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Mara had one morning in Belfast , and she spent it on a request that made the driver look at her twice . She did not want the harbour or the hills . She wanted the peace walls , and she wanted both sides . The walls are not a metaphor . During the Troubles , barriers were built in Belfast between neighbourhoods that are mostly Catholic and neighbourhoods that are mostly Protestant , so that violence along those edges would be harder to carry out . Many of the walls are still there . Some visitors pay a driver to take them along the roads beside them . A line that was meant to keep people apart has become a place people travel to see . Her driver knew the Falls Road and the Shankill . He would not talk about either as a postcard . On each side the murals remembered that community's own dead , and the pictures did not tell the same story . The paint looked sure of itself . Nothing she heard offered a single sentence that both roads would accept . She had arrived with an idea she could not use : contact between groups can reduce prejudice when the conditions are right . Her tour borrowed the word contact and then spent it . Mara could stand near a wall . She could not be anyone's neighbour for the afternoon . She would leave before she had learned the name of a single shop . That is the risk inside dark tourism . A place marked by loss can teach a visitor something true , and it can also press the loss into a story short enough to tell between two stops . Mara felt the tidy version waiting : two communities , one wall , a lesson at the end . The driver would not give it to her . The talks that reduced the violence , he said , were held in rooms she was not going to enter . A mural can honour the dead . It does not , by itself , explain the people who still live beside it . Near one stretch of wall , visitors had covered the concrete with names and short messages . Some sounded hopeful . Some were only a name . She kept her hands in her pockets . Writing there would have been easy . The harder thing was to stay long enough to understand why the wall was still standing , and she did not have that kind of time . On the way back toward the city centre she asked whether tourism had helped . He watched the road . It brings money , he said , and it brings people who leave the same day . Both can be true . The wall did not move because she had looked at it .
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