No ceasefire in a cultural battleground

"I was born in Ballymurphy! I was born in Ballymurphy! I was born in Ballymurphy! I was b-b-b ..." It's Springsteen a la West Belfast's Triple F.M., and I am rocking down the Falls Road, driving with a native son and new friend.

"Unionists are complaining that it's sectarian and bigoted, and it's not. They're just upset because Ballymurphy is being mentioned on the radio." It is, he says, the first time accents like his are being heard, Belfast wide, on the airwaves.

Triple F.M. is the biggest innovation at this year's West Belfast Community Festival (Feile an Phobail). Based in the new Springvale Training Centre, it cost £5,000 to set up the festival's radio station for the week, with sponsorship coming from many sources, and now advertising is pouring in. This is public access radio in its purest form, and nationalist West Belfast is rejoicing.

Ulster Unionist councillor John Rodgers, a member of Belfast City Council's community services sub committee was claiming by last weekend that people in the Protestant areas of West Belfast were complaining that the music on Triple F.M. was "blatantly sectarian", and was "churning out sectarian songs."

The organisers are, in fact, quite happy to open the airwaves to Unionist West Belfast, but in reality, this is just not going to happen. The West Belfast Festival is a true community festival, based in the nationalist areas of West Belfast, and yes, its ethos is "republican", as interpreted by Sinn Fein, because that is the majority ethos of those communities.

Republicanism is far from being the people's only concern: "Congratulations to Bernie for finding herself a man, after years of trying", reads one young girl from a pile of requests. Then Fra Coogan, a natural broadcaster with a rich West Belfast voice, does an item on Kathleen Largey, singer and republican, who died in the 1980s; prohibited from singing republican songs at a concert in the US, but she told the organiser who was writing her pay cheque: "Make it out to the Irish Republican Army."

The real question for any pacifist visitor to the festival is not "How many good shows did I see?", but "Does the confidence building which this festival achieves add to, or take away from, the threat of violence? Feile an Phobail began nine years ago, as an attempt to bring peace to troubled communities around August 9th, which is the anniversary of internment: "We wanted to still mark the anniversary of internment, but to move away from the violent backdrop, and involve people in a more positive way, says Kate Pickering, the new director of the festival.

"The politics have to be there, it's part of the community," says Angela Feeney, soprano with the Munich Opera and a daughter of West Belfast. Eighteen years ago, the people of her area got together to raise money to send her to study in Germany. She vowed that if she ever got anywhere, she'd give something back, and last year she set up the West Belfast Classical Bursary, open to any young musician born in Ireland: this year's winners of the bursary were Marie Hegarty, a soprano from Clare, Laurence Quigg, a trombonist from Derry, and Anthony Kearns a tenor from Dublin. For Feile, she, programmed a concert of near winners.

"Politics is the only way these people have been heard, so it has to be there," she says. "These people are just saying their feelings. They just have to watch other people's feelings too."

"You can't just stop the violence and put, nothing in its place," says Eddie Donnelly of the Ardoyne Fleadh, which, with the New Lodge Fleadh, runs concurrently with Feile an Phobail. The fleadh, run by republicans and non republicans together, has helped to heal the community: "The only way people are going to move forward is by creating confidence in themselves," says Donnelly. "I'd say we'd be confident enough now to sit down and talk to anyone."

"Meon an Phobail A Thogail Trid an Chultuir", (Building the identity of the people through culture), reads the Ardoyne mural, picturing the Queen of the Tuatha De Dannan. Most propagandist art is crude, but a Famine mural off the Falls stops me in my tracks. Stylised figures, as if descended from Bruegel and German wood cuts, taking in contemporary Scottish figurative painting on the way; a subtle Famine message, with starving women, and a Queen in a ball gown with a healthy sheaf of wheat in her hand.

This is the work of Rosie McGurran, whose images of Belfast women hang from the roof of Westwood Shopping Centre: from First Communion, to playing with a skeletal tree of hope against a background of burning cars, to sitting squat and miserable, being prinked for "The Dancing Competition", to hanging like an angel puppet, pouring cream in hand, to ascending with wings, against Virgin blue, with the clothesline being lost in the background. These are powerful images of working class women's lives, all the more so for the shopping centre setting, with the hackneyed images of women peddled by a photographic shop right beside them.

It is a far cry from the sentimental imagery of the prisoners crafts at the New Lodge Fleadh. The faces of the hunger strikers stared out from the wall, and on the table sat a collection of work using traditional Celtic and early Christian symbols - wooden crosses, one with a Virgin Mary trapped behind blue glass in its body, one with masked gunmen saluting on either side the "Third Batalion, Belfast Brigade".

THE backdrop for Just A Prisoner's Wife, a play developed by republican prisoners' wives with Pam Brighton, who directs for Dubbeljoint, was a smiling Bobby Sands, the logo of An Poblacht and the message: "Join Sinn Fein." Marie Jones, the playwright whose play Stones In His Pockets, opened last night at the same Whiterock Building venue, stood in for a member of the cast of Just A Prisoner's Wife who was ill. It is set on a bus bringing the women to visit their men in "prison, mostly old hands, but one a young woman who didn't know her husband was "involved".

These women, described as "the backbone of the struggle", never question the cause and never mention the women just up the street - Protestant women - making the same trip, and the undiluted republican message is wearing.

This message is to a large degree that of the festival, but it is not openly articulated; foreign groups coming in are taught to believe that the festival's peace message is unconditional. The French Caravane des Quartiers group, who are living in a Portakabin behind the tent in the Lamh Dhearg GAA Club grounds where they play, believe in "staging events in problematic areas of Europe", says Guillaume Trouve of a rock band which came with them called Six Foot Cake. "The goal of the festival appealed to us," he says. "A people's festival for bringing peace."

The Scottish Little Green Monkeys band, played a storming gig at Mc Enaney's, Andersonstown, with their traditional weddings band sound of accordion (Audrey Morrison), fiddle (Mhairi O'Neil), singer/songwriter (Andy Lang), bass (Roy Waterston) and drums (Steve Rhind). Strong percussion makes the band sound like a dance band from anywhere from Tulla to Toulouse to Tehran, and the shiver of magnificent fiddle and accordion against this brings unabashed drama to the folk fusion music. They were firmly told, says O'Neil, that the festival was "apolitical", but she wondered did their Scottishness, "fellow Celts, and all that" have something to do with the invitation.

Shouldn't the fact that republicanism runs right through this community festival be openly stated? It should still be tolerated, on the basis that self expression is better than silence. But only if the right, to disagree fundamentally with its ethos is also tolerated, and the threat I received from one drunken man, "not to write anything negative about us", is ignored, even in these dark, tense days.