Ghetto of hate where conflict is a way of life

Northern Ireland - Observer special

As the riot raged raged outside, Margaret Kell lit her last cigarette from the butt of the one before and moved her chair nearer the window to listen to the explosions and shouts from the street.

Kell lives in north Belfast, one of the most violent and divided communities in Northern Ireland, riddled with sectarian hatred and festering with abject poverty.

But she had an extra reason for keeping abreast of the battle that flared outside Holy Cross Girls' Primary School last Wednesday: she claims to have started it.

'I'll put my hands up; I'll admit it was me who, practically speaking, set all this off again,' Kell said. 'At the time, I had no idea what I was getting into, but if it hadn't been me who snapped, it would have been someone else: there has been a fight brewing here since last Monday, it just happened to be me who cracked.'

Last week's explosion of violence around the Catholic school that straddles a sectarian divide in the heart of north Belfast shocked those who assumed that last November's protests had bled the area of its tension.

Yet, far from reducing in scale and intensity, last week's riot spread from school to school in vicious attacks and retaliations which saw children and teachers subjected to extreme physical and verbal abuse.

While outsiders expressed surprise and disappointment, those living inside the area's mosaic of sectarian strongholds were grimly resigned to the return of the violence.

North Belfast's brief window of peace was violently shut last Wednesday afternoon in a winding side street just off the Ardoyne Road, a highway which turns from being militantly republican in the North into a loyalist stronghold in the South as it nears Holy Cross school.

It was just before the children were to be released from school when, according to Kell, a Protestant, a crowd of up to 100 republican men began to gather at the bottom of Hesketh Road, where the taxi driver Trevor Kell, her brother-in-law, was shot dead in December 1999.

His murder sparked a couple of high-profile retaliatory shootings. In the past year a telegraph pole halfway up the road has become both a memorial to the murdered man and a testament to how little the peace process has assuaged the bitter heart of north Belfast.

Last week Trevor Kell's sister-in-law watched as a man detached himself from the crowd and slowly walked up towards the pole where, she claims, he tore off the central wreath and ripped it to shreds. 'I flew down that street like a woman possessed and asked him why he had done that,' she said. 'He just laughed, so I punched him hard in the face: I really meant to hurt him.'

It was the sign the crowd had been waiting for: as they swarmed towards her, Kell says, the police swooped and pushed her into an armoured Land Rover. 'I firmly believe the police saved my life,' she said. 'I sat in that van terrified out of my mind: the crowd outside pelted the van with paving stones and rocked it from side to side so violently I thought it was going to be knocked right over.

'It was the worst moment of my life, without a doubt. I thought I was going to die. The realisation of what I'd done was coming to me, and all I wanted was to be back at home before it all happened, sitting safe with a cup of coffee.'

Kell was charged with assault and is now waiting to see whether the unidentified man presses the charge and takes her to court.

Not surprisingly, Kell's version of events is vehemently denied by her Catholic neighbours. They favour other versions of the flashpoint for the violence, such as a story that two mothers from either side of the religious divide refused to give way to each other on the pavement, or that a Catholic mother was attacked by three Protestant men.

Some of her Protestant friends prefer the story of the Protestant woman whose pram was jostled by a group of Catholic mothers on their way up to the school.

Whatever the truth, the issue now is whether these latest riots prove that north Belfast is condemned to an endless cycle of violence, or whether the communities still have any chance of giving their children a future free from hate.

'You have to look at north Belfast in a different context to the rest of the country,' said Ulster Unionist city councillor Christopher McGimpsey. 'It's a ghetto within a ghetto; a pit of deprivation, where if you sneeze in the wrong way you'll get a knife in your back.'

Unemployment, violence, bitter sectarian hatred and prison are the sum of most people's lives in north Belfast: the lavish inward investment that has transformed the rest of the city into a chic collec tion of fashionable bars and gleaming leisure complexes has not reached its streets, predominantly a rubbish-strewn morass of cheap shops, burnt-out cars and crumbling houses.

There is also a perception that it is the republican community that has gained most from the peace process, which has left Protestants in the cold and without effective political leadership. The loyalist paramilitaries are straining at the leash.

'North Belfast is a microcosm of the whole Troubles as it was 20 years ago,' said Professor Peter Shirlow of the University of Ulster. He points out how the area's tightly knit rival strongholds have bred generations programmed to hate their neighbours.

A study Shirlow made of the area found that sectarian hatred had reached unprecedented levels. 'While the rest of Northern Ireland is growing up and away from this hatred, the signs I see in northern Belfast are that it's discovering a new extreme of sectarianism that is beyond any political control.'

Shirlow is not alone in questioning whether there is any solution to its problems. Father Aidan Troy, chairman of the school governors, is pessimistic. 'We haven't just gone back to square one, we've gone back further than that in the past week,' he said.

'Square one was when Holy Cross was the only school being attacked and it was only attacked at certain times. That was horrific enough, but last week's rioting had a new edge: children are at risk in every school. Where on earth can we go from here?'

• UK news
• The Observer
• Northern Ireland
• Belfast

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK2bZH9xfJFooZqmX2aAcLrOq6uhnaKjtrOxy5qlnQ%3D%3D