Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Riot Displacement in 1969Author(s): Michael PooleSource: Fortnight, No. 22 (Aug. 6 - 31, 1971), pp. 9-11Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25543639 .

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FORTNIGHT 9

Riot displacement in 1969

Residential displacement at times of sectarian riots is something with

which Belfast has been depressingly familiar for a century and a half, as Andrew Boyd has vividly documented in his account of "Holy

War in Belfast". For example, the Commissioners of Inquiry into the riots of 1857 reported that people

whose religion differed from that of the majority in a particular area,

were 'asked' to leave their homes; this 'request' to leave could have taken the form of a threat to burn the house or wreck the property.

Clearly, these are words which are just as appropriate to the troubles in 1969 as to those of 1857. It was this wave of intimidation engulfing the city in the summer of 1969 which led to the establishment of the Public

Protection Authority and which induced many people to abandon their homes. However, in addition, the actual violence and property damage during the mid-August riots themselves impelled large numbers to flee, either because their homes

were attacked or because they feared for their personal safety.

An analysis of these 1969

refugees was undertaken by myself, in co-operation with Miss Margaret

Day, and submitted to the Scarman

Tribunal, the aim of the analysis being to establish, in quantitative detail, which religious group most of the refugees belonged to and from which parts of the city most of them came.

There were many difficulties to be overcome in obtaining the

requisite information to undertake this analysis. Firstly, we had the

problem of achieving a satisfactory and consistent definition of a

displaced family; this arose partly because of the need to differentiate between the moves prompted by the troubles and those moves which

would have taken place anyway and

partly because of the need to

distinguish clearly permanent moves from those which were only temporary. We decided to restrict our work to the analysis of

permanent movement, since that

is clearly the type of displace

Michael Poole, lecturer in

Geography at Queen9s Uni

versity, summarises his re

cent submission to the Scar man Tribunal on the riots

of 1969.

ment which led to the most intense suffering. This difficulty of

defining what we meant by a

family permanently displaced by the troubles was overcome by

including in the analysis only those

families whose problems were so

severe that they were included in tho lists of refugees compiled by official central and local govern

ment sources. This self-imposed restriction to

information from the official sources also enabled us, we believe, to overcome a second problem

?

that of avoiding religious bias in

collecting lists of refugees. Various

unofficial lists were available, but each was largely restricted to one

religious group, whereas it was

hoped that the official records were free of such religious bias.

Having compiled this comprehen sive list of permanently displaced families, the third problem was to

identify the religious denomination of each refugee family, and this

was done by sending complete lists of the refugees from each parish to the Catholic clergy for them to

specify which families they knew for certain to be Catholic. All

refugees not positively identified as.

Catholic in this way were regarded as non-Catholic in the analysis.

Finally, in addition to classifying each displaced family on the basis of religious affiliation and of

geographical area, it was considered

necessary to classify also the total number of families in the city on

the basis of religion and of the same geographical areas. This is because it was regarded as rather

meaningless to state simply the absolute numbers of Catholics and non-Catholics displaced; instead, it

was considered more useful to

express the number of Catholic

refugees as a percentage of all Catholics for each area and to

express the number of non-Catholic

refugees in each area as a

percentage to all non-Catholics there. Since appropriate data was not available from the Population Census, the information on the

religious composition of each part of the city before the troubles was obtained by sending complete lists of streets in each parish to the Catholic clergy and asking them torecord the total number of Catholic families they knew to be resident in each street immediately before the disturbances. The number of non-Catholic households in each street was then obtained

by simply subtracting the

figure for Catholic houses from that for all houses. This method

yiedded a total of 28,616 Catholic households

- in Belfast County

Borough, 24.5 per cent of the estimated total of 116,995 house holds in the city.

The accompanying table presents the most salient of our findings for the County borough as a whole and for each of the six sectors into

which we divided the city for the purpose of analysis. It is imme

diately obvious from the first

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10 6?31 AUGUST, 1971

column of this table that the displacement which occurred was

heavily concentrated in the western and north-western sectors. Thus 3.9

per cent of all households in the west were displaced, and 2.5 per cent in the north-west; in no other sector was more than 1.0 per cent

displaced. In fact, 1,465 (80.5 per cent) of the total of 1,820 refugee families came from these two main sectors.

