Loyalists are at a crossroads and the next turn could bring a descent into anarchy, Shankill Road residents tell Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor
Everyone on Belfast's Shankill Road saw last weekend's widespread eruption of violence coming. The only surprise was that it wasn't worse. Violence worked for Irish nationalists, say young loyalists, and can be made to pay off for the neglected people of the Shankill. Disaffected teenagers are too young to remember the Troubles, and some are only too ready to opt for the gun.
Ordinary residents, meanwhile, are watching their community come apart at the seams. Targeted, they say, from the outside by a duplicitous British government and by their Catholic neighbours, the community is wracked from the inside as well by the tensions linked to the vicious loyalist feud.
"Protestant areas are being discriminated against by the government, by the British-Irish government. You can't get jobs," claims Sam Robertson, a builder from the strongly loyalist Woodvale area of the Shankill. "My son has applied for jobs and at the bottom of the form it says 'we particularly welcome members of the Roman Catholic community'. That's as much as telling my lad he's no chance of getting a job."
Robertson knows about violence. Jameson Lockhart, a sub-contractor he employed, was shot dead in east Belfast last summer in the UVF-LVF feud. A former soccer coach, Robertson spent years trying to keep young lads off the streets and on the football pitch. But now their attitudes are hardening, and so are his.
"Every one of them wants to be a gunman, virtually every one of them, a gunman taking on the big bad world out there," says Robertson.
So the whole world is against them?
"Well, it is. It is," he says. "I spent many years . . . I'm well known for it and fell out with many local paramilitary leaders over it . . . I've been encouraging these boys to stay away from everything. Hand on heart, I don't think I could do that any more. Because these kids are being destroyed.
"My concern is that the young Protestant people here, our people, could become what the violent wing of Irish nationalism was for 30 years - murdering and bombing everything you can get your hands on. They could become the new Provos. It's starting to manifest itself now, I think."
Discrimination is official government policy, Robertson believes, and the problems faced by people such as his son, who each day has to get home from the Boys' Model School past the Ardoyne [the scene of the serious rioting on July 12th], are ignored and unreported.
"I live one and a half miles from my son's school and if my son wants to take the bus home from school he has to take a seven-mile detour because the Protestant kids are getting attacked at Ardoyne for the past 20 years," says Robertson. "Everybody knows of the Holy Cross situation, but how the Boys' Model School situation was never brought into the public domain astounds me.
"The 'Shankill Special' bus, as they call it, to take the boys home, is not allowed to come down the Shankill because it gets attacked by our Catholic neighbours every day of the week at Ardoyne shops there."
Robertson is not afraid to use official channels to seek redress - the PSNI, the Police Ombudsman, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission - but nothing seems to work.
"I am not a paramilitary, I'm not an Orangeman, I'm not in a band, I'm not in a unionist party," he says. "I'm just sick, sore and tired of this."
A short distance away on the Shankill Road, near the scene of the 1993 IRA bombing that killed nine locals, three residents meet to drink tea and discuss their community's turmoil. These are suspicious times and they speak on condition of anonymity.
"People on the outside looking in are thinking we are destroying ourselves as a community," says one. "Even living in the community, you ask yourself: 'Why are we doing this? Why is this happening?' If you look deep enough, it didn't just happen from last Saturday; it's a deep-rooted thing, festering over a long period of time."
Another resident links the community's malaise to a current social phenomenon. "There's a big media hype at the minute over these young people and teenagers, and they're frustrated, they're not being listened to and they're beginning to self-harm, they are starting to cut themselves. To me, all this street violence, that's self-harm. There is this phenomenon of self-harm.
"If psychiatrists were looking at a case, the first thing they'd say is: 'Low self-esteem, no confidence, frustration, anger, all pent up.' So the only way out is to damage themselves, because only then do they get the attention they cried out for.
"That's what this community is doing, they are crying out: 'For f**k's sake, will you listen to us?' "
There is consensus about when the problems started.
