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Derry/Londonderry – where even the choice of name reflects ‘which foot you kick with’ – has a compelling and fractious history. It has often been synonymous with sectarian tensions, not least at the violent onset of the Troubles in the early 1970s, during which large numbers of Protestants moved to the Waterside, while Catholics stayed on the Cityside.
The writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh not only grew up amid these divisions in the 1980s, but, with a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, she embodied them. If religious identity was not an issue at home, it certainly was outside.
The family was living in a working-class Protestant housing estate when their father left, and the thuggish enforcers of tribal purity soon came after those who remained. Their message to leave arrived in the form of a petrol bomb through the window – ‘We were not Protestant, now that Dad had left. We were not Catholic either, though… we were nothing other than other – indefinabl