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,
