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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
The Usual Suspects
Street politics were made fashionable by the Civil Rights Movement, and that was a good thing…. If people couldn’t articulate what they felt in words then they could forcibly demonstrate what they felt with bricks and bottles. Street politics changed the very consciousness of the people, and opened to them prospects which were before vague dreams, i.e., jobs, houses, justice…. Street politics were exhilarating, dangerous and to a degree effective; they were also bloody, brutal and murderous.
—Joe Nicholas, letter to the editor, Sunday Press, November 1, 1970
At the bottom of the Falls Road, in the Divis area of west Belfast, one wall has become a dedicated site for murals. It is called the “international wall,” and the murals there draw connections between Northern Ireland and other countries. Periodically, the murals are changed; exemplary paintings have commemorated the Basque struggle, expressed sympathy with besieged Gazans, and celebrated historical figures like Che Guevara. A long-standing trope of the murals is comparison of nationalist experiences in Northern Ireland with African American experiences in the United States. So, for example, in 2010, nine years after the Holy Cross protests discussed in Chapter 1, a mural juxtaposed images of the Holy Cross children and Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine black students who attended the desegregating Little Rock High School in Arkansas, as she was harassed by white students in 1957.
Comparisons of Irish experiences in the north with the U.S. civil rights struggle have persisted since the 1960s, when local civil rights campaigners appropriated the strategies of the U.S. activists. The civil rights movement began in protest of practices under the unionist-dominated Stormont parliament—including gerrymandering, limited enfranchisement, and anti-Catholic discrimination in public services, especially housing. Their demonstrations and marches were met with violent opposition from police and loyalists. Street politics spiraled into violent conflict. In this sense, rights discourse was implicated in the conflict’s emergence.
Those living in the most impoverished and violent areas of the city quickly embraced the protest tactics of the civil rights movement, as working-class nationalists and unionists in west Belfast incorporated rights discourse into their political vernacular. This appropriation, as much as the civil rights movement itself, was an early determining influence on the contemporary function of rights talk as war by other means. The appropriations of rights talks in the 1970s swiftly translated grander assertions of civil rights into more quotidian claims for socioeconomic rights, such as the right to public housing in communally identified areas of the city. Territorial boundaries of political and communal blocs hardened, and swathes of people were put out of their homes, often violently. As riots, mass displacements, bombings, and shootings became everyday events, rights talk, especially about housing rights, became inseparable from profound social and political cleavages, as well as new forms of political action.
Rights Enter the Lexicon
“Patrick,” a former member of People’s Democracy (PD), one of the 1960s civil rights organizations, still recalls some of their work with a sense of accomplishment. But he is also rueful and contemplative. The subsequent loss of life, he says, makes his heady days of student activism seem naïve. In 2011, he still questions PD’s role in the conflict, and he is still shaken by memories as he makes his way through the city. Recently, he says, driving past the Divis area, he remembered Patrick Rooney, the first child to die, killed in his bed as police fired on Divis Flats during the riots of 1969.1 He began to cry and pulled to the side of the road to compose himself. Questions and doubts plague him, not about the injustices of the Northern Irish state they confronted but about the different paths they might have taken. “It’s not whether those things didn’t happen; it’s whether the response to them could have been different,” he said sadly.
In contrast to Patrick’s doubts about civil rights strategies and categorical rejection of violence, contemporary accounts of the peace process causally link past violence to the postpartition state’s rights deficits. The curative potential of human rights is celebrated for helping end the conflict. A pivotal moment in this account is the late 1960s campaign for civil rights, the violent reactions of police and loyalists, and the subsequent street-level, intercommunal violence that escalated in 1969. But the movement from rights protest to violent civil conflict was not a straightforward historical trajectory—the journey was more complex, just as the role of rights discourse in peacemaking is more ambiguous.
The commonly understood impetus for civil rights grievances is the way unionists dominated government in Northern Ireland after partition in 1921. Under the devolved Stormont regime, anti-Catholic discrimination occurred in private and public employment and public services, particularly those provided by local councils. Although some debate the character of the postpartition state in both politics and scholarship, a broad consensus agrees that, from 1921 to 1968, the devolved political system supported and legitimated widespread discrimination against the Catholic minority (e.g., Darby 1976; Whyte 1983).
State discrimination was most pronounced in local government. Local authorities preferentially allocated public housing to Protestants, and the system for voting in local elections meant housing discrimination had electoral consequences. That is, under Northern Irish voting laws, only “ratepayers”—either property owners or public housing tenants, both of whom paid a local property tax called “rates”—or their nominated representatives could vote in local elections. Private tenants did not pay rates—their landlords did—so these tenants were not automatically entitled to a local council vote. These rules applied only to local council elections; all adults were enfranchised for Northern Irish and UK parliamentary elections. Yet this system, combined with discrimination against Catholics in public housing, amplified the political representation of unionism. Ratepayers’ provisions also entitled owners of commercial property to nominate special voters (non-ratepayers) for each £10 ($28) value of the property, for up to six voters.2 Given disproportionate Protestant ownership of commercial property, this, too, increased unionists’ political representation (see Darby 1976). Furthermore, the practice nurtured a culture of patronage within unionism, as nonratepaying Protestants were dependent on property owners for nominations to vote in local council elections. There was also a pattern of gerrymandering, whereby electoral boundaries were drawn to ensure unionist dominance, most strikingly in Derry. Policing and justice also operated in a biased fashion, with the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act 1922 allowing internment without trial.3
Brice Dickson (2010), a respected human rights scholar and advocate (he was a founding member of the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the former head of the Human Rights Commission), makes clear the underlying difficulty of approaching Stormont’s repressions as human rights violations. Although these practices disenfranchised the minority, he explains, international frameworks that define human rights do not prescribe particular political or voting arrangements. In this sense, these frameworks offer limited tools. For Dickson (2010), stretching human rights principles to denounce the Stormont regime’s practices obscures the essentially political nature of its abuses (15). Extending this observation helps clarify a central insight: rights conflicts were political from the moment of their emergence in Northern Ireland. Broader narratives took longer to emerge, such as identifying human rights violations as causes of conflict or, later, human rights culture as a cause of peace.
In the 1960s, however, political and economic shifts occurring throughout western Europe dramatically changed the region’s politics. A growing Catholic middle class and radicalized university students (from both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds) challenged the region’s governance. The civil rights movement they created, and opposition to it, became a catalyst, rather than a simple cause, for the conflict. The local movement combined tactics from both the U.S. civil rights movement and European student uprisings. These tactics were introduced at a moment of increasing local tensions, as nationalists and unionists, respectively, celebrated the fiftieth anniversaries of the Easter Rising and the World War I Battle of the Somme.4
In the 1960s, pressures for state reform were acknowledged by some of the unionist elite. Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, who took office in 1963, attempted to reform the state by proposing the elimination of the commercial owners’ vote and a boundary commission in 1966. Two years later he added review of the Special Powers Act and fair public housing allocation to his reform proposals. Civil rights campaigners felt the reforms were too modest, and unionists felt that any concessions were dangerous. O’Neill’s efforts appear motivated more by a concern to preserve and modernize the unionist state than by a commitment to civil rights (Dixon 2001).
