Ex-POWs empower themselves and a community
Dealing with the costs of conflict in North Belfast
BY ROISIN DE ROSA (roisinderosa@hotmail.com)
``Sure there is no housing in North Belfast. What there is needs to be refurbished. There are even outside toilets in the backs. Your average stay in hostel accommodation, waiting for housing, is two years. Imagine. Private landlords are buying up the housing and that's put rents up to £75 or £100 a week.'' Agnes Fraser works in welfare rights in Tar Isteach in the New Lodge area of Belfast, one of four North Belfast groups operating under the umbrella of Coiste na nIarchimí. ``Jobs? Well there are jobs, but the government has made it impossible to go to work. They refuse to pay relatives to mind the kids. You just can't afford to lose your benefits.''
``They've built an Advance Technology Factory, across the peace line between New Lodge and Tigers Bay. It's empty. It's just widening the peace line corridor.''
``There is no space, not even a plan to rebuild. There is no funding. This is our inequality.''
``We need space for development. We need housing, good quality rebuild programmes. The Housing Executive doesn't want to get involved. They just want to work within the Ôpeace lines'. Human Rights Commissioner Bryce Dixon only last week said he didn't think this was an equality issue. Doesn't he?'' asks Paul O'Neill, co-ordinator of An Loiste Uir, another republican former prisoners' group.
Costs of the conflict
This almost pre-war housing, appalling social and economic deprivation, is just a part of the heavy cost of the conflict born by the New Lodge/Newington district. Over the 30 years, over 100 people from the area have been killed and 500 imprisoned. Within a square mile radius of this area, some 650 people have been killed. Of the 566 council wards across the Six Counties, the New Lodge is ranked second highest in degree of deprivation.
d of course the political prisoner community has faced additional disadvantage. Results of their own research show 66% economically inactive, 42% registered unemployed, where the North Belfast average is 9.2%. These are not just bare statistics. They indicate factors that go deep into the community.
Recently, the ex-prisoner community has researched the effects of long term imprisonment upon families and ex-prisoners themselves. The results, published in a recently launched report, ``The State They Are In'', provides a startling series of statistics and comments outlining the human costs of the conflict in terms of personal lives.
The research reports 58% of ex-prisoners in poor health, scarcely surprising given the conditions so many prisoners endured for so long, especially in the H-Blocks and Armagh, and 75% emotionally distressed. Few report that imprisonment has strengthened their relationships with their families. The costs of the conflict to fathers, wives, partners, and children have been heavy, though some ex-prisoners, as this report points out, still find it hard to recognise the effects of imprisonment, and to use, and help to build, the support structures which ex-prisoners are themselves developing to address these consequences of deprivation within the whole community itself.
The facility which the Coiste groups in North Belfast have provided to at least 2,000 people in the community is playing a major role.
Confronting disadvantage
The report concludes: ``It is evident that negative consequences of imprisonment must be challenged in order that individuals can place faith in peace building and be a part of the structuring of a new society. Without doubt, solving the problems faced by ex-prisoners and their families is decisive in building capacity in the community.''
As Paul O'Neill said when launching this report and another evaluation study of the amazing work done by the four North Belfast groups over the last couple of years, ``Not only are we an integral part of those communities, the New Lodge, the Bone, Ardoyne, and similar communities throughout the length and breadth of this society, but we are committed to the betterment and wellbeing of those communities... we are committed to healing the wounds that are still raw within those communities, for it is crucial that we do so, if we are ever to progress towards a new society that is just.'' Those wounds are personal within the families, just as they are social and economic within the community.
Coiste skilling the community
This second report, Republican Ex-Prisoner Groups in North Belfast, opens a new horizon. The report, which is compiled by the Social Exclusion Research Unit, based in University of Ulster by Dr. Pete Shirlow, summarises some of the achievements of Tar Isteach, An Loiste Uir, Amach agus Isteach and Marrowbone ex-prisoner group, all working within the context of North Belfast, all in different ways involved in ``capacity building'' in the one broad extended community.
Two years ago, the An Loiste Uir Project took on development of accredited training and education courses to develop knowledge, skills and employment prospects. The courses included Open University degree, basic teaching skills, counselling, community restorative justice training of trainers, mediation skills, training on child protection, basic listening skills, community reconciliation skills, disability awareness training, women in management, facilitation training, teen suicide prevention training, and a welter of training and teacher training courses in information/computer technology, and computer maintenance and building.
These are by no means mere Mickey Mouse training projects, an excuse to take ex-prisoners off the dole. They are the very skills needed to empower a whole community, not just republican ex-prisoners. They embody a politics of listening to people, involving them, of developing skills and knowledge for all, not just a few, of dealing with social and personal problems arising out of the social disadvantage and inequality which have been at the heart of the conflict over 30 years.
Community involvement
The training courses have been a basis of work placements, which have seen the involvement of the wide ex-prisoner community in numerous economic and social projects within the area, as shadow managers, IT tutors, as workers in a local publications and photography company, in mediation work, interface peace work, work as youth development workers, as managers of community restorative justice projects, as development workers in a local primary school, organising community festivals.
``The implications for the project of building political strength in the struggle for equality and democracy in our society, are immense,'' says Tommy Quigley, co-ordinator of Tar Isteach. ``We are engaged, as we always have been, in what is fundamentally a social struggle.''
