Belfast: The Short Strand

A report by Kevin Myers on one of the poorest and most violent ghettos in Belfast.

WHERE COUNTY DOWN ends its dismal encounter with East Belfast, through the cramped and decaying streets of Ballymacarret at the rim of the River Lagan and County Antrim, lies the Short Strand, four hundred yards by four hundred yards of belliigerent Republicanism and poverty, surrounded on three sides by loyalist districts and on the fourth by the River Lagan. Its back to the East, the Strand faces Belfast city centre; which a large number of its residents have done their best to flatten.

The Strand is a village, tighter than Kiltimagh could ever be, the sort of place where a teenager recently called a Falls Road man thirty-two years resident in the Strand an outtsider. He meant it. Strong family loyalties tie the Strand together. If the clan system exists anywhere in Ireland it is here, where a grudge made is a grudge remembered. If you take on a Strandman, be prepared to take on the Strand.

In that quarter square mile of 27 streets are two bookies, seven drinkking clubs, one pub, two churches (one of them Protestant), two schools, one police station, one Army base, two play grounds (both closed because of vandalism), three paramilitary organiizations, lots of committees, acres of dereliction and rat-infested brickeddtip houses, and about two and a half thousand people, including a sprinkkling of Protestants, with about three hundred pensioners, living in some eight hundred households.

Intercourse with the vast Protestant hinterland around it has almost stopped; but it once existed in a very real sense. Listen to the family names:

Engelen, Scott, Carlisle, Thompson, Cupples, Hawkins, Carson. The blood of the Planter is evident here in this Repu blican stronghold where virtually everybody has had an imprisoned reelative at some time.

The interface area between Prootestant Ballymacarret and Catholic Short Strand runs along the Alberrbridge Road, the Newtownards Road, and eyeball to eyeball, along Bryson Street, deserted and abandoned, parallel with the River Lagan. At the junction of Beechfield Street and Bryson Street, crowds of youngsters whiled away the long summer hours stoning each other, Protestant cousin doing his best to down Catholic cousin and vice versa. Community leaders on each side (and that often means men with guns) stopped the rioting.

The Strand has suffered appallinggly in the troubles, and knows it. Ask a local for the names of the people from the area who have been killed. He'll recite a gory litany: 'Dorian.Magee, Steele, Bell, Benstead, McIlhone .. .' McIlhone. Mention that name to an East Belfast Protestant gunman, and he might well softly confide in you that he shot Henry McIlhone. More people shot Henry McIlhone that dreadful night in June 1970 than were in the Post Office in Easter Week. It was the night that the-Provisional IRA showed its teeth for the first time in repelling an attack on St. Matthew's Church which looms over the Strand from its sentinel position at the junction of Bryson Street and the Newtownards Road. Four protestants, at least two of them harmless passers-by, were shot dead, and people in the Strand hint mysteriously at secret graves being filled at the dead of night with corpses of slain UVF men. It was a night that is not forgotten by the working classes of East Belfast. Henry McIlhone, the single IRA victim, was almost certainly shot accidentally by one of his commpanions.

But that was the start of the haemmorrhaging in the Strand. Thirty-one of its residents have been killed there, so have five Protestans in its immediate environs, and two British soldiers.

By 1971 the Short Strand was an armed Republican stronghold. When the internment scoop arrived on August 9, there were active Official and Provisioonal IRA units, which proceeded to burn down the local bus depot, causing two million pounds worth of damage. In the tiny cluttered streets, gunfire rang out through the day, and the Short Strand's real ordeal was under way. The ghetto shrank as people moved away from the interface areas, abandoning houses their families had lived in for a century. The population dropped from eight thousand to its present two and a half. Those two and a half apparently intend to stay.

The enhanced sense of identity afforded by the insular nature of their geographical position seems to have been one of the reasons why the Short Strand maintained its militant Repubblicanism. 'Us'ns agin them'ns' might not be the most sophisticated of politiical messages, but it is underlined by a sense of disadvantage that has a very real base.