An early civil rights group was the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ), formed by middle-class Catholic residents of Dungannon, County Tyrone, in 1964. Their main concern was discrimination in the Dungannon Urban District, where the council gave Protestants preferential treatment in public housing allocations (McCluskey 1989). With leadership from Dr. Conn McCluskey, a general medical practitioner, and his wife Patricia, the CSJ began organizing protest marches. The group’s first publication, “Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth,” compiled figures on housing allocation, council employment, and political representation according to political identification in Londonderry, Enniskillen, and Dungannon districts (CSJ 1964).
The CSJ also initiated legal challenges, including applications to the European Court of Human Rights, but they were unsuccessful (Dickson 2010; McEvoy 2011). Although Dickson (2010) contends that the group’s U.S. lawyers provided inadequate counsel, the CSJ members believed state denial of their legal aid application also hurt the cases (CSJ 1966). Alongside CSJ, other civil rights groups began to emerge in the 1960s, such as the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC). The movement quickly realized legal challenges were not an effective tactic (McEvoy 2011). Direct actions, such as marches and protests, became their preferred approach, along with rhetorical appeals to audiences in Britain, North America, and Australia (Maney 2000).
In 1966 and 1967, a new group emerged to coordinate the various civil rights groups: the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). The Wolfe Tone Societies, republican groups established in 1964 to commemorate the leader of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion against Britain, were a primary force behind the creation of NICRA (Purdie 1990: 122). The Wolfe Tone Societies’ engagement with civil rights activism was a break from the republican ideology of armed struggle. In the 1960s, many republican groups, including the IRA, increasingly embraced leftist and Marxist ideology and became receptive to other political tactics (see Moloney 2007). Nevertheless, this early alliance of civil rights activism with republicanism added to unionist suspicions of the movement, even among the Protestant working class who could benefit from civil rights reforms. In 1967, NICRA publicized five objectives shared by civil rights groups: “To defend the basic freedoms of all citizens; To protect the rights of the individual; To highlight all possible abuses of power; To demand guarantees for freedom of speech, assembly and association; To inform the public of their lawful rights” (NICRA 1978: 20). In 1970, the group created a more specific list of demands: the individual franchise in local government elections, an independent boundary commission for local constituencies, a points system for housing, fair employment legislation, and a bill of rights. (Inclusion of the first demand, individual franchise, was mostly a propaganda device, since it had been established more than a year earlier in April 1969.)
The civil rights movement’s rhetorical appeals for international sympathy established a tactic that subsequent activists used for a variety of causes. Yet appropriating rights discourse is not a simple task, especially when movements in other places and times are treated as comparable to different situations. So, for example, civil rights activists in Northern Ireland faced a significant rhetorical challenge when they compared arcane local council voting practices or discrimination in public housing allocation to U.S. laws disenfranchising African Americans (e.g., poll taxes and literacy tests), to systematic, state-mandated racial segregation (Jim Crow laws), and to the historical legacies of the mass kidnap, transport, and enslavement of African peoples.5 At the same time, the Irish Americans who supported the Northern Irish campaign, but not the U.S. civil rights movement, were discomfited by these comparisons (Maney 2000; Dooley 1998). James C. Heaney of the American Congress for Irish Freedom warned in a letter to Dr. Frank Gogarty, a civil rights campaigner, “There is not a single Irish American group in the United States which has worked with the Colored Civil Rights movement…. So don’t expect this of any of us.”6
The other primary tactic, street protests, catalyzed broader political conflict throughout 1968 and 1969. On October 5, 1968, the DHAC, with support from NICRA, organized the first civil rights march in Derry. Police and loyalists attacked the protestors, and intercommunal rioting raged across the city and the region for two days. These events inspired the formation of a new, more strident civil rights group, People’s Democracy (PD).7 On October 9, to protest these events, about 3,000 students and staff from Queens University attempted a march to Belfast City Hall and were blocked by loyalist counterdemonstrators. PD was formed following this incident, and Northern Ireland’s 1968 arrived. PD initially outlined a list of conventional civil rights demands regarding voting, housing, employment, and civil rights (Arthur 1974), yet from the beginning it was more explicitly oriented to a class-based analysis than was NICRA. On October 24, marking the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights Day, PD was allowed to hold a three-hour sit-in at Stormont (see Arthur 1974).
Student radicals introduced several fissures in the civil rights movement. Purdie (1990) writes that the PD coalition with civil rights campaigns was a temporary, instrumental move, because members were “almost as hostile” to middle-class nationalist elements within the movement as they were to Stormont (198). Arthur (1974), a PD leader from October 1968 to Easter 1969, argues that PD members were not seeking revolution and in the beginning innocently believed that, once civil rights reforms were achieved, they could retreat from broader politics. What is certain is that, during 1968 and 1969, PD members disagreed repeatedly with NICRA members, pushing for more street marches. NICRA’s (1978) account reflects the suspicions that PD members were attempting to undermine the group and push a more leftist agenda.
The PD quickly began organizing protests the other groups found controversial. In January 1969, a small number of PD activists staged what they called the Long March, walking from Belfast to Derry. However, they never reached their destination. An organized loyalist contingent brutally attacked the marchers at Burntollet Bridge outside Derry. PD participants said the police did nothing to defend them. Conflict intensified after this event. As summer approached, both nationalists and loyalists lived in fear of their neighbors. Nationalists told me they had feared a sectarian onslaught from loyalists; loyalists said they were anxious the IRA was going to mount a full military campaign for a united Ireland.
On August 12, 1969, violence escalated in Derry and Belfast. Nationalists in the Bogside and Creggan areas of Derry directly engaged police and loyalists after a loyalist parade. By the next day, rioting had spread across the region. After two days, with police staff strained to the breaking point, the British Army stepped in at Derry. In Belfast, the rioting intensified, and intense sectarian battles led to six deaths. The most intense riots took place in mixed neighborhoods located between the lower Falls and lower Shankill areas of west Belfast. In Bombay Street, forty-four houses owned by Catholics were burned to the ground by loyalists. A barricade was set up between the Falls and Shankill Roads, the IRA surged, and conflict escalated from this point throughout the 1970s. The cityscape became a patchwork of embattled “communities,” separated by makeshift walls, later institutionalized as “peace lines.”
The political reforms proposed in the 1960s were ultimately implemented, but only after conflict had erupted. Individual franchise in local elections came earlier, in April 1969, but sporadic street violence had already become widespread civil disorder. Other reforms followed in the next decade, also too late to forestall the violence and conflict. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), established in 1970, gradually took over administration of public housing from elected representatives (see Brett 1986). The Fair Employment Act banned discrimination in 1976.
