People’s Living History of Northern Ireland

To understand the so-called Troubles of  Northern Irleland one must remove the veils of religion, ethnicity, and even nationalism, and begin with economy, which means learning about the unique properties of the flax plant and the geography of the North Channel.

The Political Geography of Northern Ireland Then and Now. 

To begin to understand Northern Ireland I needed to stare at some maps. I found one of Ireland before 1920 divided into four provinces. Ulster, the most northern province, was itself divided into nine counties. I then looked at a current, partitioned map. Northern Ireland is the old Ulster Province, but with a bite taken out of the bottom, a skim off the western shore, and another bite off the top, like a cookie nibbled around the edges.

Dublin freedom fighters fought and won independence for 2/3 of the island in 1922. During the border negotiations, the English insisted on the strangely shaped partition.   Three Ulster counties became part of the Irish Republic. The remaining six counties of Ulster are Northern Ireland.  The borders made no geographical or cultural sense, Farmers were divided from their land, children from schools, and neighbors from neighbors, ensuring ongoing internal conflict and second-class status for pro-Irish Catholics. Yet in the history of British imperial post-colonial border-making, they fit a pattern: create boundaries in the interest of the Empire at the expense of locals.

With my US mindset, I found it difficult to understand the geographical boundaries of current NI political divisions. Where I come from we have a stark rural/urban divide.  In contrast, in Northern Ireland there are both pro-British, (Unionist or Loyalist) and pro-Irish ( Nationalist or Republican) villages, small towns, and inner-city neighborhoods. We spent August 2024, crossing those internal political boundaries, in the divided capital city of Belfast, the primarily Unionist seaside village of Whitehead, and the mostly Nationalist town of Derry.

Economic Causes of The Troubles, in a Land where Linen is Queen and Shipbuilding is Prince.

To understand The Troubles, one must remove the veils of religion, ethnicity, and even nationalism, and begin with economy, which means learning about the unique properties of the flax plant and the geography of the North Channel.  Belfast and Derry had similar economic histories because their land and waters were uniquely suited for linen production and boat building.

Linen is made from flax, which thrives in wet cool climates. Linen making was a cottage industry in Ulster for longer than other textiles, due to the unique and arduous process of turning a piece of grass into cloth. Reeds were soaked in still water to release the woody hull of the plant from its silky inner core.  Though men were originally the weavers, women took over during the Napoleonic war and never left. At the height of Ireland’s linen production women and children were the primary workers. Protestant/Catholic sectarianism was sown by factory owners to keep workers from organizing. Catholic workers were last hired, first fired, and worked the most dangerous positions.

When Belfast was the linen-producing capital of the world, production outstriped supply and they were importing flax from Russia and Belgium. The rise of shipping was directly tied to the linen industry, bringing flax to Ireland and Irish textiles to the global market. It was geography that made Northern Ireland a prince of shipbuilding. The North Channel between Belfast and the Scottish coast is narrow and deep – perfect for docking and testing the seaworthiness of ocean liners before sending them into the deep sea.  Shipbuilders were men, and like the linen industry, the Catholic workers felt the brunt of downturns in the industry, which successfully impeded an integrated union movement.

Derry

The gerrymandered partition borders make the northernmost town of Derry (called Londonderry by the Protestants) a border town. From the west side of Derry, one can walk into Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. Divisions within municipal borders are not subtle. Ancient stone walls 25 feet high, divided the Protestant community from the Catholic majority. Outside the walls is the city hall, where a Protestant minority ruled the Catholic majority. Catholics were confined in overcrowded neighborhoods, living three generations in a two-up, two-down—two-bedroom house with no bathroom or plumbing. When new housing was built, only Protestants were given leases.

 

We took the Bogside Walking tour run by the children or siblings of activists murdered, maimed, and/or radicalized on Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, when a massive civil rights march demanding housing was attacked by British soldiers, who shot 26 people and killed fourteen. Our tour guide was a boy in 1972, a few years younger than us. His father was a marcher and one of the people, who after the massacre, supported the IRA and believed until the end that they would not have achieved a peace agreement if they had not taken up arms.

