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