In 1972, the most violent year of the conflict, 496 people were killed, and some of the most horrifying violence occurred (McKittrick et al. 1999: 138). Potentially lethal violence became a daily occurrence: police records show 1,853 bombs and 10,631 shooting incidents in 1972 alone (PSNI 2012b: 2). At the beginning of the year, on January 30, civil rights marchers in Derry protested the practice of internment. Shockingly, British paratroopers monitoring the march shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians; seventeen others were injured, one fatally. The incident became known as “Bloody Sunday.” These killings were seen by nationalists as conclusive evidence of the local state’s failure. In March, devolution was suspended, and Britain instituted direct rule, dissolving the Stormont parliament. Local authorities were restricted to governing matters such as refuse collection, recreation, and community services. Yet the abuses of the Stormont era remained a potent rhetorical weapon in political battles for decades.
After Bloody Sunday, civil rights campaigners organized fewer marches, understandably reluctant to expose themselves to further state violence. As the conflict escalated, NICRA turned to more conventional advocacy, lobbying the UN regarding internment, policing and justice, and treatment of prisoners.8 The PD became overtly associated with republicans as it attempted to become a working-class movement. After conflict became endemic in 1969, some PD members aligned themselves figuratively and literally with the beleaguered residents of the Falls. Arthur (1974) recalls that attempts at activism in working-class communities fell on deaf ears among the Protestant working class, who associated civil rights with nationalism. Certainly, PD efforts in west Belfast never became as influential as citizen’s defense committees and paramilitaries. But PD did introduce New Left concepts, such as people’s cooperatives and people’s councils.
Many individuals within PD became influential figures in political and academic spheres in the years that followed. Kevin Boyle became a widely respected human rights lawyer. Michael Farrell, also a human rights lawyer, served on the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. Eamonn McCann, a young leftist from Derry, became a respected journalist and an active member of the Socialist Workers Party. Bernadette Devlin, famously elected an MP at age twenty-one in 1969, was influential in the formation of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). Jeff Dudgeon pursued a successful challenge to sodomy law before the European Court of Human Rights and remains an internationally recognized gay rights activist. Paul Bew became a respected academic historian and eventually advised the Ulster Unionist Party during the peace process.
Although consensus about the nature of the Stormont regime eventually emerged, the role of the civil rights movement in the conflict is more contentious. Unlike Bell (2006), who treats the movement as part of a trajectory toward human rights values, others implicate activists in the genesis of conflict. For example, Prince (2006, 2007) suggests that the civil rights movement, shaped by the “global revolt” of 1968, was partially responsible for the violence that followed its rise. Because civil rights brought street politics to sectarian Northern Ireland, with the ensuing state brutality and intercommunal violence, Prince argues that “its legacy was more one of civil strife than of civil liberties” (2006: 875). Politicians also claim that civil rights demands inevitably led to conflict. Conor Cruise O’Brien, who careened between unionism and republicanism in his long political career, argued in 1981 that the movement’s outcome “in Northern Ireland conditions could only be, as usual, Catholics versus Protestants” (cited in Ranelagh 1999: 268).
Other scholars and participants view the movement as a catalyst rather than a cause of conflict, treating violence as a symptom of an irredeemable system, unmasked by the movement. White (1989, 1993) explores how membership in or support of the civil rights movement influenced some to join the IRA. It is overly simplistic, however, to treat the movement as a straightforward route to armed struggle or as a direct cause of the conflict. Furthermore, a number of factors determined west Belfast community activists’ subsequent appropriation of civil rights tactics, especially direct protest and rhetorical appeals.
Although large numbers of civil rights activists did not embrace violence, the fact that some high-profile activists eschewed the nonviolence of Martin Luther King was a crucial factor in perceptions of the civil rights movement as a cause of the conflict. The role of the republican Wolfe Tone Societies in NICRA’s formation and the presence of paramilitary stewards at some marches led many to believe the movement was aligned with republicanism. Certainly, some of my research participants embraced both the civil rights movement and a philosophy of armed struggle. Furthermore, after conflict erupted, some more radical tendencies in the broader movement advocated armed struggle, and individual activists such as McCann appeared sympathetic to PIRA at times (1980: 129).9 Nevertheless, the mobilization for civil rights, through the assertion of basic rights to assembly, did not inevitably cause the conflict. It was, however, a catalyst for some of what followed. One consequence was that the language of rights became an integral part of institutional and everyday politics.
The contemporary function of rights discourse as war by other means is determined by how rights talk is received by different social groups as much as by the intentions of advocates. Current reception of rights talk is partly shaped by historical perceptions that, despite legitimate grievances, the civil rights movement was implicated in the conflict. Prominent campaigners’ contradictory positions about political violence aggravated these perceptions. However, the contemporary politics of rights discourse are shaped even more by the way working-class activists swiftly appropriated rights talk. In territorialized communities where the violence of the conflict was most intense, the example of the civil rights movement provided rationales, tactics, and language for claiming basic social and economic rights. The community politics of rights that followed were contingent rather than inevitable: they were shaped by historical political conditions, structural changes linked to deindustrialization, the intentions of the activists, and the very particular concerns and fears of people living through extreme violence with scarce material resources. In this crucible of poverty and violence, rights talk became inseparable from ethnopolitical conflict.
“Beyond the Capacity of Maps”: Poverty, Violence, and Political Consciousness
So it came about that, by 1970, a first-class housing crisis was one of the principal contributory factors to the Troubles.
—C. E. B. Brett, Housing a Divided Community, 36
During pervasive intercommunal violence in 1969 and 1970, riots, direct violence, and intimidation displaced thousands of people from their homes. The upheaval intensified profound associations of people and place, leaving behind a cityscape that was “beyond the capacity of maps.”10 In the aftermath, west Belfast residents retreated behind protective barricades into the safety of ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods. The destruction of houses and displacement of people created additional demands for housing in areas of the city where housing supply was limited and substandard. The Stormont government had been slow to introduce the postwar welfare entitlements established in Britain, and public housing was scarce. As part of the 1960s reforms, local government devised redevelopment plans that would increase public housing in the western part of the city. However, the plans were primarily designed to attract foreign investors as traditional industries declined. To provide new factory and commercial sites, the plans proposed razing and redeveloping large swathes of Victorian housing and moving people to newly constructed public housing. This process was already underway when conflict erupted.
As conflict brought additional threats to working-class life in the city, wide-scale resistance was mobilized against redevelopment. Increased housing demand and new resentments animated this resistance, as well as fear. Angry residents combined the direct action and rhetorical appeals of the civil rights movement with neighborhood defense groups, emerging paramilitarism, and desperate self-help projects. Rights-based consciousness and language converged with violent upheaval and preexisting grievances about housing. This new, community-based activism brought rights politics into the everyday terrain of loss and survival. Although these new housing campaigns made valid claims on the state, under conditions of increasing violence and territorialization, housing rights activism appropriated rights talk to maintain or rebuild communally identified neighborhoods. These embattled communities effectively became collective subjects of rights, establishing an important antecedent of present rights politics.
