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