Our guide also said all of it could have been avoided. In 1969 they built a college in the much smaller Protestant town of Coleraine and left Derry high and dry. If they had built the college here, if they had ended housing discrimination, if they had provided basic infrastructure for Catholic Derry so they were not isolated from the rest of Northern Ireland, if they integrated the police force, they could have prevented the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They could have prevented the rise of the IRA.

There was 80% unemployment in Catholic Derry in the 1960s. Like Blacks in South Africa, they were 75% of the population, confined to ghettos,  living four generations in a four-room house with no plumbing. Homeownership was tied to voting, so like Black counties in Mississippi, dirty tricks were used to keep people completely disenfranchised. No major roads were built into Derry, leaving the community economically isolated.

The first major protests in the 1960s were housing protests. A family living in a tiny caravan (motor home), parked it in the middle of a busy street. Supporters rallied around the vehicle. A couple of Catholic families squatted in new housing only available to Protestants.  The huge marches were planned to walk into the Protestant neighborhoods, demanding housing.

The people of Derry were isolated by their lack of infrastructure but did have TVs. They knew about the US civil rights movement.  They recognized themselves in the conditions and the police brutality experienced on the  Edmund Pettus Bridge. If it weren’t for the mass murder by British troops, if there were not a cover-up lasting 40 years and an attempt to blame the victims for putting guns in hands that had no weapons, the IRA would have remained marginal.

The IRA prisoner protests also kept support alive and many of the murals in Derry laud the blanket protesters who refused to wear prison uniforms, going naked with only a blanket to wear, with no bathroom facilities, and smearing their feces on the wall. And the hunger strikers, who one by one, starved themselves to death while in prison.

We also visited the Free Derry Museum, put together by families They opened doors in 2017.  Jesse Jackson was on hand for the ribbon cutting. The outdoor walls of the museum are decorated in iron depicting the musical notation of the We Shall Overcome. Today as we enter the entire front entrance is painted with a solidarity with Palestine mural. Inside you can buy buttons with the Palestinian flag over the Free Derry wall. Proceeds go to Palestinian medical aid.  The Museum exhibit ended triumphantly in 2010 when the British Court exonerated those murdered.

After we visited Derry we spent a few days binging on Derry Girls, the Netflix show that takes place in Derry during the 1990s and ends with the peace process in 1998. It brilliantly shows us a world where inequality and violence were ordinary, and segregation perpetuated the status quo. Today things are better in terms of access to housing jobs, and voting rights. The communities remain segregated, however, with schools and neighborhoods perpetuating the divisions. That is something anyone living in a city in the United States should recognize.

Global perspective in tiny Derry, and provincialism at the Democratic National Convention

My own experience in Derry was punctuated by media from back home, where the Democratic National Convention was unfolding in Chicago. I was struck by the natural internationalism of the Derry people in this tiny backwater corner of the planet, and the lack of worldliness at the global superpower’s political convention, though the whole world was watching. The DNC seemed to be in denial that everything in this world is connected, the products we produce, the land we are trying to sustain, the people on the move, and the pandemics and climate crises that don’t give a damn about our political borders, our flags or our folksiness. Derry meanwhile, was acutely aware that what happens in their tiny part of the world will reverberate.

Whitehead

Whitehead is a small seaside village, seventeen miles north of Belfast, where the Belfast Lough joins the North Channel. The railway company built the town to create a summer destination on the line for Belfast’s middle class. They incentivized people to build homes there, promising free train passage to Belfast, built six hotels and a public walk along the sea with steps up the cliff to the lighthouse.. The Great Depression hit Ireland in the 1920s and several Whitehead hotels closed In the late 1930s, local tourism rebounded when the Belfast labor movement won wage increases and vacations for linen and steel factory workers. Then the working class of Belfast began to take holidays in Whitehead.

