Doors close on proud neighbourhood

Every year, religiously, the people of Clonard painted their houses for the June Novena at the monastery. Streets were decked out in blue-and-white bunting and a banner emblazoned with Ave Maria was suspended over the Springfield Road end of each street to welcome thousands of devout Catholics from all over Belfast and beyond.

The gates of Clonard Monastery have been framed by the terraced kitchen houses of Oranmore Street since these houses were built at the turn-of-the-century. They stood back-to back with similar two-storey terraces on Bantry Street and Dunmore Street, separated only by narrow lanes known in Belfast as entries.

The houses in Clonard were all built by private developers on what had been the estate of one of the city's mill-owners. His fine bow-fronted early Victorian house, with an Ionic portico, still stands at the end of the street, opposite the monastery that was built and paid for by this once tightly-knit, proud working-class community.

The peace line between the Falls and the Shankill, a high, solid barrier topped with barbed wire, lies just beyond Clonard Monastery, to the rear of Bombay Street. The houses there were built in the early 1970s, after the street was almost burned out in a loyalist assault on one of the darkest nights of the Troubles in August 1969.

Gerard McCartney (43), who has lived on Oranmore Street all his life, remembers doing barricade duty as a schoolboy in the months that followed. The barricade was erected at the end of the street and manned 24 hours a day in four-hour shifts, with the nuns in the convent attached to Clonard making soup and sandwiches for them.

Clonard at that time was a community worth defending. Everybody knew everybody else. Front doors were always open to neighbours dropping in for tea and a chat, or children calling around to see friends - though at night they had to be sealed shut by steel drop-bars, as a safeguard against loyalists.

The area had its own corner shop and its neighbourhood pub, the Blackstaff, at the Springfield Road junction. It was blown up in the early 1970s and replaced by a quite nondescript building that for years had a row of concrete tubs outside it. But then, there was always Annie McGlinchey's Bar near the other end of the street.

Officially, Annie ran an off-licence, but she turned it into a shebeen, serving pint bottles of stout and large whiskeys to the locals, first in her kitchen and then in her upstairs parlour; the regulars all had their own chairs, which nobody else would dare to sit in. If the police ever called, she would say she was just having a drink with friends.

Even as late as the 1970s, this living, breathing version of Coronation Street had its door-to-door traders. There was the stick man who sold kindling from his cart, the fish man who called every Friday, and two bread men - one of whom came with fresh baps in the morning while the other called later with sliced pans and Bellview biscuits.

The lemonade man was one of the great characters of Clonard - Gerard's father, the late Joe McCartney. When he was 16, he scored his name and the year 1929 on one of the red bricks beside the door of a friend's house, No.13 Oranmore Street. Years later, after Joe married Maureen Simpson, this was the house they moved into.

It was not easy to raise a family of two sons and two daughters in a two-bedroom house with a tiny kitchen, an outside toilet and a small yard with whitewashed walls. Later on, after one of Gerard's sisters started going out with an electrician, "we were among the first people around here to have a light in the outside toilet".

Their Auntie Peggy lived around the corner in Clonard Gardens, a tree-lined street of more commodious parlour houses, which were a cut above the kitchen houses of Oranmore Street. But that wasn't enough to save them; within the past few years, the houses and the trees have gone in the interest of comprehensive redevelopment.

"Our neighbours are moving, never to be seen again in this area," said Mr Gerard McCartney, who works as a plumber. "The spirit and comradeship within the area among people who grew up together and went to school together, have been broken not by the loyalists or the British army but by the (Northern Ireland) Housing Executive."

Though more than 70 per cent of the people in Clonard had bought their homes from landlords by the mid-1980s and many availed of grants to build two-storey extensions in their yards, the Housing Executive "vested" the entire area in 1994 and compulsorily acquired every house at prices ranging from u £17,000 to u £19,000.

Since then, entire streets have disappeared, to be replaced by suburban housing with front and back gardens. Other streets are being dismantled house-by-house. Less than half the houses on Oranmore Street are still occupied, amid derelict sites lined with boulders and vacant houses with doors and windows blocked up. Nobody bothers to paint their houses for the Novena anymore because there's not much point; Oranmore Street, once so lively and proud, has been turned into Desolation Row.

"Within the past four years, the Housing Executive has totally ruined the area and the people are scattered all over the place, from one end of West Belfast to the other," Mr Gerard McCartney said. "There are actually people who call me a traitor because we're moving to Cluain Mor, less than half a mile away, and not staying in Clonard."

Not that there was much of an option. "Originally, they told everyone that they would get new houses in this area, but they backed out of that commitment. They've run roughshod over the local people and because so many have been moved out in this phased redevelopment, they haven't had half the numbers left to re-house." So it's not just the physical fabric that has being destroyed, but the community as well. "One neighbour who moved here from Kashmir Road when they were knocking it down said she never lived in a happier house. Now she's been re-housed somewhere else and is being treated for depression because she wants back to Oranmore Street."

Older people, in particular, have found it hard to cope with the stress of it all. "A lot of them died because of it. Once they got the money for their houses, they lost all their social welfare benefits because they had a lump sum of money in the bank. Now they're going to be paying u £66 a week in rent for a house, when they previously owned one."

Though tinged with sadness over the loss of Oranmore Street, the McCartneys are looking forward to moving into their new three-storey, four-bedroom house in Cluain Mor, which they will rent from the Oaklee Housing Association. It has gardens to the front and rear, as well as off-street parking.

Those who have already moved there are clearly taking pride in their new homes. Some of the houses have acquired PVC porticos, new doors with inset fanlights, carriage lamps, trellises and a whole range of garden furniture, including colourful gnomes, romantic statuary and pinwheel plastic flowers that twirl around in the breeze.

The layout of Cluain Mor is quintessentially suburban, with mainly two-storey houses clad in polychromatic brick set back from sweeping curved roads. Even in Clonard, redevelopment shows scant regard for the established street pattern; its streets, too, are being replaced by suburban-style estates, obliterating mental maps of the area.

The old street names are being retained, but the new roads read as changelings for the real thing. It is impossible to imagine a shebeen such as Annie McGlinchey's surviving in this new dispensation; indeed, it has already been replaced by a pair of bungalows as part of a sheltered housing scheme for old people, known in Belfast as a fold.

All that will survive of Oranmore Street are the photographs. One of the residents, Mr Malachy Dickey, has taken thousands of photographs over the years of people chatting on doorsteps, children playing in the street and houses being painted for the Novena of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. For the street itself will soon be gone.

Some of Mr Dickey's photographs are framed on the panelled walls of the Blackstaff pub along with pictures of local GAA teams and the words of Amhran na bhFiann, in English and Irish. In time, they will become a quaint recollection of bygone years until there is nobody left living who remembers what Clonard was really like.

Long before that, the Housing Executive will probably have achieved its real agenda here, which is to create a great swathe of private housing on both sides of the peace line containing two sets of owner-occupiers "who will stabilise the area for us", as one official puts it, when this grim and forbidding "interface" finally comes down.

And in the comfort of their new suburban-style homes, no doubt they will all tune in to Coronation Street.