protestant.
She says adults perceive the peace process as resolving itself and regard any discussion of sectarian as being counterproductive and politically incorrect. "The messy aspects of ongoing deprivation and discrimination in working-class communities are being ignored by the media because looking at problems is seen as pessimistic, and in a fragile political situation it makes sense to push the image of Northern Ireland as moving forward," she says.
But for children and teenagers who must deal with sectarianism in their daily lives, such collective denial is Northern Ireland's equivalent of the famous elephant in the front parlour.
"Teens in working-class communities in North Belfast don't see any visible manifestation of peace in their daily lives because Protestant and Catholic children are segregated in education and housing," Leonard says. Only 4 per cent of Northern children attend integrated schools, and in working-class tenant communities run by the Northern Housing Executive, residents are either 90 per cent Protestant or 90 per cent Catholic.
Yet despite their bad experiences, many teens are open to having their prejudices confronted and want the chance to talk openly without adults censoring them. "It's absolutely crucial to focus on children and young people before the damage becomes . . . irreparable," says Leonard.
