The Belfast Telegraph / Sunday Life today reports on what it describes as “sectarian attacks on new social housing in interface area”. That is the local jargon for where Catholics and Protestants live adjacent to each other. “The area is close to a notorious interface that was the scene for intense violence during the Troubles” is how the unnamed Sunday Life reporter describes it. It is where I grew up, until we were forced out by UDA murderers, and the horrible, depressing thing is that the history of fifty years ago is repeating itself in 2025 in Alloa Street and Annalee Street, off Manor Street. Here is a little bit of it.

Back when it was possible for a bus driver to support five kids, run a second hand car and have a week or two summer holiday by the coast, my father bought a house in Manor Street. At that time, it was a mixed area, becoming more Protestant as you moved towards the Shankill. I’d picked up the basics of chess at primary school, and a neighbour called Mr Wright would let me win games when I played him in his family’s living room which had a portrait of the English queen and a large, furled union jack which was hung out in July. It is a long time ago, but I definitely remember that the Catholic kids were made welcome at the bonfires.

The  Shankill Road was a relatively prosperous, bustling shopping destination, an alternative to the city centre. Things changed in the early 70s. The UDA took to building barricades and there were gun battles, if memory serves involving the loyalists and British army. The old houses, which have mostly been demolished, had three floors and I decided it would be fun to join in with my toy gun on one occasion from a third floor window. My father snatched it from me and smashed it with a hammer, an act which in retrospect doesn’t seem as mean as it did at the time.

If we are to believe the Sunday Life report, the reason for the attacks on recently arrived families is “The UDA wants them out because they’re Catholic.” So, after almost exactly half a century almost nothing has changed in Manor Street. The UDA are still terrorising people out of the area.

There are some differences.

Manor Street used to have a few shops. Gardeners was run by an old lady and her son. He’d been taken prisoner by the Japanese in World War Two and all his fingernails had been pulled out. A man called Hughes owned a small corner shop in which my mother sometimes worked. One night in October 1976 the UDA walked in and shot at the three women in the shop. Sixteen year old Anne Magee was struck in the head and died a couple of weeks later in hospital; Mrs McKenna was also shot in the head and lost an eye and either the gun jammed or she hid under the counter, but my mother survived. I remember absolutely nothing from the moment she ran screaming into our house about twenty yards from the shop until we moved into a new home in West Belfast on an estate which was purpose built for people who’d been intimidated out of other parts of the city. Apparently, my brothers and I stayed with some relatives and my mother and sisters stayed with others. That period is a mental blank.

My mother never once spoke about that evening until the end of her life when she relived it for weeks when she had dementia.

The dead weight of history

It is customary with things like this to say I would like to meet the men who did it, find out their motives and reconcile with them. I have no interest in that sort of sentimentality. They were the armed wing of a reactionary, sectarian bunch of gangsters and I have no interest in them as individuals.

What does concern me is that fifty years on a 63 year old convicted criminal is recruiting more young men into a tradition of sectarianism and intimidation, almost certainly reminiscing about the glory days of the Shankill Butchers and when Taigs stayed in at night because of fear of the UDA. He might even tell them about how loyal sons of Ulster killed a girl and nearly killed two Catholic women. He is of that vintage.

Much of Manor Street has been rebuilt now. That is just as well. The old houses could have been used as walk in fridges in the winter if you weren’t in the room where the coal fire was. Hughes’ shop has gone too, and the street is effectively partitioned. I returned to it a couple of years ago and carried on towards the Shankill. You can really feel that the area controlled by the UDA drug gangs and extortionists is having the life sucked out of it.

After fifty years the UDA aren’t sending men into shops to shoot women because they are Catholic. These days they smash the windows of their home with the kids inside and organise to stand outside chanting “cheerio, cheerio” and “get to f**k”.

If ever a city is suffocated by the weight of its history, it is Belfast. What makes it worse is that in loyalist areas young men are being offered nothing other than drug dealing and sectarian violence by the old thugs who have wasted a lifetime doing it. However, what might shock people unfamiliar with how things work in the north of Ireland is that there is a whole industry funded by the British and Irish governments to keep these people in business.