Across the island of Ireland, we tend to be very territorial about our spaces, with the older generation especially often thinking in terms of ‘Protestant places’ and ‘Catholic places’.

Maybe amongst the younger generation, those binary ideas about life are dying out, but we still see traces of it in the way we imagine our towns.

Many places are still seen as being either ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’, with all the cultural associations that go with this label, rather than religious.

As an example of this, last weekend I went to the very ‘Protestant’ town of Lisburn on my way to a christening in Glenavy – a wee village that I’ve no idea of the denominations of.

Maybe I have always been a bit dyslexic when it comes to these kinds of things, but I quite enjoy going over to explore places that are seen as somehow not belonging to me, either culturally or historically.

Then again, I have worked in South Korea and China, so I don’t mind passing through places that are never really mine.

But it’s kind of sad that we even still reflect on things this way. Why should I not be as comfortable with a night in Lisburn as I would be with a night in Dublin or Derry?

A lot of it’s probably in our minds like a bad hangover of the past.

If we’re truly to move on as a society, we have to start seeing our spaces and places as being shared.

You can spend the night in a Unionist or even a Loyalist town without having that political persuasion, just the same as you can do that in a Nationalist or Republican town.

The best analogy for that, I have heard, is a story that goes back years to when we had those dreaded Border checkpoints and British soldiers pointing guns at us.

One of the lads in my year at university – who went on to be a very successful doctor – told us a story of how he was coming up to just such a checkpoint one night.

He and his friends were playing Republican songs in the car just before they rolled down the window.

A British soldier looked in at him, and says: “So we have Republicans in the car.”

He answered back with a question of whether they’d have called him a cowboy if he had been playing Country and Western music.

The point is that things don’t need to be absolute. Anybody’s welcome to a night in Lisburn or Limerick without picking up any of the political values that might define the place in a different way.

I spent the weekend in Lisburn, but that doesn’t make me a Unionist. It does, though, make me open to experiencing the atmosphere of such towns and getting a sense of their culture and way of living.

To be honest, apart from lack of a GAA presence, many of these ‘Protestant’ towns aren’t that different to anywhere else, North or South.

People watch the same TV shows, drink the same beer, follow the same football clubs and understand the same cultural references.

And we worship the same kind of God, too.

This island belongs to all of us in our own ways, and it’s in our interests to explore the place as best we can.

That’s what our ancestors would have done in a time before it was Partitioned.

For me, it’s about place rather than politics, so I will gladly go to any corner, whenever there’s a chance to tick a new place off the proverbial bucket list.

A couple of years ago I went to Carrickfergus for the weekend with my wife to stay with Fermanagh’s renowned Country and Western singer, and promoter, Malcolm McDowell.

It was a place I’d long since read about in the poetry of Louis MacNeice and heard about in the classic Irish folk song, modernised by Dominic Behan.

I was delighted to get a chance to visit such a historic place, regardless of what colour the flags were on the lamp posts.

As John Hume often said, you can’t eat a flag. And sure, why would you bother, with all the gourmet pubs about Derry these days?

But seriously, it’s a great thing to be able to switch between the range of places that this part of the world offers us.

Even going back to childhood, we used to switch between trips to Bundoran and Portrush all the time.

Never once did it matter what the politics were, because the sand and sea are neither Orange or Green.

In writing this, I am thinking too of an interview that I once did with Danny Morrison.

I’m not sure he has ever had too many weekends in Lisburn, Lisbellaw or Carrickfergus, but he’d be very open to the prospect, I’d imagine.

In that interview, he was talking about the creation of a new shared Ireland that belongs to everyone equally.

He told me a story of how once upon a time he was on his way to some event in Dublin and he had a pit stop along the way.

During the course of that, another Northern car pulled up, and after chatting it turned out the driver was a Protestant who might even have had a connection to the police, possibly the RUC.

At first, the Protestant driver acted almost apologetically, talking as if he was out of place in Danny Morrison’s country.

But it’s no more Danny Morrison’s country than it’s any less the country of anyone born in Lisburn, Lisbellaw or Carrickfergus.

If we are to mature as a society, we have to realise this.

In a normal society, spaces are shared and diversity is the norm. But at the same time, old habits die hard.

It’s not so easy to imagine an Ireland where the man from Carrickfergus feels that some part of Cork belongs to him too, and vice versa.

I suppose part of that’s to do with our attachment to land. But at the end of the day, there’s more to life than land.

Because if there’s an afterlife, then we can’t take the land that we live on now with us to that place.

So while we’re down here, we might as well share it as best we can, and see as much of it as we can while we have the chance.

Paul Breen is @paulbreenauthor on X.