This new activism translated grand claims for civil rights and rights to national self-determination, often intermingled, into more quotidian assertions of residents’ rights to determine the location and design of public housing. Such claims were what Sally Merry (2006a) calls a “vernacularization” of human rights. Merry argues that such discursive processes offer liberatory possibilities when advocates “draw more extensively on local institutions, knowledge, idioms, and practices” (48; see also Merry 2006b). Merry (2006a, b) also asserts that local social movements become translators in the process of vernacularizing rights, and this dynamic also emerged in Northern Ireland.
In 1970s west Belfast, new NGOs proliferated, creating an infrastructure of local self-help and advocacy groups. Activists and scholars of the period called the emerging NGO practices “community action” (Lovett and Percival 1978; Griffiths 1975a). These new community groups translated struggles for neighborhood survival into the language of rights; housing rights became a central issue throughout the 1970s (McCready 2001; Griffiths 1978; Wiener 1976). These claims were grounded in prior patterns of social life in the urban spaces of west Belfast, and translated by activists as the rights of “communities.” This term, “community,” had powerful local resonance, conveying the profound associations among places and people at stake in superficially straightforward housing claims.
“Community”—emplaced social relationships—carries multiple communal and ideological associations in contemporary Northern Ireland. Bryan (2006b) explains that “Real people, along with a range of agencies, are active participants in the reproduction of community boundaries,” despite the term’s exploitation by “ethnic entrepreneurs” under the GFA’s consociational arrangements (604–5). These boundaries sharpened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Houses and streets—central to everyday life—were burned and barricaded in the conflict. The redevelopment plan threatened to displace more people and permanently alter the areas—the lower Falls and Shankill areas—where some of the most intense violence took place. Local opposition to redevelopment intensified alongside increasing violance. One Shankill activist told me that residents saw redevelopment as a state plot to dismantle their community “brick by brick, but also taking it apart in terms of its community structure, the actual social structure.” To explain the political power of “community” in the past and the present, and its elevation as a subject of rights, I must describe its historical meaning and the changes that elevated its importance to my research participants over time.
Today, Belfast is an unprepossessing, deindustrialized, provincial city. Approximately 275,000 people live in the urban area and about 580,000 in the greater metropolitan area. Yet, beyond the city center and its more monied southern environs, Belfast’s past endures in a series of working-class and poor enclaves. In these areas west and north of the city center, people recount local histories as distant as seventeenth-century settlement. Others describe more recent upheavals like the blitz of World War II. Many young men from Belfast fought in World War I, and people still recount stories of soldiers naming their trenches after streets in Belfast—Sandy Row, Royal Avenue—superimposing a map of the city onto the Flanders battlefields. The development of distinctive identities in these west Belfast communities is tied to rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century. Rural people moved to the city for linen and shipbuilding jobs when Belfast was a thriving port and industrial center. Historical studies have documented the development of distinctive local identities in the Falls, Shankill, and Springfield areas as early as the nineteenth century (e.g., Porter 1973), and political geographers have documented the long-term phenomenon of “territoriality” in these areas (Boal 1969, 1978).
Throughout the late twentieth century, Northern Ireland remained one of the poorest regions of the UK and Ireland, with west Belfast topping tables for unemployment, welfare dependence, and other deprivation indices. Since the 1970s, various agencies and academics have analyzed the spatial occurrence of deprivation in Northern Ireland (Boal et al. 1973; BAN Project Team 1976; Robson et al. 1994; Noble et al. 2001; NISRA 2010). West Belfast ranks as a severely impoverished, disadvantaged area from the beginning of such reporting to the present. This poverty was not limited to Catholics; indeed, in the 1970s, Rose noted, “given their larger numbers in the population … there are more poor Protestants than poor Catholics in Northern Ireland” (1971: 289). Poverty intensified social affiliations in these areas both before and during the conflict, even before deindustrialization caused dramatic levels of unemployment from the 1970s onward.
Yet the neighborhoods my research participants wanted to defend and preserve cannot be characterized simply by the broadly drawn blocs of communalism, although they are largely communally homogeneous. In everyday life, a kind of pointillism prevailed, where people formed their solidarities street by street. In the Falls and Shankill areas particularly, people identified their neighborhoods in precise geographic terms, as small as a single street (see Curtis 2008).
Both loyalists and republicans refer to pre-conflict communities as “great places,” in terms not of material conditions but of cohesive relationships and mutual assistance that made coping with poverty possible. “Ivan,” a housing campaigner in Shankill in the 1970s, told me, “The poorer you were, the more ‘community’ you had.” Solidarity was a positive effect of difficult material circumstances. “Sadie,” from a mixed neighborhood situated where the motorway now divides west Belfast from the city, said, “You were always reared with the idea it wasn’t a question of being forced to help your neighbor; it was something you done automatic.” When a neighboring Catholic family’s male breadwinner lost his job, Sadie’s Protestant mother learned of their circumstances and discreetly prepared extra food to take over, saying she had “made too much.” “It wasn’t cause she hadda do it,” Sadie said. “It was because she had a feeling for the community.”
The physical structures of housing shaped social relationships. In west Belfast, central to the physical environment were the house and the street. Much of the housing in inner west Belfast (nearest the city center) consisted of Victorian terraced houses, the smallest, most common type being the “two-up, two-down” or “kitchen house.”11 Most had an outdoor toilet and no bath. Whether publicly owned or rented by private landlords (often mill owners or the Catholic Church), the houses were often in poor states of repair. Dampness and flooding aggravated the difficulties of scarce space and poor facilities.
In the 1970s, kitchens in these areas usually had gas stoves and cold-water sinks. Residents heated water on the stove or in large portable water heaters that ran on electricity, like giant kettles. Heat came from coal fires, but most residences had no central heating systems. Many kept buckets upstairs to avoid winter journeys to outdoor toilets in the night. Indeed, people seem to relish their stories of an almost Victorian existence (“Sure, we’d’ve kept coal in the bath, if we’da had one,” one man said).
With high birth rates—among Protestants as well as Catholics—compared to Britain and Europe, the size of these houses posed challenges for families (McWilliams 1993). In one conversation, a woman deplored the houses, pointing out that “you couldn’t swing a cat in there.” Her neighbor reprimanded her, recalling a widow in their street who had “raised thirteen children in a house like that, and they were always immaculate.” Yet another neighbor pointed out that the family with eight children next to him had served their dinners with children ranged up the stairs, and sitting in the “coal hole.” “Or sometimes they fed ’em in shifts. I always wondered how they done it, but I didn’t believe it till I seen it,” he said.
The size of traditional terraced houses did not nurture contained, nuclear households. With neither front yards nor back gardens to extend private space outdoors, a street culture emerged. Children roamed and played in the streets, and family-like relationships developed beyond individual households. Residents fondly reminisce about a time when “everyone’s door was always open.” Intricate networks of extended families lived in these little streets (“people were related in ways you would never have believed”), yet even unrelated people shared informal childcare arrangements. In both nationalist and loyalist areas, women who worked in the linen mills (“millies”) were assisted by unrelated older women acting as second mothers to their children. Today, adults still refer lovingly to biologically unrelated people as their brothers and sisters or even mothers.12 The physical structures of the houses necessitated other forms of intimacy. Lack of bathing facilities meant that adults often used public bathhouses to groom, a Friday night ritual before going out to a dance.
