I was somewhat shocked to read about “Peace Lines” in major cities in Northern Ireland (Peace lines - Wikipedia). I’m curious as to how crossing the lines works in practice - can you simply casually walk or drive across during non-emergency situations, or are you subject to inspection, like if you were at a border crossing such as US/Canada? E.g. could the authorities manning the line stop a Northern Irish Protestant (or Protestant foreigner/immigrant/tourist) and tell them that they cannot enter the Catholic neighborhood today for some unspecified security reason, or because they have a criminal record, or were reported as a suspicious person?
Or is it just a matter of stopping instant access, and a person who really wanted to go to the other side could just hop on the highway out of town and turn around and enter the city in a different neighborhood?
Are the gates ever closed to the point where a person simply cannot cross even with a good reason (such as living and working on the other side?). It’s difficult to fathom how this would work - how could a person be able to leave the city or the country but unable to cross neighborhoods?
You can get into or out of any area. You just have to take the long way around.
One example I think is interesting (apologies if my memory isn’t completely accurate): Exiting from the walled city of Derry through Bishop’s Gate, if you are on the footpath on the left side of the road you will find yourself on one side of the Peace Line, in the Protestant enclave called The Fountain. But if you drive out the same gate, or walk on the footpath on the right side of the road, you will be on the other side of the Peace Line, in the Catholic Bogside.
To get from one side of the line to the other, you just walk back through the walls, cross the road, and walk out again.
At one of the most famous peace lines, between the Falls and Shankill roads in West Belfast, there is a gate through which people can pass freely during the day. Last time I was up around there, which was a good few years ago now, it was closed at dark.
At other times and other places some of them may be completely closed off e.g. in the Short Strand (East Belfast) in 2002, at a time of serious hostility between the two communities in the area, there was no way across the peace line. If you wanted to go from one area to another - and if you did you were probably up to no good anyway - you had to either scale the walls or go the long way around.
My observation about the continued existence of the peace lines is that everyone thinks they should come down except the people living on either side of them.
What disturbed me more than the peace lines was the meshes over people’s backyards so that firebombs coming over the lines don’t set fire to their houses.
ETA: As the others have said, they just block the immediate path between an area predominantly one and predominantly the other community. They don’t hermetically seal areas off from one another.
