In Another World. Gerald Dawe
most Irish cities, which give their name to the immediate hinterland – Dublin, Galway, Cork, Sligo, Waterford, Derry, Donegal – Belfast is just itself. The lough at whose mouth the city fans out is fed by the River Lagan, which flows down through the untouched meadows and park forests, along the embankments and under the bridges that link the south and east of the city with the north and west.
In the building docks and islands, old quays and wharves, Belfast’s industrial history as a shipbuilding and merchant port makes way for the new ferry terminals. Channels such as Victoria and Musgrave and basins like Pollock, which had borne tankers, liners and gunships for the British fleet, rub shoulders now with a busy and expanding city airport. The massive gantries of the Harland and Wolff shipbuilders – once the greatest of its kind in the world – straddle the city’s horizon like monumental arches.
Clutched around Belfast’s inner reaches are the refitted mills and factories, warehouses and engineering works that are isolated by the svelte dominance of motorways and bypasses. What remains of Belfast’s industrial architecture has a strangely marooned look to it. The red-brick Gothic of insurance houses and banks, stores and churches, hotels and theatres, which were once the city’s Victorian legacy, have all but vanished.
Belfast suffered the fate of many cities in Britain and Ireland caught up in and mauled by the hectic redevelopment boom of the 1980s. What has taken over, inside-out as it were, are the shopping malls, the steel-framed centre and the masked facades. These changes belie another truth, however, of the profound, irrevocable change Belfast experienced as the site of sectarian violence that took possession of the city from the late 1960s: bombing campaigns in the name of Irish national liberation vied with bombing campaigns in the name of preserving the British way of life. Peace lines of metal girders divided communities against themselves; security barriers defaced the cityscape and turned the centre into a police zone during the worst years of the Troubles. The map of the city is a history of territorial allegiances and tribal loyalties.
For anyone growing up in the Belfast of the late 1940s and 1950s, there was always going to be an inbred sense of where one walked. This sense of place has been grotesquely theatricalised as a result of the Troubles and the physical manifestation of sectarian divisions during the 1970s and 1980s. But it is true to say, that, over the generations, Belfast people, particularly working-class people, were born with a radar that made them aware of where they were in the city.
Lacking such instinct could spell danger in the nightlife of Belfast, and most certainly led to many a harsh word and ‘scrap’ (or street fight). Eventually the political divisions of the city, crackling like an electric storm, were earthed in these intensely intimate and cross-grained inner lives of the city’s myriad neighbourhoods. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, what had once been a ‘mixed’ neighbourhood, where Protestant and Catholic families had ‘got on well’, experienced the shock of having to face the truth about Belfast’s sectarian divisions. Similarly, the traditional Protestant and Catholic areas, which had previously been negotiable by bus or foot when leaving a girl home after a dance, or meeting a pal, or going to a party, became increasingly dangerous and represented a perilous risk upon which few would chance their lives. By the mid-1970s, when assassination squads roamed what became known as ‘twilight zones’, or interfaces between the dominant working-class districts, Belfast had ceased to be a living city and became, for a decade and more, a ghost town.
Districts played, and still play, a key role in defining the identity of Belfast. Even though there have been extraordinary population shifts within the city over the last twenty-five years, because of intimidation and violence on the one hand, and redevelopment on the other, the sense of being from a particular area is strong and lasting. It is a common in many industrial cities.
Put at its simplest, Belfast’s history is physically indistinguishable from the industries that were established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: linen mills, rope works, tobacco factories, shipbuilding and engineering works.
Erected within this formidable industrial landscape were the streets and houses of the workers. It is not possible to think about Belfast as distinct from this industrial past. Consequently, Belfast is unique in Ireland and has much more in common with Liverpool or Glasgow since the pattern of its streets, as much as the commercial nature of the city, centred on the industrial heartland and little else. Each district had its own factories, its own customs linked to the work practices of the factory, its own destiny and well-being, tied irrevocably to that factory. The Falls, a predominantly Catholic road, had its mills; York Street, in the Protestant lower north side, had the famous Gallaher’s tobacco factory; while the shipyards dominated the east of the city. It was a pattern replicated throughout the city, layer by layer, from the dockland up to the prosperous higher roads that circle the outer city, heading for the nearby countryside.
This pattern rapidly disappeared in the post-industrial 1990s. By the early years of the new millennium, developments along the Lagan waterfront transformed parts of the city into apartment villages and multinational ‘nowheres’, and the birthplace of the Titanic and other world-renowned passenger liners has been reimagined as the (hugely popular) Titanic Quarter.
Going back forty years, it was a fact of life that those who grew up in the districts surrounding or hugging the industrial shore would become part of it.
The stories of their lives were the stories of the industries in which they worked. Indeed, one reason for the fierceness of the sectarian passion, which has characterised Belfast throughout its history, is the struggle to maintain some standard of living in a city whose economy was (and, of course, remains) fundamentally susceptible to the unpredictable diktats of the government in Westminster.
What was known were the streets where one lived; at least they were predictable. Families stayed, generation after generation, and while the men in the house (and sometimes the daughters) might follow work ‘across the water’ (to Britain) or emigrate farther afield to Canada or Australia, the home territory was a proven ground. Here the rituals of Belfast life were handed down through the calendar of quasi-religious rites and political commemorations.
For the Protestant community, in the main identifying themselves with the union with Britain, their sense that their cultural and political aspirations were different to those of the Irish Catholic community was celebrated through Orange parades and marches. Taking place annually throughout the summer months of July and August, these parades in Belfast were dramatised statements of territorial imperatives and cultural bonding. If Cork or Limerick once had Corpus Christi, Belfast, which called itself unionist, had ‘The Twelfth’.
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