In a map of Northern Ireland color-coded to show the current political divisions —dark green = Irish Republican,  dark blue = British Loyalist, Whitehead is a light blue town surrounded by a sea of dark blue. The population of 3,800 is nominally, 3/4 Protestant, and 1/4 Catholic. There is a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Catholic church in town, all within the same two blocks. In August at least, they are lightly attended.

All Whitehead hotels shut down during The Troubles. They have never revived. Today, most people who visit, do not stay longer than an afternoon, due to the lack of accommodations. Two wealthy individuals live in mansions that were once hotels on the shore. How do I know this? A sign on the boardwalk tells us so. Mansion owners use the glorious public walkway built by the Railroad to get their vehicles in and out. Even the town’s castle and the lighthouse, two public draws in yesteryear, are now privately owned and off limits to the public. You can still climb the stairs to see the view, but some paths lead to a few more mansions on the crest and an exclusive golf course surrounded by hard-working small farms.

 

The mansions are summer houses. Most people who live year-round in Whitehead reside in townhouses and row houses, working in Belfast or at the Gobbins. (see photo, below.) Their homes and a few stores hug the shore or climb the cliff.  We stayed in a townhouse bought by a neighbor when the owner could no longer climb the stairs to the bedrooms and bathroom on the second floor. The four cafés in town are only open for brunch hours, not every day. A butcher, a produce mart, and a bakery have daytime hours. A convenience store with limited groceries and plenty of alcohol is open into the evening.

Unionist, Loyalist, Scotts of Whitehead

There are three places to drink in town. One is the Glasgow Ranger Club on the waterfront, flying British and Orange Heritage flags. A few feet from the club, on the pier, an Israeli flag flaps in the Irish wind, confusing new arrivals to the Celtic isle.I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand this Scottish club, front and center on this Irish shore, affronting or welcoming visitors with their many flags.  Knowing nothing, I reacted negatively to the flags and the moniker, which I associated with the Texas Rangers, a paramilitary group in the US Southwest that terrorized Latinos.

The word in this context refers to the name of a Scottish football (soccer) team. But I was not completely off in my assumptions. The process in which this sports club became identified as an Orange, pro-unionist, Protestant group in Ireland has something to do with the shipping industry playing divide and conquer with workers on both the Scottish and Irish sides of the North Channel, and the longer history of Protestant Scots in Ireland. Racism among Ranger’s fans is a contested issue, both within the context of Northern Ireland politics, the rise of neo-Nazism and racist responses to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Suffice it to say, today the flags, songs, and rituals of the Whitehead group, —which also engages in water sports, salsa dancing, community suppers, and weekend music events—are not devoid of sectarianism.

The Rangers Club is in a historic building in the middle of the shoreline, a few feet from the main parking lot for daytime visitors. Walking south from the club, we could admire a row of multicolored wooden homes, and beyond that another cliff. Dozens of wood poles stretched in a line into the Channel. We thought it was for the salt factory on the edge of town, but they built their own pier. The picturesque quay was once used by the quarry to bring Whitehead limestone to national markets, The train tracks hug the shore here. Trains arrive every fifteen minutes.  You can continue between tracks and the sea. The narrowing path has splendid flowers; a misstep means a drop twenty feet to the rocky waterbed

Walking north, we saw the lighthouse on a high green cliff jutting into the water, getting closer. The two-mile paved sea path is one of the prettiest I have ever seen. The rocks on the shore mean that even on a calm day the sea is textured and its laps mesmerizing.  Climbing to the top is still as challenging and exhilarating as when the railroad built it to lure tourists.

Whitehead Community 

In Whitehead, we looked for opportunities to participate in community. We attended a yoga class in the Catholic Church, heard Mexican musicians play at the Bank Cafe during lunchtime, went to a band concert at the Methodist Church.   A sign at the library said people gathered on Wednesday and Friday to read the newspapers together. We showed up one day. No one else came. The librarians brought us all the newspapers and a cart with coffee, tea, pitchers of milk, and cookies. While children in the room next door recited nursery rhythms, we read about how the neo-Nazis attacked immigrant businesses in Belfast and the anti-racists gathered in bigger numbers to counter them. The librarians wanted us to know the headlines did not represent Northern Ireland. We are better than that. We are welcoming.