Within the Short Strand itself is one of East Belfast's biggest employers, Sirocco Engineering. The only employyees it takes from the Strand are cleaning women. And the towering gantries of Harland and Wolff Shipyard do not mark the spot where Strandmen find employment, or really ever did. It was so easy in those heady days of '71 and '72 to think that a short sharp war could change all that. Those recruits who are now dead, in jail, or useless because of their records, have brothers and sisters and cousins to take their places. Take on a Strandman and be prepared to take on the Strand.

In the last six years, virtually every house in the area has peen raided, and hundreds of men and women have been either interned or sentenced. At the moment there are fifty-four Short Strand people in jail on terrorist type charges, with seven more out on bail. And so the sense of ancestral grudge is added to, fired by family loyalty and, in recent months, allegaations of RUC brutality during interroogations. The Amnesty International team arrived at the beginning of the month to conduct its investigations into RUC behaviour, and for the Short Strand, anyway, their arrival alone was proof enough of those allegations.

One person's terrorist is another person's child. The steady procession of young people through Northern Ireland's courts means that there is an ever-widening circle of relatives who have to make that dreary trip to Long Kesh. Twice a day a bus leaves the Strand to take visitors to Her Majesty's Prison, the Maze. Some relatives are spared that ordeal, simply because their sons refuse to wear prison clothing and so do not receive visits. Twenty-year-old Sean Rooney next month will have completed a full year without a single visit.

But despite the successes of the security forces, the Provisionals in the Strand always seem to manage to regroup. In fact, their recruitment level was so high three years ago that they 'were able to form, along with the largely Official IRA Markets area, a fourth Belfast batallion. To the outtsider, the adoption of grandiose miliitary titles by jobless teenagers might seem absurd; to the Provisionals, miliitary titles are real things. 'The Army' is the IRA.

The Strand has had a catastrophic record for what the British Army cosily terms 'own goals'. Thirteen people have been killed by prematurely detonating bombs in .transit. The first, in February 1972, killed four IRA men. The following May, four IRA men and three innocent civilians were killed in the Strand in another such blast. Two IRA men were killed in October last year when their bomb exploded in transit. And loyalists have also extracted revenge for June 1970, killing six residents in the Strand Bar in May '1975. Seven other Strand people have been killed in sectarian violence, two have been shot dead by British soldiers, and one killed in an IRA feud.

And just how many people have been killed by Short Strand people is impossible to say. Certain it is that IRA men and women from the Strand have been responsible for the levelling of a large part of Belfast city centre.

But the Strand does not stand four-square behind the Provisional IRA. There are many pious, good-living people there who consider the Proovisionals a bunch of scoundrels. The high arrest rate of suspected Proovisionals suggests that a lot of confiidential telephone calling is being done. And many other pious men believe the day may come when they will have to bear arms; they belong to the CDL.

The letters CDL mean little to most people in Belfast. They evoke small response from Strand people when you mention them, but that is not from ignorance. Probably the best equipped and most secret organiization in the Short Strand is the CDL The Catholic Defence League - which does not lose guns or personnel, and waits for the day of the great conflaagration. That that conflagration seems to be receding does not seem to lower the CDL's guard. They encourage silence about their existence, but they are there, awaiting the fateful day. While some Strand residents' dream of freedom from the centre to the sea, others remember where they live, in a tiny enclave surrounded by a vast Protestant population.

Bailymacarret means in Irish 'Townnland of Art (O'Neill)' and there are indeed some O'Neills living in the Strand. But with the Plantation, the land passed into other hands, and, in the Eighteenth Century, Thomas Potttinger was granted the entire area of what is now East Belfast for the fee of twenty pounds a year. His name is commemorated in the Mountpottinger Road which divides the Short Strand in half, and, as is common in working class areas, parts of the Strand, partiiculariy on the St. Matthew's side of the Road, consider themselves rather more genteel. And there is indeed a visible difference in the quality of the housing; but not much. And both genteel and otherwise, Provisional, Offiicial and CDL, are united behind the Short Strand Housing Association.

