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,