If we now differentiate between Catholic arid non-Catholic refugees, the second column of the table shows that, in the city as a whole, 82.7 per cent of all displaced households were Catholic. Moreover, this proportion varied very little

between sectors; the lowestCatholic

percentage was 75.9 per cent in

the north, while the highest was

88.9 per cent in the south-east.

Thus, in every single sector, at

least three quarters of the dis

placed households were Catholic. The severity of the displacement

suffered cannot really be appre ciated, however, until we relate the number of displaced households of

each religious group to the total number of Catholics and non

Catholics in the city. If, first of

all, we look at the situation in the

city as a whole, the third column

of the table shows that 5.3 per cent of all Catholic households

suffered displacement,while the next

column indicates that only 0.4 per cent of all non-Catholics were

displaced. However, it is clear that both

the Catholic percentage and the

non-Catholic percentage are subject to quite considerable variation from one part of the city to another. It

was in the west and north-west that the largest number of both

Catholics and non-Catholics were

displaced. In terms of absolute

numbers, it was, in fact, the west

that saw the largest number of

both religious groups expelled from

their homes, but, if we examine

the percentage of each group

displaced, we find that the highest

percentage of Catholic families, 11.8

per cent, was in the north-west.

This compares with 5.2 per cent in

the west. The proportion of

Catholic families displaced in the

other sectors was both lower and

subject to relatively little variation between sectors; it varied only from 3.3 per cent to 2.1 per cent.

What is interesting is that even

DATA IN RELEVANT PERCENTAGE FORM

Displaced Displaced Displaced Displaced households Catholic Catholic non-Catholic

as pc of households households households total as pc of as pc of as pc of

Sector households total total total displaced Catholic non-Catholic

households households households

North 0.9 75.9 2.4 0.3 North West 2.5 84.8 11.8 0.5 West 3.9 81.7 5.2 1.8

South 0.4 86.7 2.1 0.1 South East 0.4 88.9 3.1 ?

East 0.4__8A_313_0.1

Total 1.6 82-7 5.3 0.4

this lowest Catholic percentage

displaced, 2.1 per cent in the

south, was higher than the highest figure for the non-Catholic percen

tage displaced for any sector. And this is despite the fact that this highest non-Catholic figure, 1.8 per cent in the west, was itself far

higher than the corresponding non

Catholic figures in any other

sector, for elsewhere the highest such figure was a mere 0.5 per cent.

In attempting to understand this

pattern of residential displacement, it is perhaps most meaningful to

relate it to the pattern of religious

segregation in the city, but, to do

this, we need to analyse the data in much more geographical detail

than the six sectors we have used so far. For this purpose, the

County Borough was divided into

71 areas with approximately equal

populations. This more detailed

analysis shows that the Catholic

displacement was primarily from

three types of area. Firstly, it was

from areas on the northern

periphery of the dominantly Cathol

ic Falls wedge, from such streets

as Bombay Street, Cupar Street

Norfolk Street, Conway Street,

Percy Street, Dover Street, Beverley Street and Ardmoulin Avenue; there was a huge volume of

displacement from those sections of

these streets which were very

heavily Catholic. There was similar

movement, too, from certain

dominantly Catholic streets in

Ardoyne, especially Brookfield

Street and HookerStreet. Secondly, there was displacement from areas

in which Catholics were in a

large minority, as in parts of the Oldpark Road area and in Chief Street (off the Crumlin Road). And thirdly, there was

displacement from areas in which Catholics were in a very small

minority, as in the Shankill Road

area, in the Sandy Row-Donegall Road area and in the Albert Bridge Road area.

The areas which lost the highest percentage of non-Catholic families were those areas in the western section of the very dominantly Catholic Falls wedge. Thus it is

virtually true to say that only where non-Catholics formed a very small minority was there a signifi cant proportion of non-Catholic

movers. The only exception to this was the quite considerable non

Catholic movement out of Hooker

Street, which did have a fairly large non-Catholic minority.

Thus it is clear that the fact that the proportion of Catholic families which were displaced is

very much higher than the prop ortion of non-Catholic families

displaced can be partly accounted for by the nature of the religious distribution within the city. One

might expect displacement to be

primarily of people in a small

minority in any area, and there are clearly far larger areas of the

city in which Catholics form a

small minority than there are areas

in which . non-Catholics are in a

small minority. However, one must

add the qualification to this that

non-Catholics showed virtually no

tendency to move from areas in

which they were either in a large

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FORTNIGHT 11

minority or in a majority, whereas

Catholics moved in very consid

erable numbers both from areas in

which they were in large minority and even from areas where they formed a very large majority where those areas adjoined dominantly non-Catholic territory.

