By the city, which sat at the head of Belfast Lough, rolled out into the counties of Down and Antrim. The transformations of a century of industrialisation had entirely redrawn its scale and style.
In , only around 25, people lived in Belfast; by , this number had increased to 70,; and by , it had reached , It was now, and by a considerable distance, the largest city in Ireland. This explosion was unique on an island whose population was in persistent decline through the second half of the nineteenth century as a result of famine and emigration. Even the northern industrial towns of England, with which Belfast shared so many similarities, could not match a city which became the fastest growing urban area in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
What made this transformation all the more stunning was that the history of Belfast was a relatively recent one. It had been the site of a medieval castle, but it only really gained any significance at the start of the seventeenth century.
Chichester laid out a town and settled it with English and Scots. The Catholic Irish lived mainly to the west of the fortified town, which developed slowly as a commercial centre through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Throughout this period it was a relatively unimportant, largely Presbyterian town, which had a reputation for a radical and democratic outlook. This was emphasised by the central part played by Belfast Presbyterians in the emergence of the United Irishmen and their abortive insurrection of By then, Belfast was already embarking on the process of industrialisation which so altered its nature.
While tension, fear and violence characterised everyday life for many in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, areas along the border experienced the greatest number of bombings, deaths and injuries apart from parts of Belfast.
Shootings and bombings suspected to have been carried out by loyalist paramilitary groups also occurred in the border counties of Ireland; in the towns of Clones, Monaghan, Swanlinbar and Belturbet.
The attempt to seal the border depended on a very heavy military presence along the border in Northern Ireland. Army patrols and checkpoints responded to IRA violence in the borderlands and provoked attack.
Catholics that were judged by the IRA as being collaboration with the security forces, and Protestants with no connection to the security forces were also murdered. For some the appearance of heavily armed and camouflaged soldiers in the otherwise quiet and often sparsely populated countryside of the borderlands became routine and taken-for-granted, and for some a reassuring presence.
For others, seeing soldiers on lanes, fields and around farms was a frightening and intimidating experience. In some of the isolated parts of west Co. Fermanagh and west Co. Tyrone, Catholic young men and teenagers suspected to be involved in republican organisations were subject to repeated intimidation and harassment by security forces.
Makeshift barricades went up across the city, as depicted in Belfast. There was an unease among the Catholic population that the police would not protect them and their homes because the RUC was overwhelmingly unionist and Protestant. The violence of Partition had established a statelet with a Protestant majority; unionist interests were maintained through repressive tactics to the detriment of the Catholic minority.
The NICRA was founded in an effort to address state discrimination against the Catholic minority and members came from a variety of political and religious backgrounds.
Social activism, civil rights mobilization and mass protest were a globally defining feature of the late s. This Northern Irish civil rights movement drew heavily on the U. It allows Branagh, who emigrated to England with his parents in , to indulge in the romantic nostalgia of his own memory, and there is something highly artificial in the stylized aesthetic of the film. The carefully composed scenes remind viewers of the theater or old Hollywood, both of which, during a few scenes when the family enjoys a cultural outing together, puncture the narrative with bursts of color.
But this return to an earlier Belfast does more than this. A balance had to be struck between affording the locals a policing service and protecting ourselves from the constant threat of attack.
Despite the pressure and the risks, morale was high. The uniformed branch was almost over-protective of us when we were called to investigate serious terrorist incidents in the area. Brian McKee, an RUC constable who had been a soldier for six years, serving with the Royal Engineers in Germany and the Middle East, was one of the officers at Andersonstown police barracks who liaised with the army units on tour in the area, including the battalion based a short drive away at the army base called Fort Monagh, on the southern edge of the nationalist Turf Lodge estate.
He, too, thought outer west Belfast was a relatively easy place for the IRA to operate. As he drove between the police barracks and army bases, McKee was expected to use his own car, a red Austin Allegro, and he kept his Walther PPK semi-automatic pistol tucked under his thigh. I volunteered for it. Some army units thought they were a law unto themselves, and there were some real headaches.
And then there were good units, like the Royal Marines: they were brilliant. Rather than upholding the law of the land, you were very much a military police service. You were more soldier than policeman. But at Andersonstown, the first instinct of the police was to protect themselves, literally. First of all, you had to protect yourself and your colleagues. Then you had to protect the public and property.
And then, lastly, your job was to investigate and solve crime. But investigating and solving crime was way down your list of priorities. D uring the height of the Troubles, when would-be IRA recruits were questioned, they were always asked why they wanted to join the IRA. It was always the events, and the desire to react to them: Bloody Sunday ; the little-reported massacre in Ballymurphy by British troops of 10 Catholic civilians in west Belfast in August ; the torture during interrogations in police holding centres; the shoot-to-kill operations ; internment without trial; the house searches and the mass surveillance; the assaults by members of the security forces.
All of this resulted in some nationalists and Catholics concluding that when those who made the law broke the law, there was no law — and that a lawless response was entirely justified. In other words, it could at times be the acts of state violence — and the repeated official denial of that violence — that had, for a minority of people in Northern Ireland, untied the moorings that usually bind people into a liberal democracy.
And once they had volunteered, they were members of an organisation that regarded its own violence as legitimate. Pro-unionist security forces, so this argument went, were not protagonists in a national and sectarian conflict, but men and women who were upholding law and order in the face of a concerted assault.
But the volunteers who joined the IRA had a strong sense that they were simply members of a violated community, which they needed to defend. Another republican would put it slightly differently. M any of the people living in the outer areas of west Belfast had moved there in the early days of the Troubles, when about 60, Catholics had been forced to flee their homes as a result of intimidation or fear. At that time, it was perhaps one of the largest enforced movements of people that Europe had witnessed since the second world war.
Areas such as Lenadoon became almost uniformly Catholic and nationalist, as Protestants moved a few hundred yards across the sectarian line in and But those families arriving in Lenadoon had been driven out of their own homes in turn. Another remembered moving into a house in which the bath and kitchen sink had been smashed by the family that had fled from it.
The housing problems were truly dire. Some developments around Andersonstown and Lenadoon were so badly designed that pedestrian underpasses were regularly inundated with rainwater, a problem that the local newspaper, the Andersonstown News, highlighted by photographing children inside the underpasses paddling in canoes. The last hopeful housing estate to be constructed in the province had been Twinbrook, built in the late 60s on the far outskirts of south-west Belfast.
Its labyrinthine lanes are set around a slightly boggy acre park; some of the housing is solidly built; some less so.
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