Although the pleasures and struggles of working-class life were often similar on the Falls and in Shankill, there were differences along communal lines. For nationalists, discrimination in the allocation of public housing led to overcrowding, with adult children remaining in the family home, unable to acquire housing for their own families. “Kevin,” a PIRA ex-prisoner and community activist, says of his family home in Iveagh, “We had a bathroom, actually. Our side of the street had bathrooms, and the other side had outside toilets. So, relatively speaking, we weren’t too bad. But it was only a two-bedroom house, for my parents and seven children. And one of the rooms downstairs developed into a bedroom as well. But for a period, I was living in my mother’s house, and my wife was living in her mother’s house. ’Cause there wasn’t enough room in either house for the two of us.”
Protestants faced substandard housing conditions more often than overcrowding. Sadie says of her family home,
Literally, in my street, when it rained, it rained in the back door and out the front door. We were flooded two or three times every year. One year, someone forgot to open the gates of the river, and it rained very heavy and we were flooded to a depth of five feet…. I mean, I can remember coming down as a young woman—I have a great fear of cockroaches—and when the lights went out in our house, the whole floor was covered in hundreds and hundreds of cockroaches. They came out of the damp. And I can remember if you had to go to the toilet, which our toilet was outside, I remember coming down the stairs, running along the settee and taking a big jump into the scullery, so that I would step on as little of them as possible…. People wouldn’t live in those conditions today.
In these circumstances, public housing was a deeply contested political and social commodity well before people began driving neighbors from their homes. Local government’s patronage approach to public housing intersected with the importance of homes in working-class communities. Preferential housing allocations for Protestants created persistent consciousness of inequality. When “Marie,” a Catholic from Ardoyne, married a Protestant in the 1950s, she began to understand the way housing inequality worked:
We were living in a large five-bedroom house on the Cavehill Road. And this was in ’59. And there was only my husband and myself and one baby and his mother and father living in a five-bedroom house. And his brother had a flat [in an area] where we wanted one and a flat became vacant and we were told about it. And his father went and seen the City Hall and we got the flat. In the meantime, I … had chums who were Catholics who’d got married and they were living eight, ten, maybe twelve in a two-up, two-down in Ardoyne. And then later I thought, “Oh, it’s because you’re Protestant. You get a house quicker.”
However, the civil rights movement made some loyalists uncomfortably aware of their own housing needs, and they realized that their supposed advantages were often marginal. “Tim,” a Protestant, was twenty-eight in 1969, still living with his parents and two adult sisters in Ardoyne. He resented the protests:
I can assure you as a Protestant I’m ashamed of some of the things that’s been done in my name. But I’m also ashamed that certain—… a lot of the things that was supposed to be done by us were not actually done by us, and we were all accused of being bigots. And every one of us had flashy cars and big houses and so on and so on, and the truth of the matter was we lived in exactly the same conditions as they did. We didn’t have any of those rights the marchers wanted. And we should have asked for them too. But we didn’t know that. Because we were told that these people were gonna steal our country, they were gonna do this to us, they were putting us into a united Ireland…. I didn’t have a vote, nor did my two sisters.
Ivan says such realizations were a shock for many loyalists. “Traditionally the Protestant community believed that it was looked after and being looked after by its unionist governors,” he says:
There’s an element in which that was true. In that, with the right connections, being in the right lodge, being in the Masons, you know, will get you a deal, get you a house, get you a job. To a degree. But you were living in shit…. But you know what the transformation was, the transformation was that when civil rights broke out in the Catholic community and went working-class eventually, I remember there was TV coverage of houses in the Bogside and the Falls Road and suddenly, this is true, the Shankill woke up. “Jesus, they’re the same as our houses. We thought we had better houses.”
The civil rights movement brought home how public housing was linked to political rights under prior electoral arrangements. The political importance of houses and streets then increased with violence and mass displacements in 1969.
Intercommunal violence has recurred often over centuries in Belfast. In the nineteenth century, intense sectarian violence broke out in 1835, 1841, 1857, 1864, 1872, and 1886 (Hepburn 1990; Bardon 1982). In the early twentieth century, violence took place in 1907, and from 1920 to 1922 intense violence accompanied Ireland’s partition. The Depression brought another period of sustained intercommunal violence, particularly in 1935. Yet Brett (1986) reports that, following World War II, “many parts of Belfast, and of most other Ulster towns, had become genuinely mixed in religious complexion” (63). This mixing made some families especially vulnerable when more intense violence arrived in August 1969.
The 1969 riots were accompanied by forced evictions—through direct violence, such as arson and physical beatings, or threats of violence. Unlike previous clashes, however, the 1969 crisis led to decades of sustained conflict. The locus of the riots was the western edge of the city center, in the neighborhoods between the lower Falls and lower Shankill areas. People fled intimidation and attacks in mixed communities and escaped to more homogeneous neighborhoods. Minority members of neighborhoods that were predominantly loyalist or nationalist were expelled or fled. If not burned out, people would often burn the houses they left so the “other side” could not have them. Residents erected barricades to bar state and enemy incursions.
Research participants’ recollections of August 1969 shed light on how the violence was interpreted by protagonists and the increasing role of place in the conflict. Since January 1969, there had been repeated clashes among civil rights marchers, police and loyalists. In Belfast, Catholics feared an imminent invasion of their neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Protestants feared the IRA was about to recommence a military campaign not simply for a united Ireland but for the elimination of the British “presence”—which they interpreted to include themselves. In this feverish and fearful environment, both nationalists and loyalists argue that their actions were defensive.
On August 13, approximately 500 nationalists assembled and held a protest at the Springfield Road police station. Kevin, a participant, says, “At that time Derry was under a lot of pressure, and so we were talking about, ‘well, we can do something down the road somewhere [i.e., the Falls], we can take the pressure off Derry…. And that was the whole idea.” They then marched down the Falls Road to another police station, where youths broke away and attacked the station with stones and petrol bombs. In response, riot police mobilized on the scene. The police and IRA exchanged gunfire, and disorder spread in the Divis and Falls areas. Nationalists burned down a Protestant-owned car dealership and a Catholic-owned betting parlor.
The next night, nationalists again assembled in the Divis area, and some attacked the police station once more. Loyalists expected the protest and had gathered in Dover and Percy Streets. Some of those present told me they feared nationalist battles with the police would progress to attacks on themselves. When police and nationalist protesters clashed again, with stones and petrol bombs raining down from Divis Tower, these loyalists began to push into Divis from their gathering place. Participants I spoke to called this a defensive gesture; nationalists living in these areas called it a pogrom. Under fire from the IRA, the police began to fire machine guns indiscriminately. Loyalists surged past barricades into the neighborhoods of Divis and Clonard, and began burning houses.