"You could say it started with the Good Friday agreement, where there is a perception here that Protestants gained nothing and the Catholics gained a lot," says another resident. "Most people here probably didn't read the agreement, they were led by the politicians. What wasn't explained to the people was that the agreement was trying to achieve equality for everyone. So . . . a certain amount of the agreement concentrated on the Catholic community because they hadn't been treated equally. But now the imbalance has gone the other way. It's perceived. I'm not saying that that's the way it is, but that's what the perception is by the ordinary people out there."
Another says: "The Whiterock parade [ last weekend], that was the turning point. I grew up on this road and I grew up with two parades, the Twelfth and the Whiterock parade. I didn't care about any other parade, but those were family fun days . . . And when they said 'no, this parade isn't going to happen', the Protestants then said, even the most moderate Protestant was saying, 'enough is enough'."
The forced re-routing of the band parade is seen as another defeat, as a cultural loss, and as a further erosion of identity. All three residents say they can explain the violence but that they won't excuse it.
"I don't agree with what took place on that road and I think it's a bloody disgrace what happened," says one. "But I can understand why. I don't approve, but I understand. Ninety-nine per cent of people on this road don't approve, but that just shows you the height of frustration and anger of not being listened to.
"Going back to the Holy Cross School situation, it was exactly the same thing. Only when they did what should never have happened, people started to listen. This is exactly the same scenario. People have to start listening. I want to live in peace with my Catholic neighbour, I don't want to fight with them."
Another explains the significance of the parades to the wider loyalist community. "I have a feel-good factor watching the bands going down this road. For me it's a festival event, a community event, and I've no connections with the Orange Order or the paramilitaries. I live here and parades are a part of my community and part of me. When you start to take that away, it's affecting me.
"Put yourself in the mindset of somebody living in one of the most deprived areas of Belfast: low education standards, unemployment that's unbelievable, a system that's letting you down. Over the last couple of years they've seen community funding being cut. Then the IRA says it's getting rid of the weapons and the war is over.
Within two days they hear announced that the Royal Irish Regiment is disbanded. That's like shutting the shipyard or Shorts. It's very, very suspicious. The army towers coming down within hours - that all adds to a very insecure community.
"People here feel they're on a conveyor belt, and it's not going up. People blocking the roads here - I'm not saying it's right or that I agree with it - you see, when that protest starts hitting the middle-class pocket, that's when you'll see things happening. It's no use when it's just the people on the Shankill Road suffering."
External pressures are compounded by tensions within the community too.
"There needs to be a place for ordinary people to give their views without being afraid," says one resident. "When you open your mouth on this road, you're always afraid of what's going to come back to your front door. That's what the feud has done.
"The feud has shattered this community in so many pieces. The person you have lived beside for 30 years, you may not be able to give your opinion because you're not sure what their opinion is. You don't want to be saying something radical to bring attention on yourself and getting your windows put in. People here, not only do they not trust another community, you can't even trust your own."
For Sam Robertson, the next step is all but inescapable. "We have to fight to defend ourselves," he says. "But we shouldn't be fighting on our own streets, we should be fighting on other people's streets - the centre of Belfast, Dublin if needs be.
"All this has been dropped on us from a great height, but it will manifest itself pretty quickly, I would think. I believe this trouble is like a tester. I believe the government are saying to themselves, 'the loyalists are burning their own areas, so we've nothing to worry about here', whereas if the people here said to themselves (and I'm not suggesting that they should), 'we'll burn part of Dublin down or whatever we have to do' . . .
"And then they could say to people, 'if you don't treat us fairly here, that's what we'll do'. That's what Irish nationalism did. Violence does pay. Irish nationalism benefited from it. Of course it pays. But unfortunately there's no other way out."
Unprompted, the three other residents concur.
"There's a view here that the other side went about getting what they wanted through violence, and they got what they want," explains one.
"What's that saying to us? No government says that they are going to give into that - but they do."