But the truth was that most residents still lived in neighborhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90 percent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated elementary schools. Bus stops in some parts of Belfast were informally designated Catholic or Protestant, and people would walk an extra block or two to wait at a stop where they wouldn’t fear being hassled. Hundreds of Union Jacks still fluttered in Protestant neighborhoods, while Catholic areas were often decked out with the tricolor, or with Palestinian flags—a gesture of solidarity but also a signal that, even
...more