Kevin says, “I, along with hundreds of others, witnessed policemen baton-charging people, shooting people down like dogs. Going along with loyalist mobs into Catholic streets and burning them to the ground. Watching all this. Clonard, Bombay Street. Down Conway Street. I watched a cop actually throwing two petrol bombs into … a pub on the corner of Dover Street, the Argyll Inn.” “Andrew,” an IRA activist at the time, reports that the paramilitary group did attempt to defend these areas, but “We were useless, running around Clonard with rusty guns.”13 Meanwhile, in Ardoyne, loyalists began to attack houses near the now famous Holy Cross Church, and nationalist residents scrambled to defend the area.
Republican research participants view their initial protests as defensive, originating in solidarity with Derry. Loyalists also regard their actions as defensive. “Hugh,” a UVF member originally from the lower Shankill, said that, in the days before August 13, “The tension was so high that, you know, everybody heard rumors it’s going to start here, and so everybody was wound up and waiting for it to start. Word had come down that it [the nationalist protest] was going to start in Belfast, to weaken the police. And the reaction from the loyalist community at that time was, well, we’ll defend the police.” Loyalists were frightened, he says, and believed that the IRA was about to invade: “My perspective on it [was that] it was an attack on my community. It was the beginning of it. I can remember, I was eleven, and I can remember standing on the street corner, terrified, watching tracer bullets flying up the street…. [A]t that time I thought that was the IRA shooting down my street.” He later found out the tracer bullets came from the B-Specials, a police auxiliary that was disbanded in 1970, firing randomly.14 Yet he admits, “I don’t think the people on the Falls had anticipated such a high level of reaction. Like Bombay Street, and all that, they hadn’t anticipated that, they hadn’t realized the kind of tensions that was stewing within the loyalist community.”
The full-scale fighting ended when the British Army was deployed into the streets. Nationalists initially welcomed them as protectors, but this was not to last. Hugh says that, on the loyalist side of the barricades, “I think when the army came in, they seen the damage that was done in the nationalist areas and seen us as the aggressors. And were fairly hostile towards the loyalist community in the early stages…. [T]here was [a] level of hostility, that the soldiers wanted to teach the Protestant community a lesson. Not only was the first policeman shot [by loyalists], but there was two loyalist casualties shot dead. Those were the early impacts.” Meanwhile, for Kevin, who joined PIRA, the horror of those few days was clear evidence that civil rights reforms were insufficient: “When you see agents of the law breaking the law, actually cutting people down, murdering people, there’s no way the state can be reformed. So … there was a stampede to the IRA.” Later events, such as internment in 1971 and Bloody Sunday in 1972, led to further recruitment to the new republican paramilitary group, PIRA.
Entire streets where nationalists once lived were burned down; in Bombay Street, forty-four houses inhabited by Catholics were destroyed. The mixed area between the districts of the lower Falls and lower Shankill was replaced by a barricade. In September 1969, the state built the first “peace line,” a wall between the Falls and Shankill areas, replacing barricades set up by residents. In the following months, people living as minority members of districts fled to the safety of communities homogeneous to themselves. In 1970, disturbances rocked upper Springfield, and there were shifts of population in the newer, more westerly estates. Another wave of violence followed the reintroduction of internment in August 1971, and the few remaining mixed areas were subsumed into homogeneous communities. Outbreaks of intimidation continued sporadically in certain areas, such as Lenadoon.
Population movement in the city during the 1970s was the largest in Europe since World War II (that is, until Yugoslavia fragmented). While hatred was a component of these conflicts, it must be remembered that many people were simultaneously victims and perpetrators of violence and that, as perpetrators, people were also motivated by fear and a desire for the safety of communally homogeneous zones.
The Northern Ireland Community Relations Commission (NICRC), a short-lived state agency, conducted research into population movement in the 1969–1973 period, and found state records for the movement of 8,000 families.15 Furthermore, the commission concluded that in total about 15,000 families were displaced in greater Belfast, by studying additional data from informal relief organizations (NICRC 1974: App. K). The commission estimated that 8 percent of Belfast’s population had been displaced. Although figures vary somewhat, rough estimates show that, in the first wave of displacements in 1969, the communal breakdown among the displaced was approximately 80 percent nationalist, 20 percent loyalist (Poole 1971; NICRC 1974: 59); and, in the second wave in 1971–1972, 60 percent nationalist, 40 percent loyalist (NICRC 1974: 59).
In the context of the street-by-street communities, expulsion came as a crushing betrayal, at once severing bonds and calling into question their prior sincerity. One research participant, “Cheryl,” had been displaced to a newer loyalist estate on the edges of the Shankill. She kept a photo of her family home in Ardoyne, taken as they fled in the second wave of displacements in 1971; the photo showed mostly smoke and flame, giving little sense of the house itself. Her loss was not of a house but of an entire way of life and childhood friends and neighbors. “We would have been put into a back bedroom,” she explains, describing the actions taken during violent episodes, “with mattresses and beds against the windows. Because friends of ours that we’d grew up with were stoning the windows and there was shooting up the street. Stuff like that, you know. So you’re talking five children lying in a room, you know, screaming, with their mother and their father downstairs, trying to make sure nobody’s going to get in any of the doors, you know. I mean we weren’t the only family that experienced it. Everybody in that area [did].”
Like many others who fled, her father set the fire that destroyed their home as they left. Such an action is unsympathetic on its face, but the NICRC assessed the practice in a more sensitive fashion: “To give up a home where one has lived for years, and which is in itself a symbol of security, for the insecurity of squatting, which many did, is an act of desperation: to damage one’s home on leaving, or allow others to do so, is an act of despair” (NICRC 1971: 1).
Direct assaults, like the burning of Bombay Street in 1969 or Cheryl’s situation, may have been the most violent means to convince people to flee, but they were hardly the only means. While not burnt out, a few days after the riots in August 1969, “James” was intimidated into leaving his home in an area where he and his wife were part of a Catholic minority. While Cheryl doubted her prior bonds of friendship, in hindsight James was certain he had been naïve to live in a predominantly loyalist area. “There’s a lot of people moved out and I remember friends of mine went out to get a lorry and I sat out, shitting myself, the next day, I think it was the 16th, 17th of August, and I heard the kids in the street shouting, ‘The Fenians are coming, the Fenians are coming,’ and it was all my mates on the back of this lorry, to get me. So it was just, into the house, fuck the furniture out, and very quickly away. Just threw it into the back of this lorry. The house was burned that night.”