Its power is acknowledged by the British Government, which is giving it £2m to organize the rehabilitation of about one third of the houses in the area. The rest of the houses are rubbish; the sooner they go, the better. But it could be five years before that is achieved, and the vesting orders reequired to begin this process will be made when the Short Strand Housing Association gives the go ahead.

In the meantime, hundreds of families live in the most appalling houses imaginable. One man I visitted was sitting in his living room, wearing his cap and coat to keep warm as a couple of lumps of coal flickered lugubriously in his fireplace. Chunks of plaster hung off walls down which water visibly ran. About half the houses in the street are like this, with warped window frames stuffed with paper and outdoor lavatories that are pure horror at this time of year.

And in these houses live a group of people who, it is reliably estimated, spend over a million pounds a year on drink and cigarettes, even though unemployment runs at over thirty per cent and amongst teenagers at over fifty. The Strand's seven clubs prosper hugely; how the Strand people manage to get the money they spend there is beyond anyone's reckoning; perhaps they do their sums with mirrors.

But because the Strand has virtually no amenities and people are genuinely terrified of venturing out for enterrtainment, the unemployed men tend to drift into the clubs, where they often spend the rest of the day. The traditions of casual unskilled labour, particularly in the building trade, ennsure chronic unemployment, and massive amounts of drinking. Yet virtually no one in the Strand admits to a drink problem. The attempt to get an Alcoholics Anonymous off the ground failed dismally.

The usual corollary of such factors would be wife beating and desertion. In fact, locals could only think of half a dozen deserted wives, and very little wife beating. Family ties are just too strong for things to go that far. Perhaps it is those ties which have given the Strand a far higher literacy rate than educationalists would have anticipated. In fact two repreesentatives of the Northern Ireland Council for Educational Research went to St. Matthew's primary school to find out why.

But the struggle to get ahead is not feverishly fought in the Strand. Last year only four of twenty-eight final year pupils qualified for grammar school from St. Matthew's where one in three children receives free meals because of low family income. And perhaps two dozen residents have qualiified for university places, six of them from one astonishing family. 'People dont think about next Christmas or the summer holiday,' said one social worker. 'Tomorrow is what they just about manage.'

Yet Short Strand soldiers on. Its seven clubs have a liason committee which collaborates with the tenants association in barring parents who are seen to be spending too much money on drink and not enough on their .children. And the local paraamilitaries, easier than in other quarters on miscreants (kneecappings are rare in the area), have made it clear to over two dozen men that their wives should- get a larger cut of the dole.

Attempts to brighten the area have beerr made, with wall murals of Walt Disney characters; these have been joined by the more traditional slogans of Belfast's Catholic ghettoes in inncongruous juxtaposition. The two playygrounds have been closed after children did £6,000 worth of damage to the facilities there. And clusters of locally recruited social workers are busy trying to make silk purses. They even have to escort school buses carrying secondary school children in order to prevent vandalism.

Strand people are a hospitable crowd. In all the years that I have known' people from the area, I have always been treated with friendliness, despite an accent which to their ears must be disgustingly English. And one woman who has no reason to love the security forces (several of her relaatives, including a son and a brother, are serving time) described the Military Police, who are responsible for the Strand, as 'exceedingly civil'.

But the early morning raids go on, and it seems that each week more young people from the Strand appear in court. Patrick Hill, who joined St. Matthew's teaching staff almost forty years ago and is now the school princiipal; described what it is like to watch a community like the Strand being enngulfed in tragedy. 'What saddens me is to think of all the boys I taught who have been killed, or jailed, or have had their lives ruined. Even though I might have known them as adults, I still see them as boys, I imagine the rows of faces that I taught.'