Human Rights as War by Other Means. Jennifer Curtis
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and systems for distributing household necessities sprang up; those who owned vans took shopping orders, traveled to supermarkets, and delivered supplies. Behind the barricades, cooperative movements took hold, partly for survival.
These nascent efforts were swiftly formalized into NGOs and residents associations; local practices were quickly given a formal name by activists, “community action.” A new infrastructure of activism emerged and became the vehicle for rights claims in these areas. Scholarship from the period defines community action loosely, as the formation of groups to address “an issue or condition which is presumed to have some significance or importance for the community” (Griffiths 1975a: 191). Many early initiatives were cooperative responses to evacuations and displacement. Sometimes minorities in one area swapped houses (technically called squatting) with those who were minorities in another. Occasionally, these exchanges were organized by local “defense associations” and were orderly affairs. For example, in 1970, an organization of about 1,000 men, both Protestant and Catholic, patrolled the area, and coordinated the movement of people when intercommunal rioting took place in upper Springfield (De Baróid 1989: 48; NICRC 1974: 41).
“Sandra,” from the loyalist Springmartin estate, says, “At that stage, the whole area was in an uproar. And there was the New Barnsley estate, which was mixed, there was the Springmartin estate which was mixed, and in one weekend, people actually went out on the road and negotiated: ‘You keep your house safe, and I’ll keep my house safe, and we’ll actually transfer houses.’ So in one weekend, New Barnsley became a Catholic ghetto, and Springmartin became a Protestant ghetto.”
So, if conflict had fragmented community, it also became another source of solidarity. Emergency efforts established relief centers to provide food and shelter. As areas received their coreligionist refugees, new networks of cooperation and activism further enhanced solidarity. For example, the Co-ordinating Centre for Relief established fifteen centers for displaced persons, providing assistance in applying for state compensation, housing, welfare benefits, and legal aid. Much of this activity was necessary because the conflict rendered state services nonexistent or partial in these areas. “No-go areas” for the police and the British army were set up in both loyalist and nationalist neighborhoods. Gun battles between the army and paramilitaries, bombings, and shootings became commonplace, as did rent and rate strikes.17 The neighborhoods of west Belfast continuously erected and reerected barricades to protect themselves from attack by communal enemies or state forces.
Andrew, who joined the PIRA faction when the IRA split in 1969, says, “You had the clear political and civil rights emerging; you also had the economic issues beginning to surface again.” Andrew says these efforts dovetailed with armed struggle, which he called, “politics by other means.” By controlling territories of west Belfast, he believed that republicans had displaced state authority: “In the ’70s after internment, there was no police, they couldn’t exercise their writ, they couldn’t collect their money, they couldn’t bring people to court, they couldn’t tax their cars, rents didn’t have to be paid, electricity bills didn’t have to be paid. And yet they still had to provide them.”
By 1973, there were more than 300 community-based organizations in Belfast alone (Wiener 1976). Early on, they often used the tactic of street protests; women took the lead in organizing. In nationalist west Belfast, for instance, women organized large demonstrations against security-force actions, protesting raids in Clonard and imprisonments in Ardoyne and upper Springfield. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts support research participants’ memories of events. In July 1970, 2,000 women broke the Falls Road curfew by marching from the upper Falls to the lower Falls (for some, a journey of up to four miles) carrying bread and milk to residents confined to their homes by the army. In loyalist west Belfast, women also were active in street protests, in blocking roads, and in marching. Loyalists also organized protests against security forces. During the disturbances that led to the expulsion of Protestants from Ardoyne in 1971, more than 300 women went to the police station to protest against inadequate protection.
Community groups also organized rent and rate strikes. More than 16,000 public housing tenants in nationalist west Belfast withheld rent and rates from the NIHE following internment in 1971. Shankill loyalists organized strikes over rent increases and housing conditions as early as 1969 and continued until the early 1980s. Protests in both areas occurred against the Payments for Debt (Emergency Provisions) Act of 1971, which authorized deductions to be made from social security payments—or wages in the case of state workers—to cover rent and rate arrears. The act was later extended to apply to utility arrears. When NIHE imposed a dramatic rent increase in 1975, tenants’ groups from the Shankill and the Falls joined together to block roads and protest the decision.
Following emergency efforts to assist refugees and the routine organization of street protests, activists formed more grounded, ongoing projects. Some of the earliest efforts centered on young people. For example, “Bernadette,” from the nationalist Newhill area, first organized a shopping van for the area. As the conflict continued, she began to worry about her children and their friends becoming involved in the conflict or being attacked wandering into unsafe neighborhoods: “There was absolutely nowhere for young people to go. Nowhere. And they were all kept in their own areas, so were the adults, too…. Ghettoized, you could say.” As a solution, she helped young people form a youth club, starting up a disco in a vacant building, initially with borrowed sound equipment. By charging a small fee, they earned the money to buy their own equipment. Other parents later helped the young people begin a broader program that included boxing, football, drama, and snooker.
Similarly, on the Shankill, Ivan said that young people were bored and restless. He was young himself—nineteen—and his friends who had participated in riots were now barred from church-based youth clubs. They banded together and took over a vacant council house to begin their own youth club. Collecting wood from houses that were being razed for redevelopment, they began making window boxes and selling them. Observing the spirit of the times, they also began a placard business—using reclaimed wood to provide signs to the various protest groups springing up. Ivan says, “I remember this so clearly…. And it just blew my mind. I mean this was not organized, this was not—this just happened.”
Gaining confidence from projects like the shopping vans and youth clubs, activists began organizing self-sustaining cooperatives. These provided jobs and steered local consciousness and action toward self-help. For example, the Turf Lodge Development Association (TLDA) conducted an employment survey and seized vacant buildings for economic ventures. In Ballymurphy, local residents set up a knitting co-op in 1971, which expanded into a commercial knitting factory. Although Ballymurphy Enterprises, as it was called, struggled, efforts to establish worker-run industry persisted. A cooperative building company, Whiterock Industrial Enterprises LTD, purchased a twelve-acre site in the Whiterock area and constructed a factory that it then leased to a furniture company. It also constructed a local filling station, franchised by Burmah Oil. The group sold “loan bonds” locally to raise capital. In 1979, however, the army took over the Whiterock Industrial Estate and dispersed the businesses operating there.
One of the most successful offshoots of the co-op movement in both the Falls and the Shankill were the People’s Taxis, or black taxis, which are now an institution. In the early 1970s, hijackings and rioting caused the suspension of regular bus service to the areas of the conflict. People began to get lifts from each other, paying car owners a shilling or so per journey. From this phenomenon, the black taxis began. Local drivers bought used London cabs and drove them along the bus routes. By 1972, a service operated from the city center up the Shankill to outlying loyalist estates, sponsored by the UVF. By 1974, the Falls Road Taxi Drivers’ Association had 300 full-time drivers making a similar journey up the Falls from the city center (Irish Times, August 22, 1974, 6). Despite initial opposition by government transport agencies and security force harassment, the taxis continued to operate. There are now thousands of black taxis on these and other routes, providing cheap, rapid transport between the city center and western and northern estates.
Many of the same activists, a collection of “usual suspects,” led efforts during this period and remained active and influential in later campaigns. Indeed, in both the Falls and Shankill, the “usual suspects” was a term often used for the loose network