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