Variation in the style of intimidation does not, however, correlate with varying senses of grievance and betrayal. It did not matter how evacuation came about:
The crunch itself, when it does come, has no stereotype. There have been cases where individual families of minority groups have been directly intimidated by marauding mobs; … there has been community pressure of a more subtle nature in many estates; some of the most volatile estates have experienced no pressure against individuals at all…. It is important to observe that the effects of general violence can be every bit as intimidating as the gunmen standing at the door. (NICRC 1974: 71)
Those who remained were subject to sanctions for nonconformity, such as tarring and feathering or punishment beatings or shootings. The ugly side of solidarity was never far from the surface. Sadly, the NICRC report’s conclusion still sometimes rings true today: “This is pressure against any non-conformist in the area—the man who criticizes the IRA, or the family which refuses to pay its UDA dues, even the drug addict or the sexually promiscuous. In a desperate search for security, anyone who is not completely conformist is at risk” (72).
Ultimately, memories of prior communities and their imperiled state in the 1970s had ramifications for how people voiced their grievances. The street became not just the place for child’s play, social life, and riots, but also for protest. Although the civil rights movement had marched, organized responses to the violence opened up the streets as a venue for other forms of political protest (as opposed to communal, territorial rioting), and the material conditions that created solidarity—that is, poor housing—became reasons for protests.
Politics on “Our” Streets
Under street-lamps by all the city’s walls, writing gleams: IRA, INLA, UVF, UFF…. The city keeps its walls like a diary. In this staccato shorthand, the walls tell of histories and hatreds, shriveled and bleached with age. Qui a terre a guerre, the walls say.
—Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street, 212
Despite his grief at the violence and loss of life, Patrick’s radical PD past still shapes his memory of the period between 1969 and Operation Motorman in 1972 as a time that also contained promise and possibility.16 Before Motorman, he says, everyone was talking, even the defense associations and paramilitary groups. Behind the barricades, Patrick says, a revolution appeared within reach, as grassroots activism emerged on a wide scale. Defensiveness created greater cohesion, as residents stayed out at all hours, minding barricades, watching for assaults, and, more important, talking deep into the morning hours. People wrote and distributed newsletters and pamphlets and formed new organizations. People’s councils were formed to introduce direct democracy. New economic cooperatives, like the black taxis, began, and systems for distributing household necessities sprang up; those who owned vans took shopping orders, traveled to supermarkets, and delivered supplies. Behind the barricades, cooperative movements took hold, partly for survival.
These nascent efforts were swiftly formalized into NGOs and residents associations; local practices were quickly given a formal name by activists, “community action.” A new infrastructure of activism emerged and became the vehicle for rights claims in these areas. Scholarship from the period defines community action loosely, as the formation of groups to address “an issue or condition which is presumed to have some significance or importance for the community” (Griffiths 1975a: 191). Many early initiatives were cooperative responses to evacuations and displacement. Sometimes minorities in one area swapped houses (technically called squatting) with those who were minorities in another. Occasionally, these exchanges were organized by local “defense associations” and were orderly affairs. For example, in 1970, an organization of about 1,000 men, both Protestant and Catholic, patrolled the area, and coordinated the movement of people when intercommunal rioting took place in upper Springfield (De Baróid 1989: 48; NICRC 1974: 41).
“Sandra,” from the loyalist Springmartin estate, says, “At that stage, the whole area was in an uproar. And there was the New Barnsley estate, which was mixed, there was the Springmartin estate which was mixed, and in one weekend, people actually went out on the road and negotiated: ‘You keep your house safe, and I’ll keep my house safe, and we’ll actually transfer houses.’ So in one weekend, New Barnsley became a Catholic ghetto, and Springmartin became a Protestant ghetto.”
So, if conflict had fragmented community, it also became another source of solidarity. Emergency efforts established relief centers to provide food and shelter. As areas received their coreligionist refugees, new networks of cooperation and activism further enhanced solidarity. For example, the Co-ordinating Centre for Relief established fifteen centers for displaced persons, providing assistance in applying for state compensation, housing, welfare benefits, and legal aid. Much of this activity was necessary because the conflict rendered state services nonexistent or partial in these areas. “No-go areas” for the police and the British army were set up in both loyalist and nationalist neighborhoods. Gun battles between the army and paramilitaries, bombings, and shootings became commonplace, as did rent and rate strikes.17 The neighborhoods of west Belfast continuously erected and reerected barricades to protect themselves from attack by communal enemies or state forces.
Andrew, who joined the PIRA faction when the IRA split in 1969, says, “You had the clear political and civil rights emerging; you also had the economic issues beginning to surface again.” Andrew says these efforts dovetailed with armed struggle, which he called, “politics by other means.” By controlling territories of west Belfast, he believed that republicans had displaced state authority: “In the ’70s after internment, there was no police, they couldn’t exercise their writ, they couldn’t collect their money, they couldn’t bring people to court, they couldn’t tax their cars, rents didn’t have to be paid, electricity bills didn’t have to be paid. And yet they still had to provide them.”
By 1973, there were more than 300 community-based organizations in Belfast alone (Wiener 1976). Early on, they often used the tactic of street protests; women took the lead in organizing. In nationalist west Belfast, for instance, women organized large demonstrations against security-force actions, protesting raids in Clonard and imprisonments in Ardoyne and upper Springfield. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts support research participants’ memories of events. In July 1970, 2,000 women broke the Falls Road curfew by marching from the upper Falls to the lower Falls (for some, a journey of up to four miles) carrying bread and milk to residents confined to their homes by the army. In loyalist west Belfast, women also were active in street protests, in blocking roads, and in marching. Loyalists also organized protests against security forces. During the disturbances that led to the expulsion of Protestants from Ardoyne in 1971, more than 300 women went to the police station to protest against inadequate protection.
Community groups also organized rent and rate strikes. More than 16,000 public housing tenants in nationalist west Belfast withheld rent and rates from the NIHE following internment in 1971. Shankill loyalists organized strikes over rent increases and housing conditions as early as 1969 and continued until the early 1980s. Protests in both areas occurred against the Payments for Debt (Emergency Provisions) Act of 1971, which authorized deductions to be made from social security payments—or wages in the case of state workers—to cover rent and rate arrears. The act was later extended to apply to utility arrears. When NIHE imposed a dramatic rent increase in 1975, tenants’ groups from the Shankill and the Falls joined together to block roads and protest the decision.
Following emergency efforts to assist refugees and the routine organization of street protests, activists formed more grounded, ongoing projects. Some of the earliest efforts centered on young people. For example, “Bernadette,” from the nationalist Newhill area, first organized a shopping van for the area. As the conflict continued, she began to worry about her children and their friends becoming involved in the conflict or being attacked wandering into unsafe neighborhoods: “There was absolutely nowhere for young people to go. Nowhere. And they were all kept in their own areas, so were the adults, too…. Ghettoized, you could say.” As a solution, she helped young people form a youth club, starting up a disco in a vacant building, initially with borrowed sound equipment. By charging a small fee, they earned the money to buy their own equipment. Other parents later helped the young people begin a broader program that included boxing, football, drama, and snooker.