In conclusion, it might be

pertinent, in view of the criticism which has been made of the value of the Scarman Tribunal's work in

general, to suggest why regard analysis of the type described in

this article as having relevance and value. Clearly, if the findings are

valid, work of this kind has a

certain historic worth as an account of a major aspect of the political turmoil and human suffering which has afflicted Belfast and its

people over the last three years.

But, more important than this, it

might be suggested that an

appreciation of the extent and nature of the residential dis

placement problem ? both of who

the refugees were and of where

they came from ? permits a far

better understanding of the pola rised political and social attitudes

prevalent in the city at present. And, in addition, an appreciation of the nature of the displacement is

indispensable in understanding the

pattern and process of religious segregation in Belfast, for the

cataclysmic movement of the summer of 1969 will leave its

impact on the residential structure of the city for many years to come and will have a major effect on the viability of any possible integration policy in the future.

The fall of Magee?

A. J. McEvoy continues

the story of the decline

and fall of Magee and

suggests a remedy.

The vexed question of the future of Magee University College has been re-opened publicly within the past few weeks, this time in the context of a resolution of the Senate (the premier academic body) of the New University of Ulster, of

which Magee is now a part. It is

reported that this resolution calls for the termination of undergra duate teaching0 in the College. However, as is well known, this

dispute had deep roots, antedating the Senate of N.U.U., and indeed

N.U.U. itself; and the current resolution will be no more than another shot, albeit a powerful one, in the conflict. "Fortnight" has

already given the question some attention this year (April 30, 1971), but in the evolving situation a further look may be timely.

It is strange that, to date, there has been no public discussion of an overall plan of development for

Magee, and its relationship not only to the Coleraine campus of N.U.U.,

but also to the higher education scene throughout the province and in the wider context of Ireland,

Britain and Europe. In many ways the situation parallels that of the

city of Derry itself, vis-a-vis Belfast and Stormont; the smaller entity is

relatively remote, unsympathetic, and embarrassing, but just will not allow itself to be quietly forgotten. The impression also exists in

Magee that militance is the only effective policy, and those who hold this view can bring forward evidence in its support. For

example, there was the con frontation during the very first

academic year of the New Univers

ity (1968-69) over the status of the English Department. In the name of efficiency and the centralisation of staff and facilities, English studies at Magee were to follow

Mathematics and Geography into oblivion. It is evident, though, that no credible School of Humanities can exist in the, English-speaking world without the availability of courses in English; in Magee in

particular, where an "International School of Languages" was mooted, involving foreign students, such courses are indispensible. However, it was only after a massive protest in Coleraine, including a picket on the Monsanto chemical plant where the Council of the University was

meeting on that occasion, that the staff and students of Magee secured a reversal of the decision.

It may be asked at this point what change of policy on the part of N.U.U. could ameliorate the

situation, and a clear priority is to

display a concern and esteem for the Magee foundation. It did not

pass unnoticed, for example, that when "The Group", the Derry civic

organisation referred to in "For

tnight" (April 30, 1976) held its seminar" on the future of higher education in the north-west on

April 24th, this year, not one

senior administrative or academic

figure from the Coleraine Campus responded to an invitation by attending. Similarly, it is unthin kable to hold Senate or Council

meetings, or Graduation ceremonies, at Magee. As with the city of

Derry as a whole, a change of

attitude is the most necessary change of all.

This leaves the academic devel

opment to be considered. Magee must be seen as an academic resource focus for the Derry region, if it is to have any

meaning all all. Some indication of the rjotential is to be found in the success of the work of Mr. Rhodes, Director of Adult Education for

N.U.U., based at Magee. However, it is the policy of the University

Grants Committee in England to channel all funds for the support of external degree courses through the Open University, and Stormont has decided to conform despite the

merely consultative role played by the U.G.C. in Northern Ireland. It therefore follows that Mr. Rhodes is precluded from offering credit towards degrees or academic awards on the basis of the courses he offers. Further, when the Open

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