President Obama's newly appointed Middle East Envoy, George Mitchell, is perhaps best known for his work on another political and religious puzzle -- the Good Friday peace agreement between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Youth Radio's Pendarvis Harshaw visited the West Belfast neighborhood that was the seat of power for paramilitary groups there, to find out how the peace process has evolved among its young people.

This neighborhood is Ground Zero for "the Troubles", as the natives of Ireland call the violence between Protestants and Catholics that intensified in the late 60s. The children growing up here now haven't been directly touched by the violence that marked the Troubles, and their generation is the Petri dish for whether peace will hold here. They still live in a segregated city. Protestants and Catholics live in two neighborhoods divided by a wall, euphemistically called a Peace Wall.

"It took really long to build it," said 11-year-old Leigh Hutchinson, "and it would take really long to knock it down because it's really really big and really really long." Leigh is a student at the Clubhouse Community Center, a community organization in Belfast. There are actually two Clubhouses open to the youth here: one on the Catholic side of the wall, and one on the Protestant side, where Leigh lives. 

"Even though we have a peace wall, there shouldn't really be one," Leigh said. "Even though it does help separate the Protestants and Catholics and stoppin' them from fightin, no other place really has one so it's a bit not normal."

The gates at either end of the peace wall close at sundown, to prevent the lingering embers of conflict between the two neighborhoods from sparking into violence reminiscent of the time before the peace deal ten years ago.

"My daddy used to be in the army," Leigh's twin sister Laura tells me, "and he talks constantly about it. I can't really explain how he talks because he talks so much about it I can't remember. He just thinks he's the greatest because he was in the army and he just likes talking... he like the sound of his own voice,"

Laura, as most children would, says her parent talks a lot. But sending his daughter to a center that promotes reconciliation-- in the very community where he once waged war-- says more than Leigh's father could ever articulate.

As recently as two years ago, there were nightly riots here: Catholics and Protestants were exchanging lit explosives over the peace wall. It's a blue collar section of Belfast, where most young people won't go on to college, or work far from home. Elizabeth Donaldson works with young people at the Clubhouse in the Protestant Shankill Road area. She says both Catholics and Protestants in West Belfast have high rates of teen pregnancy and suicide, and are at risk of drug use.

"The funny thing is," said Elizabeth, "there are young people that feel -the other side are aliens to them-- in proximity they're very close , in interests they're very close. And it's only when they get together that they realize that each other are not two headed monsters."

Fourteen-year-old Steven is a computer graffiti master who regularly attends the Clubhouse in the Catholic neighborhood of Falls Road. He attributes the bulk of his historical knowledge of the Troubles to YouTube videos, but says he's experienced Catholic-Protestant violence vicariously through his 19-year-old brother.

"My mom just sits and worries about him," Steven shared. "Sticking up for the Catholic religion or something, over nothing. Sneaking out at night when the riots were actually on. I always tell him not to go up – I haven't heard of any riots for a few years, so it's sorta calmed down."

Although Steven speaks on the history of violence disapprovingly, his teacher says Steven and other teens look upon their relatives' involvement in the Catholic-Protestant rioting as a kind of  "machismo"; a way to show how close they are to being involved in the subsided conflict.

Leigh Hutchinson at the Protestant Shankill Road Clubhouse says they commemorate their heroes with a poem they have to recite on Remembrance Day. Protestants have adopted this World War I era poem as a nationalist  hymn.

Leigh claims that "me and Chloe and Laura all had to memorize it. On Flander's Fields, poppies grow…row on row…I can't remember. She's going to go over to the computer and check it out".

Leigh paused halfway through the poem so her friend could go and look up the words for her on the Internet, in a classroom covered with sketches and paintings of the students' favorite pop stars. I almost asked Leigh to recite the singer Rihanna's latest single, I doubt she would've needed a search engine for that one.

Most of these kids were toddlers when the Good Friday peace agreement was signed in the hopes of ending violence in Northern Ireland. But their neighborhood is still socially and physically segregated - Catholics on one side, Protestants on the other. Programs like the Clubhouse ease the integration process, but still, their interaction takes place mostly on field trips. Nonetheless, these small integrations are the pebbles cast by a Trouble-free generation in an effort to knock down the wall between these two communities, only a stones throw apart.

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