Similarly, on the Shankill, Ivan said that young people were bored and restless. He was young himself—nineteen—and his friends who had participated in riots were now barred from church-based youth clubs. They banded together and took over a vacant council house to begin their own youth club. Collecting wood from houses that were being razed for redevelopment, they began making window boxes and selling them. Observing the spirit of the times, they also began a placard business—using reclaimed wood to provide signs to the various protest groups springing up. Ivan says, “I remember this so clearly…. And it just blew my mind. I mean this was not organized, this was not—this just happened.”
Gaining confidence from projects like the shopping vans and youth clubs, activists began organizing self-sustaining cooperatives. These provided jobs and steered local consciousness and action toward self-help. For example, the Turf Lodge Development Association (TLDA) conducted an employment survey and seized vacant buildings for economic ventures. In Ballymurphy, local residents set up a knitting co-op in 1971, which expanded into a commercial knitting factory. Although Ballymurphy Enterprises, as it was called, struggled, efforts to establish worker-run industry persisted. A cooperative building company, Whiterock Industrial Enterprises LTD, purchased a twelve-acre site in the Whiterock area and constructed a factory that it then leased to a furniture company. It also constructed a local filling station, franchised by Burmah Oil. The group sold “loan bonds” locally to raise capital. In 1979, however, the army took over the Whiterock Industrial Estate and dispersed the businesses operating there.
One of the most successful offshoots of the co-op movement in both the Falls and the Shankill were the People’s Taxis, or black taxis, which are now an institution. In the early 1970s, hijackings and rioting caused the suspension of regular bus service to the areas of the conflict. People began to get lifts from each other, paying car owners a shilling or so per journey. From this phenomenon, the black taxis began. Local drivers bought used London cabs and drove them along the bus routes. By 1972, a service operated from the city center up the Shankill to outlying loyalist estates, sponsored by the UVF. By 1974, the Falls Road Taxi Drivers’ Association had 300 full-time drivers making a similar journey up the Falls from the city center (Irish Times, August 22, 1974, 6). Despite initial opposition by government transport agencies and security force harassment, the taxis continued to operate. There are now thousands of black taxis on these and other routes, providing cheap, rapid transport between the city center and western and northern estates.
Many of the same activists, a collection of “usual suspects,” led efforts during this period and remained active and influential in later campaigns. Indeed, in both the Falls and Shankill, the “usual suspects” was a term often used for the loose network of actors that emerged. The matter of housing became the central focus of both nationalists and loyalists. Civil rights activists’ concern with housing allocation and its link to voting rights provided a language to articulate the more visceral demand for a basic standard of housing. As noted earlier, housing was in short supply, demand was exacerbated by displacements, and the emerging anger with urban redevelopment decisively turned this activism toward housing. Early activism coalesced around claiming housing rights and defending neighborhoods from redevelopment. A rights discourse developed about the state’s responsibilities regarding housing, along with more fraught claims for the rights of communities to “hold” territory and steer public housing plans, inflected by ethnosectarian territoriality.
Regeneration, Not Gentrification
In 1961, the UK ratified the European Social Charter, a treaty that expanded the social and economic rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights.18 The charter sets out basic rights of individuals in respect to housing, health, education, employment, and nondiscrimination. These rights were not enforceable during the 1960s. The European Social Charter was revised in 1996, and the European Committee of Social Rights, a quasi-judicial enforcement mechanism with a collective complaints procedure, was established in 1998 (see Cullen 2009). Nevertheless, like other western European countries in the postwar era, the UK had a system of social entitlements, including public housing. As with other aspects of the social safety net developed in the early and mid-twentieth century, Northern Ireland’s government was slow to match British welfare provisions. Adequate and affordable housing was especially scarce. The civil rights campaign, with its emphasis on anti-Catholic discrimination in housing allocation and the link between property ownership and voting rights, barely scratched the surface of profound housing inequalities and deprivation.
Plans to increase public housing provision and address the infrastructural housing difficulties of Belfast developed slowly from the 1950s onward. In the late 1960s, the Ministry of Development and the Belfast Corporation contracted Travers Morgan and the Building Design Partnership (BDP) to produce a roads plan and housing redevelopment plans, respectively. The subsequent plans required massive house clearances, with blocks of flats and fewer houses replacing the old stock and motorways cutting across the city in concentric “ring roads.” The plans projected a “car culture,” and the Falls and Shankill Roads, beloved of their denizens, would be reduced to arterial routes sprinkled with “district shopping centers” housing large multinational retailers. The plans dictated the destruction of both the physical and social existence of communities, and, not surprisingly, residents in the affected areas found the plans unacceptable. Yet it is unlikely that opposition would have been so forceful, or successful, had conflict not erupted, making direct action a conceivable and viable practice (see Wiener 1976). When the Ministry of Development unveiled the plans in the 1960s, there were few objections at initial public consultations, from either Divis or Shankill residents.
The plan called for local government, and later the NIHE, to purchase large swathes of the poor housing in these areas, which was a mix of public and privately owned rentals. The mill owners and Catholic Church, as major landlords, would receive significant compensation. Meanwhile, tenants would be provided public housing, with far more legal rights over the properties than existing tenants. Yet the plan would displace even more people. Organized opposition to the plan in the 1970s by residents of Divis (lower Falls) and the Shankill cemented rights discourse as an intrinsic part of everyday politics in these areas. Without legal recourse under the European Social Charter of the time, activists used new methods of direct action to mobilize for decent, affordable housing. They also asserted rights of local people to traditional forms of housing, in traditional areas of residence. As activists became more confident, they asserted the right of social housing tenants to direct the planning and construction of housing. Their tactics included direct action, research and documentation, media campaigns, and lobbying professional planners directly.
The NIHE took over the management of public housing from local councils in 1971. In the postwar estates—New Barnsley, Moyard, Springmartin, and Glencairn—construction was so poor that residents developed health problems. New Barnsley children suffered from dysentery because inadequate sewage facilities tainted the water supply. Glencairn children had high rates of asthma, partly because of the inadequate heating systems. Moyard flats and maisonettes were a disaster, with flooding, leaks, vermin, and, again, high rates of dysentery and asthma. In all three areas, residents compiled surveys of conditions and shared their data with the NIHE to lobby for repairs or replacement housing. But they also went to the media with their complaints (Irish News, August 16, 1974, 12). This increased emphasis on documentation and publicity became a significant and effective tactic of housing campaigns.
Residents saw the plans as part of a deeper conspiracy between security forces and city planners to engineer out of existence the troublesome interfaces of west Belfast. They viewed the plans as slum clearances, putting nationalists in flats and moving loyalists to outlying estates. Most importantly, the plans would destroy social structures that were inseparable from the physical structure of the terraces and the streets as communal space. The hostility of people in the lower Falls and Shankill to the flats cannot be overstated. Despite the poor condition of terraced housing, campaigners did not want wholesale demolition; they wanted to improve the physical structures that shaped social life—and they wanted to take the lead in planning how to preserve their houses and streets. The initial efforts of local redevelopment groups, however, did little to alter the course of government plans, despite intense lobbying. Large swathes of terraced housing were demolished, and flats were indeed built in the lower Shankill and Divis.