We attended a reading by two men in their sixties reading their works and that of others. They read a satirical story about members of a dairy collective in Antrim County who decided during The Troubles that they should divide into two collectives, one Orange, and one Green. The problem was they couldn’t decide how to divvy up cows born on an Orange farm, now living on a Green farm. Unable to figure out the political and ethnic proclivities of their cows, they finally came back together.

We attended a Folkfest in the park on an unusual blue-sky day. Crepes, cones, beer in stem glasses, prosecco in plastic cups, orange pop, children chasing giant bubbles, babies dancing, and a band singing Johnny is gone on the rolling sea, the rolling sea, the rolling sea. Later I saw the lead musician on the street and told him I loved his music. He looked to be about 45. He said he grew up in Belfast. When he was a teenager, his father sent him to Whitehead during the summers to get away from the Troubles. Thirty years ago he moved here permanently. He works for himself (I think construction) and plays at the Marine Bar on Thursday nights. The next time we saw him he was riding his bike with a toddler on the back. He asked where we were from. Thanks to political twists in the US election, our Minnesota Governor was in the news.

“Tim Walz put you on lockdown didn’t he?” our new friend said.

I thought he was referring to the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police when Walz called out the National Guard and we had tanks in the streets and a 7 pm curfew. Instead, he was talking about COVID policy. Our Irish friend thinks COVID is a hoax. He knew no one who died of it, though he went to many funerals during that time, for people who died of heart attacks and the like. I told him we did know people who died of the disease and we were sure it was not a global conspiracy.

Belfast

We spent the last two nights of July, in West Belfast in the heart of the Falls, a block from  Falls and Grosvenor Roads, where Palestinian flags flew on the street posts. Knowing nothing about the internal geography of the city, we got off at the bus station in the city center, and walked up the hill over the bridge, to a neighborhood with Arab groceries and Asian restaurants, all shuttered—not knowing that the night before immigrant businesses were attacked. Five out of six anti-immigrant rioters were Protestant Unionists, There were few people on the sidewalks. We finally found one Chinese takeout open. It served chips (French fries) instead of rice with their meals. Our room came with the use of a dining room, so we brought it back and ate. At night we heard more sirens than we had since we left Minneapolis. — no police, just ambulances.

The next day was uncharacteristically sunny. We walked the neighborhood, onto a block festooned with tiny soccer flags from almost all over the world. No British flags, a large number of Spanish flags. We saw the giant Bobby Sands mural on the side of the Carnegie Library and the many solidarity murals. We did not understand yet that we were seeing one side of Belfast, or that we had arrived at a moment when Belfast was experiencing a Troubles reprise, as the anti-immigrant riots in London reverberated across the North Channel. 

Belfast Millies

We also did not know that Belfast was beginning its 12-day festival of music, art, and politics, Féile an Phobail. The annual event was founded by Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams in 1988 to show the world a positive view of West Belfast. This year Féile was teaming with progressive politics, energy heightened by the need to respond to racist attacks on immigrants, and carnage in Gaza. It began with Pride events and ended with concerts attracting 10,000 youth. In the middle were several days of Palestine solidarity events, carnivals for children, and massive antiracist rallies.

St Mary’s University College was the primary location for Feile’s art exhibits and speaker events, We missed Jeremy Corbyn and caught Sara O’Neill, a granddaughter of a Linen mill worker, who designed robes and scarves that tell of the lives of Belfast Milles, bringing respect and knowledge of the women who worked in Belfast Linen Mills. The word Millie has been used as a slur on school playgrounds,  a word to put a woman down, to insult working-class girls.  O’Neill wanted to reverse that, to lift up women like her great-grandma. Using her skills in design and fashion, and oral histories of the Millies, she created scarves and flowing robes with designs that illustrated the dreams of linen mill workers; the lives they led after work, in the 1920s and 30s, the labor struggles they won, and the geography of their lives, symbols of the streets of Belfast where they lived, shopped and enjoyed life outside of the factory— all on the canvas of a shawl!

