in organizing. In nationalist west Belfast, for instance, women organized large demonstrations against security-force actions, protesting raids in Clonard and imprisonments in Ardoyne and upper Springfield. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts support research participants’ memories of events. In July 1970, 2,000 women broke the Falls Road curfew by marching from the upper Falls to the lower Falls (for some, a journey of up to four miles) carrying bread and milk to residents confined to their homes by the army. In loyalist west Belfast, women also were active in street protests, in blocking roads, and in marching. Loyalists also organized protests against security forces. During the disturbances that led to the expulsion of Protestants from Ardoyne in 1971, more than 300 women went to the police station to protest against inadequate protection.
Community groups also organized rent and rate strikes. More than 16,000 public housing tenants in nationalist west Belfast withheld rent and rates from the NIHE following internment in 1971. Shankill loyalists organized strikes over rent increases and housing conditions as early as 1969 and continued until the early 1980s. Protests in both areas occurred against the Payments for Debt (Emergency Provisions) Act of 1971, which authorized deductions to be made from social security payments—or wages in the case of state workers—to cover rent and rate arrears. The act was later extended to apply to utility arrears. When NIHE imposed a dramatic rent increase in 1975, tenants’ groups from the Shankill and the Falls joined together to block roads and protest the decision.
Following emergency efforts to assist refugees and the routine organization of street protests, activists formed more grounded, ongoing projects. Some of the earliest efforts centered on young people. For example, “Bernadette,” from the nationalist Newhill area, first organized a shopping van for the area. As the conflict continued, she began to worry about her children and their friends becoming involved in the conflict or being attacked wandering into unsafe neighborhoods: “There was absolutely nowhere for young people to go. Nowhere. And they were all kept in their own areas, so were the adults, too…. Ghettoized, you could say.” As a solution, she helped young people form a youth club, starting up a disco in a vacant building, initially with borrowed sound equipment. By charging a small fee, they earned the money to buy their own equipment. Other parents later helped the young people begin a broader program that included boxing, football, drama, and snooker.
Similarly, on the Shankill, Ivan said that young people were bored and restless. He was young himself—nineteen—and his friends who had participated in riots were now barred from church-based youth clubs. They banded together and took over a vacant council house to begin their own youth club. Collecting wood from houses that were being razed for redevelopment, they began making window boxes and selling them. Observing the spirit of the times, they also began a placard business—using reclaimed wood to provide signs to the various protest groups springing up. Ivan says, “I remember this so clearly…. And it just blew my mind. I mean this was not organized, this was not—this just happened.”
Gaining confidence from projects like the shopping vans and youth clubs, activists began organizing self-sustaining cooperatives. These provided jobs and steered local consciousness and action toward self-help. For example, the Turf Lodge Development Association (TLDA) conducted an employment survey and seized vacant buildings for economic ventures. In Ballymurphy, local residents set up a knitting co-op in 1971, which expanded into a commercial knitting factory. Although Ballymurphy Enterprises, as it was called, struggled, efforts to establish worker-run industry persisted. A cooperative building company, Whiterock Industrial Enterprises LTD, purchased a twelve-acre site in the Whiterock area and constructed a factory that it then leased to a furniture company. It also constructed a local filling station, franchised by Burmah Oil. The group sold “loan bonds” locally to raise capital. In 1979, however, the army took over the Whiterock Industrial Estate and dispersed the businesses operating there.
One of the most successful offshoots of the co-op movement in both the Falls and the Shankill were the People’s Taxis, or black taxis, which are now an institution. In the early 1970s, hijackings and rioting caused the suspension of regular bus service to the areas of the conflict. People began to get lifts from each other, paying car owners a shilling or so per journey. From this phenomenon, the black taxis began. Local drivers bought used London cabs and drove them along the bus routes. By 1972, a service operated from the city center up the Shankill to outlying loyalist estates, sponsored by the UVF. By 1974, the Falls Road Taxi Drivers’ Association had 300 full-time drivers making a similar journey up the Falls from the city center (Irish Times, August 22, 1974, 6). Despite initial opposition by government transport agencies and security force harassment, the taxis continued to operate. There are now thousands of black taxis on these and other routes, providing cheap, rapid transport between the city center and western and northern estates.
Many of the same activists, a collection of “usual suspects,” led efforts during this period and remained active and influential in later campaigns. Indeed, in both the Falls and Shankill, the “usual suspects” was a term often used for the loose network of actors that emerged. The matter of housing became the central focus of both nationalists and loyalists. Civil rights activists’ concern with housing allocation and its link to voting rights provided a language to articulate the more visceral demand for a basic standard of housing. As noted earlier, housing was in short supply, demand was exacerbated by displacements, and the emerging anger with urban redevelopment decisively turned this activism toward housing. Early activism coalesced around claiming housing rights and defending neighborhoods from redevelopment. A rights discourse developed about the state’s responsibilities regarding housing, along with more fraught claims for the rights of communities to “hold” territory and steer public housing plans, inflected by ethnosectarian territoriality.
Regeneration, Not Gentrification
In 1961, the UK ratified the European Social Charter, a treaty that expanded the social and economic rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights.18 The charter sets out basic rights of individuals in respect to housing, health, education, employment, and nondiscrimination. These rights were not enforceable during the 1960s. The European Social Charter was revised in 1996, and the European Committee of Social Rights, a quasi-judicial enforcement mechanism with a collective complaints procedure, was established in 1998 (see Cullen 2009). Nevertheless, like other western European countries in the postwar era, the UK had a system of social entitlements, including public housing. As with other aspects of the social safety net developed in the early and mid-twentieth century, Northern Ireland’s government was slow to match British welfare provisions. Adequate and affordable housing was especially scarce. The civil rights campaign, with its emphasis on anti-Catholic discrimination in housing allocation and the link between property ownership and voting rights, barely scratched the surface of profound housing inequalities and deprivation.
Plans to increase public housing provision and address the infrastructural housing difficulties of Belfast developed slowly from the 1950s onward. In the late 1960s, the Ministry of Development and the Belfast Corporation contracted Travers Morgan and the Building Design Partnership (BDP) to produce a roads plan and housing redevelopment plans, respectively. The subsequent plans required massive house clearances, with blocks of flats and fewer houses replacing the old stock and motorways cutting across the city in concentric “ring roads.” The plans projected a “car culture,” and the Falls and Shankill Roads, beloved of their denizens, would be reduced to arterial routes sprinkled with “district shopping centers” housing large multinational retailers. The plans dictated the destruction of both the physical and social existence of communities, and, not surprisingly, residents in the affected areas found the plans unacceptable. Yet it is unlikely that opposition would have been so forceful, or successful, had conflict not erupted, making direct action a conceivable and viable practice (see Wiener 1976). When the Ministry of Development unveiled the plans in the 1960s, there were few objections at initial public consultations, from either Divis or Shankill residents.
The plan called for local government, and later the NIHE, to purchase large swathes of the poor housing in these areas, which was a mix of public and privately owned rentals.
