risks worth taking

If regeneration can be difficult, it’s twice as hard in Northern Ireland. Esther Harward hears how determined community initiatives are beginning to bear fruit

Who could forget those scenes on the Ardoyne Road in north Belfast that blazed onto our television screens just over a year ago? Parents frog-marching their daughters to the Catholic Holy Cross primary school past crowds of spitting, jeering loyalists - it seemed incredible that for some people this had become a daily fact of life.

To create a Northern Ireland where fear and hostility is the exception to the rule seems difficult, even impossible - particularly now, with the peace process suspended yet again and the path to devolution blocked for the fourth time in three years.

But as British ministers fly into Belfast to take over from the Northern Ireland Executive, community groups desperate for an end to the Troubles are pushing ahead with their own plans for peace.

One of these groups is Groundwork, known throughout the UK for harnessing the energies of local people to carry out environmental improvement projects. But how much can building parks and painting murals realistically contribute to the peace process?

The answer is that nowhere is Groundwork’s agenda more relevant than in Northern Ireland, where sectarian hatred is about contested space.

In east Belfast, some 3,500 Catholics live in an area called Short Strand, most of which is segregated from the surrounding 86,500 Protestants by high walls and narrow entrances. Demarcations between the two sides, called ‘peace lines’, are often where riots start. ‘Interfaces’ - neutral strips of land between Protestant and Catholic areas - are frequently neglected and targeted by sectarian graffiti.

The Green was an overgrown interface close to the riot zone that emerged after dark in east Belfast, May 2001. At the peak of the riots 500 police officers spent long summer nights trying to break up a 600-strong crowd; the fighting continued almost every night during the summer.

By day Groundwork fought to turn the land into a community park and football pitch. ‘We had to come and plead with the contractors to stay on site,’ says Mary McKee, executive director of Groundwork Northern Ireland. ‘It was really, really high risk and we thought, what are we doing here?’

The contractors stayed, and when the park was finished Groundwork made it known that no sectarian flags or graffiti would be allowed. ‘Since we cleaned up the park there has been no trouble,’ claims Ms McKee.

Groundwork owes part of its success in colonising The Green to the youth workers it took on after the riots. Sean Montgomery, who works in the Short Strand area, reckons he knows most local people and says local youths would, if necessary, form a clean-up crew to rid the area of graffiti.

Getting young people on board is vital because riots are often started by bored kids throwing stones over peace lines, followed by conflicting stories of who did what. ‘There is an ingredient of what you’d call recreational rioting, but then it moves up a gear - young kids don’t make petrol bombs,’ explains Ms McKee.

Mr Montgomery’s equivalent in the Protestant area is Patsy Laverty. Although they didn’t know each other during the May riots, they both worked as community volunteers, going out to the peace lines at night to persuade young people to go home. Since joining Groundwork they talk nearly every day.

One of their recent joint projects is aimed at a former flash point in Madrid Street, where the riots started. Mr Montgomery is organising a group of young people to paint a mural onto the iron gate erected after the riots to segregate housing - an image of what the street would look like if the gates weren’t there. Ms Laverty is organising the same activity on the other side. The groups will be able to see each other through a crack in the wall. Mr Montgomery would like to open the gates at the end of the day, just for a while, although he isn’t sure if this will be allowed.

Groundwork’s strategy of targeting young people aims to create positive experiences before prejudices grow hard. Ms Laverty has initiated another project to get a dozen teenagers to take part in an exchange with young Catholics from Donegal in the Republic, visiting each other once a month over the course of a year.

‘The [Belfast] boys in the group would have been the ones throwing stones - I went out and picked them off the street,’ she says. ‘They have never done cross-community work in their lives.’

One of Groundwork’s biggest funders is the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. In many ways, housing is key to building community cohesion. The neutral zones in Belfast tend to be filled by the middle classes, while low-income households are left with clearly marked Protestant and Catholic areas, which force them to make a statement about who they are. Many families would like to move out of the segregated areas but are held back by high house prices.

In Short Strand, unemployment stands at 45% and a nearby doctor’s surgery has banned Catholics since the riots. But Short Strand also has a 200-strong waiting list of people who feel they would be safer within its barbed-wire walls. Ms McKee believes Belfast needs more neutral areas but says this cannot be achieved by force. ‘It needs to be about choice, or it becomes a policing situation,’ she says.

Over to the west of Belfast in County Tyrone, an attempt to keep a river in the hands of the community has led to a groundbreaking friendship between Protestant and Catholic neighbours who have lived historically separate lives.

The two sides became acquainted in 1993 when the Coagh Community Action Group (CCAG) launched a bid to save a stretch of the Coagh river, which police officers wanted to turn into a private fishing club.

The river was already used by a community fishing club set up by CCAG, and to the people of Coagh - a small rural village with just 1,000 people and high unemployment - losing access to it seemed grossly unfair.

CCAG persuaded the farmer who owned the land along the river not to sell to the police. It set up a membership fee for the fishing club of £20 a year, using the money to buy two strimmers to clear the land, which had become harsh and inaccessible.

Out of the blue, the Ballinderry fishing club, which operated downstream in a predominately Catholic area and had no previous contact with the CCAG, offered the club a donation of £1,000 to help set up. The two groups met in a car park out of mutual distrust, where the CCAG tentatively accepted the money.

Since that day the relationship has grown, with both groups fishing together and becoming members of each other’s clubs. CCAG has received funds from the European Union Peace and Reconciliation Salmonid Fund to maintain and repair the riverbanks and re-sow native trees, a job that has given employment to local young people.

The launch of a website has helped turn the river into a tourist attraction, with visitors coming from as far away as Canada and Australia. This has led to a need for bed-and-breakfast accommodation. CCAG plans a new service to match people interested in fishing holidays with local anglers who will teach visitors or show them the best places to fish.

The project, which won a British Urban Regeneration Association award last year, has no affiliation with any religion, political group or authority. ‘We never ask who you are or what you are,’ states CCAG secretary John Hagan. ‘If you have an understanding of wildlife, come down to the river and tell us about it. If you are a strong person, come and help us use the strimmer.’

In County Down, the Kilcooley Community Forum has persuaded local Protestant paramilitaries to stop using a green space in front of the Kilcooley housing estate for night-time punishment beatings. Incredibly, the group has even convinced paramilitaries to work alongside other volunteers to clean up the ground and turn it into a park.

‘Some paramilitaries stopped because they also felt that Northern Ireland was moving towards normalisation and that they should be contributing,’ says Mark Gordon, the forum’s community development worker.

It’s a modest statement for a giant achievement on the part of the forum, which also picked up a 2002 Bura award. The park, with its new swings, slides and landscaped garden, has not seen any repeat of violence.

The peace process might be floundering among some of Northern Ireland’s political parties, but in small pockets of the province community groups are determined to keep it going.

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