Eileen Weir of the Greater North Belfast Women’s Network made a telling observation when I met her at the Shankill Women’s Centre. She said, “The sectarian divide only exists for men.” In her 20 years of experience organising cross-community women’s groups in Tiger’s Bay, the New Lodge, Rathcoole, and at the Barron Hall in Newtonabbey, she’s discovered that working-class women are enable to cross sectarian frontiers and engage with each other in a way that’s inconceivable for their male peers for whom tribal allegiance weighs heavier. Next year, Eileen says, will be a particularly important time for community relations in Belfast, with the two centenary commemorations of the Somme and Easter 1916, which have the potential to drive wedges of suspicion and recrimination between communities.
Eileen thinks 2016 will be a real opportunity for the communities to reach a deeper understanding of each other’s cultures and traditions. She’s helping to collate a book where the women of New Lodge and Tiger’s Bay share their stories of positive collaboration and friendship in the face of fear and intimidation, entitled, Women’s Voices from behind the Barricades. Eileen, like all other social networks in Belfast, is getting her funding where she can at the moment. Community relations are taking place in a cashflow hiatus, just when community building has reached another critical juncture.
Chris O’Halloran, who took over the directorship of Forthspring Intercommunity Group in January, also presents me with a recent publication, Talking about the Troubles: an anthology of vivid anecdotes and vignettes collated by community co-ordinator Johnston Price and his team under the aegises of Forthspring’s “5 Decades Project”, which is determined to be a cross-community trove of testimony. Organised chronologically, it leads the reader through the decades of the Troubles to the Good Friday Agreement. Its coda of “we’re a bit happier”, while according well with the modest, bittersweet tone of the book, perhaps is still too optimistic.
Chris expressed his view that since the Good Friday Agreement, “community relations have been mainly stagnant,” but the fact that there was no major rioting at the Workman Avenue peace wall, next door to Forthspring on the Springfield Road, was seen as a minor mercy, given the large scale disturbances not far away in Woodvale. Chris may be realistic about the sectarian background, but he is not pessimistic. Forthspring runs three youth projects with half a million pounds worth of help from the Lottery Fund. There’s one inter-community youth group and one each for the Protestant and Catholic community, for kids who don’t feel ready to meet kids from ‘the other side’.
Truly transformative community relationships that can interfuse and remake each other require curiosity, courage and creativity. That’s why Chris is so full of praise for his artist in residence Fiona Lovely’s use of art, to help both kids and adults reimagine their environments beyond stereotypes and the toxic gestalt of the past. In particular, she likes to get people to make weird fashion, like the national dress of some brighter planet where people have never feared what others’ think, and flaunt themselves, wearing their hearts on their sleeves and sporting their memories in all their raggle-taggle splendour, patchworked into garments that are really mind goggling.
Deirdre Mackel, the arts manager at the Springfield Development Trust, is also keen to use art to explore memory and identity. She recently showed her own delicately crafted dresses, light as gossamer, snagged on barbed wire, fraught with childhood anxieties, at the Gerard Dillon Gallery at Cultúrlann. Deirdre expects artists to push boundaries in their own experience and take risks. This means that she’s extremely active in the community, facilitating art projects such as Labyrinth where kids from Whiterock, the Westrock Residents Association, and the Matt Talbot and Newhill Youth Clubs produced an alternative tourist guide to the Upper Springfield, chock-a-block with the secret knowledge of local kids and their worm’s eye view of their world.
Artists Charlotte Bosanquet, Deborah Malcomson and writer Brenda Murphy delivered the project. Bosanquet produced a book that is a witty reimagining of the communities, so should you want to wander the Shepherd’s Path, shake a leg in the Windy Gap or play with the Giant’s Foot, then Labyrinth is essential reading. Another project, Haiku, installed poems on billboards in prominent locations in West Belfast as well as in the markets, Lower Ormeau and Millfield.
In her most recent artistic collaboration, Deirdre facilitated a guerilla gardening project, where young and older people reclaimed an interface, anti-social hotspot and installed a pop-up garden, where ideas, passions and hopes come together for a moment, then are dismantled again. Deirde is enabling “creative conversations about heart-felt things”. She is “really optimistic about the power of art to create social change, both as a platform to address pressing social issues and to enhance how we see the world as an audience”.
Eileen, Chris, Fiona and Deirder work where the sectarian interface looms largest, but in the way they are transforming these spaces through art, community action and creative conversations, they are giving a kiss of life to the future. So while community relations may seem stuck in an impasse, bubbles of infections wit, joy and laughter are seething thick and fast through the old pot.
By Graham Higgin.
Originally published by CultureHUB, October 2015.