The Thirty Third County. My West Belfast…

Last week I listened to former West Belfast elected representative Máirtín Ó Muilleoir give a sterling defence of West Belfast on Radio Ulster’s Nolan Show, (available here): on the decision to put a poster as part of a campaign called Ending the Harm which was launched last year by the Executive Programme on Paramilitarism and Organised Crime in the the Andersonstown area of West Belfast.

And it got me thinking.

I was born in 1967 in the Lower Falls to a Lower Falls mother and a Whiterock father before going to live in one of the housing estates clustered around the top of the Whiterock Rd where I spent my childhood, teenage years and young adulthood before buying my own first property on the Lower Springfield Rd and then my second and last property in West Belfast in mid Andersonstown.

A Westie through and through

Childhood was a bit surreal, juxtapositioned between a warm, loving childhood and idyllic Springs and Summers on the slopes of the Black Mountain, the greatest most beautiful playground a child could ask for, and the riots, gun battles, destruction and madness that was happening all around us, (we didn’t get street lighting in our estate until the mid eighties as all the previous street lighting had been shot out), but that wasn’t at all relevant to a gang of fun hungry young lads and girls.

Even in my younger years I was aware that I was a part of something bigger. I literally lived in my friend’s houses and they literally lived in mine, with one of my best childhood friends being the younger brother of Paul Hill, wrongfully convicted with three others of the Guildford pub bombings in 1975 and two others being fatherless after their father had been shot dead by the British Army Parachute Regiment in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 leaving their (Protestant) mother with ten children to rear which was eventually to become nine after the IRA disgustingly shot dead her fifteen year old child in 1973. We helped neighbours with food and they helped us with the same. It really was a tight knit community and the sense of collective communitarianism was palpable with neighbours organising Summer street festivals to keep the estate urchins occupied and out of trouble.

As we got older, circumstances began to assert themselves more. The things that didn’t matter that much before, the house raids, arrests and chaos around us started to take on a new dynamic with some of our group being told by both the British Army and RUC that they were ‘on the list’ and that they’d be ‘paid a visit’. Two of my close friends were subsequently arrested in the ‘Ballymurphy 7’ case and spent a number of years on remand in the H Blocks while I myself was physically assaulted on three separate occasions.

As a result of the above and many other such incidents the RUC were at best viewed with suspicion and the mundane banalities of normal policing vanished along with the expectations of vast swathes of West Belfast residents. I myself have a relation who reported a serious sexual assault to the RUC in the mid eighties and the immediate reaction of the RUC was to try to recruit them as an informer. West Belfast Parish Priest Martin Magill has himself broached this subject on these pages in a piece surrounding the perception of the RUC tolerating low level crime and anti social behaviour as a means to recruiting offenders as low level informants.

I’ve seen this reluctance to engage with the RUC framed by some as a result of paramilitary intimidation and all I can say to that is that is that it’s not my experience behind the reasoning

With this distrust of the police and subsequent break down in law and order the obscenity of punishment beatings and shootings, a particularly brutal form of vigilante rough justice, filled the vacuum with depressing frequency where those accused of various crimes and anti social behaviour would be shot in various parts of the body, badly beaten or forcibly expelled from where they lived under the threat of violence. I’ve also seen this framed by some as coercive control of a community by the IRA. I’m going to make a pretty controversial observation here and less this be construed as some form of justification or support for such let me be clear it’s not, I am completely opposed to any form of punishment attacks. I worked in a restorative justice scheme in West Belfast and, based on empirical observation, these attacks were popularly received by a considerable number of the WB populace and weren’t a result of ‘Republican coercive control’. To put it simply, West Belfast Republicans like Brendan Hughes or Bobby Storey didn’t tell the populace of WB how to live.

And so it was that West Belfast was seen as a place apart with a culture of wild west lawlessness populated by by coarse, violent roughnecks and delinquents which culminated in the wake of the corporal killings in March 1988, when two undercover British soldiers were beaten by funeral mourners and eventually shot dead by the IRA after they had violently driven into the funeral of IRA member Caoimhín Mac Brádaigh, with the BBC branding the inhabitants of the most observed, most heavily militarised part of Europe west of the Iron Curtain as a ‘terrorist community’. (Incidentally, this incident was the genesis of the enormously successful Féile an Phobail/West Belfast Festival)

Which brings me back to Máirtín’s defence, like many inner city areas in inner cities all over the world West Belfast can be gritty, tough, edgy and if you go looking for trouble there’s no doubt that you’ll find it. But it’s also warm, friendly, cultured, innovative and resilient with centres of educational and cultural excellence, magnificent restaurants and bars, almost over populated with sports clubs, with some of the most beautiful nature trails on the island and populated by some of the most caring, intelligent, cultured and proud people I’ve had the honour and privilege to spend my life with and call friends who, like most people, are just trying to get by and live their lives as best they can.

I left West Belfast in middle age and unless things have changed in the last decade and a half West Belfast isn’t controlled by paramilitaries and local businesses aren’t fleeced for protection money but to reiterate a point Máirtín makes well, if the Executive Programme on Paramilitarism and Organised Crime is really concerned about paramilitary influence and control in the North and want to raise awareness of it why are these posters not in prominent places in Belfast Grand Central Station hub and the City and International Airports?

Béal Feirste Thiar abú. Proud to be a Westie.

Hughie Beag is a West Belfast native and recovering legal scholar who spends lots of time in his spouse’s native Basque Country