“Its a big twelve foot high wall between Themens and Usens, to keep the peace”
Barack Obama says the walls are going down. Obama knows fuck all: in Belfast, Northern Ireland, an extension of the divisive interface barrier maintained to separate communities, is going up.
A group of construction workers down tools upon discovery of a mysterious rock on the building site; they suspect it marks the grave of a victim of ‘The Troubles,’ Ireland’s long period of violence. But its peacetime now, and in the current recession jobs are thin on the ground and a new Polish immigrant worker disrupts group dynamics and challenges their lazy hostility. The lads bicker and banter, constantly re-negotiating tribal hierarchies and received truths.
The Wall itself, willing to be built, rails against the delay, smelling blood. But now the builders have started questioning, and the possibility of alternatives shake the foundations of the familiar and ‘normal.’ Is change possible? Can individual change lead to the social reconstruction of a stale cycle of power, or prevent ancient division being made permanent?
