and flame, giving little sense of the house itself. Her loss was not of a house but of an entire way of life and childhood friends and neighbors. “We would have been put into a back bedroom,” she explains, describing the actions taken during violent episodes, “with mattresses and beds against the windows. Because friends of ours that we’d grew up with were stoning the windows and there was shooting up the street. Stuff like that, you know. So you’re talking five children lying in a room, you know, screaming, with their mother and their father downstairs, trying to make sure nobody’s going to get in any of the doors, you know. I mean we weren’t the only family that experienced it. Everybody in that area [did].”
Like many others who fled, her father set the fire that destroyed their home as they left. Such an action is unsympathetic on its face, but the NICRC assessed the practice in a more sensitive fashion: “To give up a home where one has lived for years, and which is in itself a symbol of security, for the insecurity of squatting, which many did, is an act of desperation: to damage one’s home on leaving, or allow others to do so, is an act of despair” (NICRC 1971: 1).
Direct assaults, like the burning of Bombay Street in 1969 or Cheryl’s situation, may have been the most violent means to convince people to flee, but they were hardly the only means. While not burnt out, a few days after the riots in August 1969, “James” was intimidated into leaving his home in an area where he and his wife were part of a Catholic minority. While Cheryl doubted her prior bonds of friendship, in hindsight James was certain he had been naïve to live in a predominantly loyalist area. “There’s a lot of people moved out and I remember friends of mine went out to get a lorry and I sat out, shitting myself, the next day, I think it was the 16th, 17th of August, and I heard the kids in the street shouting, ‘The Fenians are coming, the Fenians are coming,’ and it was all my mates on the back of this lorry, to get me. So it was just, into the house, fuck the furniture out, and very quickly away. Just threw it into the back of this lorry. The house was burned that night.”
Variation in the style of intimidation does not, however, correlate with varying senses of grievance and betrayal. It did not matter how evacuation came about:
The crunch itself, when it does come, has no stereotype. There have been cases where individual families of minority groups have been directly intimidated by marauding mobs; … there has been community pressure of a more subtle nature in many estates; some of the most volatile estates have experienced no pressure against individuals at all…. It is important to observe that the effects of general violence can be every bit as intimidating as the gunmen standing at the door. (NICRC 1974: 71)
Those who remained were subject to sanctions for nonconformity, such as tarring and feathering or punishment beatings or shootings. The ugly side of solidarity was never far from the surface. Sadly, the NICRC report’s conclusion still sometimes rings true today: “This is pressure against any non-conformist in the area—the man who criticizes the IRA, or the family which refuses to pay its UDA dues, even the drug addict or the sexually promiscuous. In a desperate search for security, anyone who is not completely conformist is at risk” (72).
Ultimately, memories of prior communities and their imperiled state in the 1970s had ramifications for how people voiced their grievances. The street became not just the place for child’s play, social life, and riots, but also for protest. Although the civil rights movement had marched, organized responses to the violence opened up the streets as a venue for other forms of political protest (as opposed to communal, territorial rioting), and the material conditions that created solidarity—that is, poor housing—became reasons for protests.
Politics on “Our” Streets
Under street-lamps by all the city’s walls, writing gleams: IRA, INLA, UVF, UFF…. The city keeps its walls like a diary. In this staccato shorthand, the walls tell of histories and hatreds, shriveled and bleached with age. Qui a terre a guerre, the walls say.
—Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street, 212
Despite his grief at the violence and loss of life, Patrick’s radical PD past still shapes his memory of the period between 1969 and Operation Motorman in 1972 as a time that also contained promise and possibility.16 Before Motorman, he says, everyone was talking, even the defense associations and paramilitary groups. Behind the barricades, Patrick says, a revolution appeared within reach, as grassroots activism emerged on a wide scale. Defensiveness created greater cohesion, as residents stayed out at all hours, minding barricades, watching for assaults, and, more important, talking deep into the morning hours. People wrote and distributed newsletters and pamphlets and formed new organizations. People’s councils were formed to introduce direct democracy. New economic cooperatives, like the black taxis, began, and systems for distributing household necessities sprang up; those who owned vans took shopping orders, traveled to supermarkets, and delivered supplies. Behind the barricades, cooperative movements took hold, partly for survival.
These nascent efforts were swiftly formalized into NGOs and residents associations; local practices were quickly given a formal name by activists, “community action.” A new infrastructure of activism emerged and became the vehicle for rights claims in these areas. Scholarship from the period defines community action loosely, as the formation of groups to address “an issue or condition which is presumed to have some significance or importance for the community” (Griffiths 1975a: 191). Many early initiatives were cooperative responses to evacuations and displacement. Sometimes minorities in one area swapped houses (technically called squatting) with those who were minorities in another. Occasionally, these exchanges were organized by local “defense associations” and were orderly affairs. For example, in 1970, an organization of about 1,000 men, both Protestant and Catholic, patrolled the area, and coordinated the movement of people when intercommunal rioting took place in upper Springfield (De Baróid 1989: 48; NICRC 1974: 41).
“Sandra,” from the loyalist Springmartin estate, says, “At that stage, the whole area was in an uproar. And there was the New Barnsley estate, which was mixed, there was the Springmartin estate which was mixed, and in one weekend, people actually went out on the road and negotiated: ‘You keep your house safe, and I’ll keep my house safe, and we’ll actually transfer houses.’ So in one weekend, New Barnsley became a Catholic ghetto, and Springmartin became a Protestant ghetto.”
So, if conflict had fragmented community, it also became another source of solidarity. Emergency efforts established relief centers to provide food and shelter. As areas received their coreligionist refugees, new networks of cooperation and activism further enhanced solidarity. For example, the Co-ordinating Centre for Relief established fifteen centers for displaced persons, providing assistance in applying for state compensation, housing, welfare benefits, and legal aid. Much of this activity was necessary because the conflict rendered state services nonexistent or partial in these areas. “No-go areas” for the police and the British army were set up in both loyalist and nationalist neighborhoods. Gun battles between the army and paramilitaries, bombings, and shootings became commonplace, as did rent and rate strikes.17 The neighborhoods of west Belfast continuously erected and reerected barricades to protect themselves from attack by communal enemies or state forces.
Andrew, who joined the PIRA faction when the IRA split in 1969, says, “You had the clear political and civil rights emerging; you also had the economic issues beginning to surface again.” Andrew says these efforts dovetailed with armed struggle, which he called, “politics by other means.” By controlling territories of west Belfast, he believed that republicans had displaced state authority: “In the ’70s after internment, there was no police, they couldn’t exercise their writ, they couldn’t collect their money, they couldn’t bring people to court, they couldn’t tax their cars, rents didn’t have to be paid, electricity bills didn’t have to be paid. And yet they still had to provide them.”
By 1973, there were more than 300 community-based organizations in Belfast alone (Wiener 1976). Early
