IRELAND Sixteen years of resistance in Belfast's Lower Falls THE DIVIS FLATS complex in nationalist West Belfast is like an extension of Long Kesh concentration camp. The prison itself, where thousands of nationalists have been held, is a huge assemblage of poorly built temporary structures outside Belfast, overlooked by guard towers and with military patrols on the ground and helicopters in the air swarming around it.
The Divis Flats are much the same. There is a high tower building in the center, with a British electronic surveillance post at the top. There are rows of flats, about three stories high, surrounding it, like cell blocks. The area is heavily patrolled by helicopters and British army units.
republican activists. The rise of the mass movement helped to isolate them.
Despite the complete uprooting of the old Lower Falls community, both the fight against the British prison housing for the nationalist population at large and the republican tradition continue. Within the Divis complex new forms of organization have grown up, and so this area remains the best organized part of the nationalist ghetto, although it is one of the most deprived, perhaps the most deprived.
You run into 16-, 17- and 18-yearold youths around the Sinn Fein advice center and the Divis Residents Association office who would have been babies and toddlers playing safely in the old Lower Falls, of which they have no memory. But the struggle is continuous. After all, English colonialism and British imperialism have completely transformed the face of Ireland several times without breaking the continuity of the resistance. In the spring of 1981, during the H-Block hunger strike, I spent an entire afternoon watching children from four to ten years old stone a patrol besieged in an entrance way to a courtyard of the flats. I remember in particular one of the children, a child of about four, with a ball in one hand and a rock in the other, trying to decide which he would rather throw.
Now there is a Sinn Fein advice center at the other side of the same courtyard. One of the released H-Block prisoners I interviewed in 1980, Fra McCann, is one of the leading community organizers. He was jailed in 1976 for possession of a firearm. He became one of the most prominent spokespersons for the H-Block prisoners, doing a number of international tours in 1980 and 1981. In the accompanying interview, I asked him about his road from the H-Blocks to organizing the fight in the Divis Flats. • Fra McCann (DR) International Viewpoint 24 March 1986
GERRY FOLEY.
Divis is a good example of the fact that the prison-house society that British imperialism has constructed in Northern Ireland is something more fundamental than even the massive repressive system, whose culmination and heart is the Long Kesh concentration camp.
The old Lower Falls Road community that the Divis complex replaced was the politically most conscious and tightly knit part of nationalist Belfast. Therefore, it was the best organized. And in the early period of the present struggle mass mobilizations and organization were centered there.
In 1970 only the central tower building had been erected. In the summer, it was gassed for the first time by the British army, who claimed that youths had been throwing stones at soldiers from the windows.
In the middle of the night (I think I remember that it was around 1:00 a.m.), a cortege of women marched through the neighborhood and brought out a huge demonstration of women to hold back the soldiers while the building was evacuated. This was also the area where the women's vigilante groups that organized in the wake of the internment roundups to counter military raids were centered.
The old Lower Falls consisted of rows of small brick houses, with two rooms down and two rooms up, with tiny backyards and outdoor toilets. It was the sort of housing that was built for mill workers in the nineteenth century.
Crime was virtually unknown. 24
There were practically no cars. Toddlers played securely in the middle of the streets. The houses were poorly furnished but carefully kept. It was a largely self-contained neighborhood with many small backroom shops.
In 1970 there was a fight to stop construction of the flats and prevent the demolition of the old neighborhood and the scattering of its people. It was unsuccessful. This project was part of a general housing policy.
In ten years, the British planners succeeded in shattering a close-knit community and replacing it with an urban jungle. The flats complex is almost unbelievably badly designed, unless its architects explicitly had a prison in mind. The walkways around the rows of flats are on a higher level than the dwellings, so that anyone walking by in the middle of the night is thunder over your head.
The construction is card-boardlike. It deteriorates rapidly, and you can hear the slightest noise in the next apartment. The outside walls are covered with graffiti, the stairwells strewn with garbage and rats and cockroaches have become plagues.
Vandalism and petty crime became quite extensive, although the pattern has not yet become well established; it has its ups and downs, depending on the level of the struggle, as well as other factors.
In the period immediately before the H-Block campaign, for example, in both Belfast and Derry antisocial gangs, known as the Hoods, developed and began to defy and attack