Youth involvement
It has led, for instance, to Joe Doherty's work with young people. ``It's a long term project, it's door to door, building up trust with young people, creating facilities they need and want, enabling them to take decisions, or to recognise the effects of their often anti-social activity on the community, which itself is the direct result of deprivation, and their exclusion from that community,'' he explains. ``It's to recognise that they too are a part of this community - Here is the damage you are doing to other people, I just leave it up to you.'' This amazing man, who after his years of imprisonment in Ireland and America, has the skills to talk to, listen to the many hundreds of young people in the community and to involve them in it. ``It is about talking to young people. If it means sitting down, playing snakes and ladders or whatever, with a young person, then that is OK. The blow-ins, the people who don't come from this community, they can't do this.''
Exciting adventure
Out of the Coiste groups have come other projects to address the costs of the conflict. There is a project to build a Hotel or B&B and a Conference Centre to contribute to the physical and economic regeneration of the area.
All four Coiste groups are also involved in establishing a cooperative building company, and this comes out of the self-build project and re-skilling project in Amach agus Isteach, which aims to provide jobs, apprenticeships, self-sustaining capacity, and along the way, develop the physical structure of the community and its much needed housing at affordable prices.
The Coiste groups interlink in their projects, developing politics to address inequality in society. All the projects are above all about developing and empowering a community, ``to take what they would not give'', namely power - be it through personal, social, economic, cultural, democratic means of Ôempowerment'. It is an exciting adventure, encompassing an entire community which has contributed so much to the struggle for freedom.
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The State We Are In
``The State We Are In'' addresses the personal costs to the protagonists and their families who have been involved in 30 years of conflict. The report was drawn up by Pete Shriver of the University of Ulster and is based on a survey of ex-prisoners and their families. It deals with general health issues, employment and qualifications, dealing with stress and trauma, career guidance, training and further education.
It is an amazing report. Anonymously it tells the hidden story of some of the most complex social economic and personal effects that long term imprisonment has had on both ex-prisoners their families and especially their children.
The report was launched alongside a second report on the work of ex-prisoner Coiste groups in the North Belfast area and touches on the colossal involvement of ex-prisoner groups not only in addressing the needs of ex-prisoner community, but more importantly in the redevelopment through community building of a whole broad area.
The following testimonies are from the report:
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``It's hard on women who have been in prison. You see when they get out nobody pats them on the back or tells them they're proud of them. People think women who are involved are odd. Most people think that only men should be fighting - not women.''
``All that strip-searching and all. I know one girl who still cleans her house every day from top to bottom. You see it's the way she was strip searched. She feels dirty or something.''
``I'm not criticising ex-prisoners. But you see this emotional well-being thing. There is a big problem with this. You see us women had to keep going. We had kids to feed, jobs to hold onto and all the everyday problems. Then it was up and down to Long Kesh and telling the men things at home were fine and all. When they weren't. You see most of us had to just keep going so we had no time to be distressed. Then he comes home, he has lost the friendships he had inside. He has a lot of issues but he can't talk to us about them because he has always had his fellow prisoners as his confidants. Those are the people he can relate to. So you think yourself there is no point in asking him what's up or why he's upset because he won't tell you. He just will say ÔYou don't understand'.''
``You get some fellas who lost out on their 20s. So they come out and they want to be 20 again. Like drinking, chasing women and having no responsibility. But if they're married their partners want them to come home and start helping. That is one of the biggest tensions you got.''
``You are so glad he is back and then all hell breaks loose. The kids don't get on with him. The thrill of him being back wears off. But you have to work at it. All the sorrow and sadness is there everyday. But you have to work and work at it. It is like a different relationship.''
``When my husband got out our house was like a battlefield between him and the kids. Then one night our eldest girl came down in a miniskirt and she had done her hair all spiky. He hit the roof and told her to put on a proper dress... I got up and got myself a piece of card. It was massive and I wrote on it that I wouldn't be back until the rowing stopped. When I came back they were all mates and that was the end of the rowing. I think they all needed the shock of my leaving to make them understand that I couldn't take any more.''
``You would always look your best when you went on a visit. You would spend all the morning getting the children all clean and ready, blow drying your hair or whatever. Then you would go up and sit and smile and inside you would be saying to yourself ÔDon't let him know how bad you feel. If he knew he would crack up'. That is how you lived. Protecting him and his mates from how hard it all was. Then when he got out, I thought to myself, ÔJust leave it. It's all water under the bridge'. That is what you call survival and I suppose love.''
``Every night when I am saying my prayers I think of worrying about my husband when he was lifted and we didn't know where he was. I think of him being thrown out of helicopters to scare him. But most of all I think of my wee children having their lives ruined and other like them being filled with bitterness and hatred. I think of them lying below the bed crying when the raids were on.''
``My da went to jail. My mother was left with four kids to raise. I had to put up with bullying because my da was inside. My da gets out and him and my ma argue all the time. Then he packs his bags and goes. I think what my da did for Ireland was right but sometimes I wish he hadn't done it and then we would be together and all that''
``When your son calls you a murderer it hurts. When you know they are only saying it because you weren't around when they were growing up it hurts even more.''
``I've told him to go to Tar Isteach for counselling. I've been and it helped me. He says that his mates would laugh at him. It's stupid being afraid to get help. It would help if he went. We row about him going. I'm at my wits end.''
Both reports are available from An Loiste Uir. Tel 90742255.
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