There is a part of Belfast, north of the city centre, which became the murder mile of the Troubles and still remains in the top 5 per cent of the most deprived areas of Northern Ireland. When the decommissioning of Girdwood military barracks in 2005 released 27 acres for development here it should have been the showcase of the post-1998 “peace dividend”. Its redevelopment made for good rhetoric about a “shared future” and £9.6 million of Peace III money was secured.
But – against the endless consultants and entities with bewildering acronyms, often helicoptered in from London and having no sense of the crucial “micro-geographies” of Belfast – the local people were not consulted. In the post-Troubles polarised geography of Belfast this should have been an imperative.
Others have mapped out the city. But here we have a young American ethnographer who wore out multiple pairs of Doc Martins to walk it, street by street. She does it for the whole of Belfast, but it is in her analysis of the demography of north Belfast that she is most authoritative.
It had been the most mixed part of the city. In the Troubles people did not move far from their old neighbourhoods, producing cheek-by-jowl segregated areas and more “peace” barriers than anywhere else. Hence the housing crisis in the area surrounding Girdwood, when Catholics moved in, leaving a diminishing adjacent Protestant neighbourhood. Yet, as she shows, despite such divisions the local people did accept the need for housing even if it benefited the more housing-stressed Catholics.
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The sense of declining and embattled Protestant neighbourhoods is real. However, Elizabeth DeYoung chronicles and charts how the “equivalence” aspect of the Belfast Agreement – the much-criticised sectarian carve-up which evades real need – was cynically used by the DUP and the paramilitaries, with Sinn Féin accepting it as a quid pro quo for its aspirations elsewhere. The outcome – a shiny new building and car parks that locals could not afford to access, a sports pitch, only 60 houses “surrounded by stretches of empty land” – reflected the inability of the post-Agreement political carve-up “to imagine transformative change”.
This is the author’s first book. But she writes like a dream and with a courage and toughness which belie her years. It is currently hugely overpriced. Hopefully its deserved glowing reception will encourage a rethink by the publisher.