The presentation she and Belfast Independent Journalist Amanda Ferguson (grandchild of a Millie) put on at St Mary’s University College in Belfast, was attended by women whose mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers were Millies. Six women sitting together behind me, in my age cohort, were daughters of Millies.

When the event ended I heard one say, I  thought we would hear more about labor conditions and struggles.I loved the presentation, but I too wanted to know more. I said I want to hear your stories.

All six women gathered around me, each adding a sentence: We became nurses and teachers because our mothers didn’t want us to have a mill life. They pushed education on us. My mother told me about the songs they used to make up to sing about bosses they didn’t like. My mother had the fancy shoes, the lipstick. They dressed up after work. They had dreams. 

Dave said watching me surrounded by those women was the best moment of our ten months on the road. It was, as the Irish say, lovely indeed.

One woman asked me if I was from somewhere exotic. I missed a beat, then said, the United States. She did not hesitate: I hope you have time to enjoy our northern coast! Pretty as any country anywhere.

Dead Center Walking tour and Ulster Museum. Shared Past, but No Shared  Memory 

With our friend Carolyn Briggs we visited the Troubles exhibit at the Ulster Museum. Carolyn was struck by how the museum was free, there was no security, no bag checks, and lockers were available for our backpacks. Having gone to national museums in countries with difficult recent, I thought the exhibit was the best I have seen by an official museum, taking on a difficult recent past in which locals all experienced but with sharply different, often opposing memories. The focus on oral histories, where nobody’s reality is sanitized to create a both/and narrative, was especially effective. The exhibit drove home the enormous and continuous impact of the Troubles on the lives of people living in Belfast today. It did not allow you to sentimentalize or Disneyfy this history. We came out with strong emotions and questions though Carolyn—who lives in England now— was clear about one thing: Britain needs to get out of Northern Ireland.

I was struck by the words of several West Belfast women in my age cohort—children of Millies, who said they learned they had the power to change the world and that feeling has never left them.  They knew their fight was connected to people’s struggles worldwide, a perspective that still guides them. Their mothers did not have that. Their testimony reminded me of Black people in Minneapolis who I interviewed for the Minneapolis Interview Project who said our  2020 post-George Floyd Uprising was the first time they felt that social change was possible.

We attended the Dead Center tour, which purported to be neutral and scholarly. I was not looking for neutrality, but I hoped I might glean more forest and fewer trees. I  wanted fewer minute details of this bombing attack or police raid, and more on the larger forces behind the Troubles.

I didn’t realize what the tour name meant until we were walking through the dead urban center of Belfast, with buildings still boarded up, independent and unique establishments replaced by you-could-be-anywhere franchises, including an English football (soccer) paraphernalia shop, which galled our tour guide.  It made me think of Greensboro North Carolina downtown area, where lunch counter sit-ins began.  When we visited in 2013, the downtown area had a great museum that told the sit-in story. Around it were shuttered stores, some selling their junk as antiques. Dead since the end of the North Carolina “Troubles.” Then again, it also reminded me of downtown St. Paul.  There are many ghost downtowns in this global economy.

What the tour re-emphasized for me is the importance of geography. The inner city was the only place in Belfast where the youth of loyalist and nationalist families came together in bars, and dance halls that catered to both.  It was the only place where a Catholic/Protestant romance might happen, the only integrated part of town. And it was the theater for much of the terror: police killings and UDF and IRA bombings that are remembered in people’s hearts and on this tour, but not marked with plaques. He took us to the place where a punk rock bar used to be in the 1990s, where nobody cared about religious background. Punks were a political movement of course, and our tour guide, a staid-looking 60-year-old, was once one of them with a “six-inch mohawk.”

