The year I entered the world was a time of change internationally and in Ireland, but for the ruling powers in Belfast, it was a time of resistance to change. Belfast was the former centre of a thriving linen industry and home to the shipbuilders who had built the Titanic. The city’s economy had benefited from World War II: Harland & Wolff had been busy building warships, and 250,000 US troops stationed in the north during the war had contributed much additional income. However, large numbers of people had lost their homes in the bombing of Belfast, leaving a continuing housing crisis, with many still housed in temporary dwellings.
The British-controlled statelet created in the six north-eastern counties of Ireland was less than thirty years old, and the family and the community into which I was born opposed the very existence of ‘Northern Ireland’ as a separate entity under the British crown. South of the border Eamon de Valera lost a general election in 1948 after sixteen years as Taoiseach. In India, Gandhi died, just as British rule drew to a close; Britain departed, too, from Palestine as the state of Israel was proclaimed. If the times possessed a particular theme it was undoubtedly the post-war decline of the British Empire, a decline spelt out in India and Palestine, apparent in Africa, and palely reflected in the Republic of Ireland Act, whereby the twenty-six counties of Ireland left the British Commonwealth.
In 1950, when Margaret was still a babe in arms, we moved from Granny Adams’s to a single large room in a gloomy, decaying house at 726 Shore Road in Greencastle, on the side of Belfast Lough. The house belonged to an order of nuns, who had given it over to a housing agent to collect the rent, and our room on the ground floor was partitioned off into areas. Upstairs was a tap for water and a toilet, which were shared with many other families. Here my mother, an articulate and gentle woman, struggled heroically to rear a growing family on next to nothing, and here we stayed for four and a half years, during which time two more children, Paddy and Anne, were born. My father did his best as a building labourer to provide for his young family, but these were difficult times, and although he was a hard worker, work itself was hard to come by, especially as a former political prisoner. Whenever he was sent looking for a job by the employment exchange they informed his prospective employers of his record and status. For a time he and an old prison friend Jimmy Bannon travelled from door to door selling fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. It was the horse, Paddy Joe, who profited most from their partnership, for both my da and Jimmy found it difficult to refuse credit to friends and neighbours, and after some time the business folded.
My mother was never overly robust, yet in her struggle to rear us and care for us she was the pillar of the family, and she plotted escape from our miserable slum room into a real house. In addition to the conditions in which we were living, the social isolation of being in Greencastle was a constant problem, given the cost of bus fares to get to Leeson Street and Abercorn Street where there were family and friends. My Uncle Seán and his girlfriend Rita used to come by bicycle to visit, but because it was so far off the beaten track they and my Granny Adams were the only regular visitors.
There was an enormous demand for housing in Belfast: overcrowding was high in the city as a whole, but nearly twice as high in the Falls, the main centre of Catholic population. Of all the houses in the city, almost three-quarters required some form of repair; at least 200,000 new dwellings were estimated to be needed to meet even basic needs. Now Ballymurphy estate, planned in 1948 to meet part of the housing emergency, had started to be built, and my mother was trying her best to get us a house there.
I recall almost nothing of my life in Greencastle beyond a sense of the dark and gloomy house, and I remember nothing at all about my first school, Star of the Sea. But one of my earliest memories is of going with my mother to the house of Seamus McKearney, a local representative on Belfast Corporation whom she was lobbying in pursuit of a house. He lived close to Inkerman Street, home of the Hannaway family, and I accompanied my mother on a number of occasions when she went from Granny Hannaway’s to Mr McKearney’s. Even though I was very young, I recall the day when we eventually got word that there was a possibility of our being housed. I was standing on the pavement outside McKearney’s front door, while he and my mother were engrossed in conversation, he in the hall, she at the doorway.
Some time later she and my Granny Adams, my sister Margaret and I went up the Springfield Road on a journey which took us as far as the bus could go, right up on to the slopes of the Black and Divis Mountains. There we came to a huge building site in an area of green fields. We ploughed our way through the muck past heavy construction vehicles, cement mixers and lorries trundling back and forth.
My mother had a letter in her hand which she showed to one of the workmen.
‘That’s Divismore Park,’ he told her, and I could see that she was delighted, even though what he was pointing to was only a row of foundations.
My granny and my mammy counted down along the row until we got to number 11, which was little more than a big pile of sand; but we could see where pipes were going in, and the base had been laid.
‘That’s our house,’ my ma told us, her voice full of wonder. ‘That’s where we are going to live.’
(excerpted from chapter 1)
