Children feel like they are being kept apart 25 years after Good Friday Agreement

It was a typically dank Belfast Friday night; I'd jumped into my car after coming out of a west Belfast youth club.  

We had just been speaking to a brilliant group of young people about what the Good Friday Agreement means to them for our Up Close programme.  

My spotify kicked in and 'Dreams' by the Cranberries, so synonymous now with the iconic Derry Girls TV show, blasted out.  

As I drove across Belfast I totally had a moment.  

I felt tears in my eyes as I thought through some of the reflections from the teenagers we'd just interviewed and I wondered aloud why change hadn't come more fully for everyone.  

One 14 year old girl had lamented the fact she's not been involved in any cross community work.  

One young lad mentioned the so-called 'peace walls' and commented, "It's like they want to keep us separated."  

What I noticed time and time again during our interviews is the passion people have for this place; so many spoke from the soul.  

I feel it too. I had just turned 17 the day before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, so didn't get to vote but my career has been charted against a backdrop of the peace process.

I feel invested in the conversations that are surfacing around this anniversary - segregation, paramilitarism and the past.

Twenty five years on perhaps peace has never felt more complicated.  

For tonight's programme, 'an Imperfect Peace', we have spent weeks speaking to a diverse range of people about where they think peace is at.

During filming we witnessed moving scenes as young people came together to re-image the Lanark Way 'peace gates' in west Belfast - and reimagine a different future.  

We listened to impassioned pleas of people in the public eye, like Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody.  And we hung on the words of internationally acclaimed artist and victims' campaigner Colin Davidson as he shared his dream that the stories of victims and survivors would finally be acknowledged properly.

Our challenges are really staring us in the face right now.

The terror threat has recently been raised due to dissident republican terror activity, while loyalist factions are causing havoc in Newtownards.  

Several community workers told me that fear is high and confidence low across a number of communities.

But amid this, among those we spoke to, what struck me was a thirst for breakthrough and for the dysfunctional parts of our norm to be faced up to and worked through.

This, of course, will take real political leadership but perhaps too it's also on all of us, if those teenagers I met are to live the normal lives they shouldn't have to crave.

On Thursday, April 6, UTV broadcast a special programme on the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. You can also watch it on catch up.


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