West Belfast walking tour

Our West Belfast tour guide, about 60, and a child of civil rights activists promised NOT to be neutral.  From him, we learned why the Irish people, inspired by Martin Luther King’s non-violent civil rights movement, needed to arm themselves. Protestants not only ruled city government. They also were the police. As in Black and Indigenous communities in Minneapolis, law enforcement did not protect Catholic communities, they terrorized them. Like AIM patrol in Minneapolis, the Black Panthers in Oakland, and the Brown Berets in East Los Angeles. support for the IRA grew, in part, out of a need to protect Catholic communities.  Grandmothers looked to their IRA grandchildren for protection from hoodlums of any persuasion. It is not a surprise that when George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, this mural went up in the solidarity wall in West Belfast.

 

I was momentarily shocked by the persistent fences, walls, and iron gates between East and West Belfast. All along the border is a wall topped with recently added fencing. They call it a peace wall. It is high enough that if someone is drunk and tries to lob a projectile over it, it will fall back on them. The Iron Gate is quite impressive it closes at 7 pm, dividing two very different solidarity messages, today primarily focused on Israel/Palestine. Then I remembered I come from a land of gated communities.

In East Belfast, an Orange Heritage Museum funded by the European Union focuses on explaining the traditions behind the many marches of the Unionist, Loyalist, and mostly Protestant people of Scottish and British heritage in Belfast. We considered going but did not make it there.

Partition politics in 2024.  

The political divisions in Northern Ireland today do not seem to hue to Protestant and Catholic faiths. “Many people these days are of no faith,” said more than one person. But different flags still fly to let you know what area you are in. Holidays that celebrate and mark recent and ancient histories of triumphs and defeats, still divide. “The people of Orange Heritage have many parades,” our Derry tour guide said, “You and I have a calendar that begins in January and ends in December. For them, it’s January, February, march march march march….”

Brexit has created new issues. It is paramount for peace to keep the borderlands free of checkpoints and guards, so now there is a border check on the Irish Sea. Furthermore, there is still segregation and inequality, border fences, and gates between west and east Belfast. Today nationalists are working for an electoral win, to become part of Ireland. They only need 50% plus one vote to lose the partition. And demographics are changing so they are confident they will be winning soon. They are aware that the unionists are afraid of being mistreated as a demographic minority in Ireland and that is a fear that they need to assuage.

Northern Ireland does not shy away from hard history

Northern Ireland has made failure and contested history a focus of identity and tourism.  The Titanic was built in Belfast. A  memorial with the names of all who died sits on the City Hall grounds in Donegal Square.  An imposing museum that perseverates the details, sits on the pier. The Troubles has become an economic entity, an essential part of the tourism industry in Belfast and Derry. History has its uses and its abuses. A pub in Belfast addresses it this way. A nation that keeps one eye on the past is wise, a nation that keeps two eyes on the past is blind. But how much we focus on history is only part of the question.  If we can avoid creating myths that bolster nationalist projects and focus on restitution and reparations rather than rehash old battles, then we are making good use of our past.

If you are a visitor from the United States, partake in Northern Ireland’s efforts to make sense of their recent past.  They have much to teach us about how inequalities are maintained, justified, and potentially overcome in our country. We don’t hold on to hard history to wallow in trauma. We examine to overcome. Our ultimate goal should be to let go.

The grandfather in Derry Girls put it this way:

What if no one else has to die? What if all this becomes a ghost story you tell your wee ones one day—a story they will hardly believe? 

Postscript: After a month in Northern Ireland we spent two nights in  Dublin. With my comparative mind now fixed on Northern Ireland, I was struck by three things:  the lack of flags, the relative wealth of some, and the huge number of people without homes, living in tents under every tree along the Dublin harbor.

The September 1 Dublin newspapers reported that Sinn Fein promised to retool the housing department and build 300,000 homes by the end of the decade. “Watch our five-year plan,” they said.

I hope that is true.  If Northern Ireland also becomes part of Ireland at the end of the decade I hope they don’t have to rebuild their 1960s civil rights movement for fair housing in a 21^st Century Republic of Ireland.