History of Belfast
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The history of Belfast as a settlement goes back to the Bronze Age, but its status as a major urban centre dates to the 18th century. Belfast today is the capital of Northern Ireland. Belfast was, throughout its modern history, a major commercial and industrial centre. It suffered in the late 20th century from a decline in its traditional industries, particularly shipbuilding. The city's history has been marked by violent conflict between Catholic and Protestant communities which has caused many parts of the city to be split into 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' areas. In recent years the city has been relatively peaceful and major redevelopment has occurred, especially the inner-city and dock areas.
Early history
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The site of Belfast has been occupied since the Bronze Age. The Giant's Ring, a 5,000 year old henge, is located near the city, and the remains of Iron Age hill forts can still be seen in the surrounding hills. It became a substantial settlement in the 17th century after being settled by English and Scottish settlers at the same time as the Plantation of Ulster.
The original Belfast Castle was at what is now Castle Junction, where several roads meet at the top of High Street. This was demolished at the same time as the River Farset was covered over to create High Street. There is a new castle on the slopes of the Cavehill above the Antrim and Shore roads, which is now a popular location for wedding receptions.
According to the city's official history (as seen on a plaque outside St. George's Church), the original settlement was based around the marshy ford where the River Lagan met the River Farset (also called the Belfast River), which today would be where High Street meets Victoria Street. The current Church of Ireland church there (St. George's) is thought to be on the site of an ancient chapel used by pilgrims crossing the waters. The castle was later added to protect and dominate this position. Maps from the 17th century suggest that the Lagan was narrowed at this point (so deepening it and making the Farset navigable) at some time before 1680.
Recent archaeological excavations within the former Woolworth's Building discovered a "gully trench" with Medieval pottery dating the bottom-most strata highlighting physical evidence that was, until that time, relatively absent for Medieval occupation of the town. The associated structure was situated close to High Street, which would have been a river, indeed 17th and 18th Century maps still show ships sailing up the river that is now covered by High Street. Timbers were also recovered from the Ann Street end of the building and dated to the 16th century.
In the early 17th century, Belfast was settled by English and Scottish settlers, under a plan by Sir Arthur Chichester. After the 1641 Rebellion, many Scots who had come to Ulster as part of the Scottish army sent to put down the rebellion, settled in Belfast after the Irish Confederate Wars. Belfast was later settled by a number of French Huguenots fleeing persecution, who established a sizeable linen trade.
Merchant and industrial town
Belfast thrived in the 18th century as a merchant town, importing goods from Great Britain and exporting the produce of the linen trade. Linen at the time was made by small producers in rural areas. The town was also a centre of radical politics, partly because its predominantly Presbyterian population was discriminated against under the penal laws, and also because of the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment. Belfast saw the founding of the Irish Volunteers in 1778 and the Society of the United Irishmen in 1791 - both dedicated to democratic reform, an end to religious discrimination and greater independence for Ireland. As a result of intense repression however, Belfast radicals played little or no role in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
In the 19th century, Belfast became Ireland's pre-eminent industrial city with linen, heavy engineering, tobacco and shipbuilding dominating the economy. Belfast, located at the western end of Belfast Lough and at the mouth of the River Lagan, was an ideal location for the shipbuilding industry, which was dominated by the Harland and Wolff company which alone employed up to 35,000 workers and was one of the largest shipbuilders in the world.[1] The ill-fated RMS Titanic was built there in 1911. Migrants to Belfast came from across Ireland, Scotland and England, but particularly from rural Ulster, where sectarian tensions ran deep. The same period saw the first outbreaks of sectarian riots, which have recurred regularly since.
For 12 July 1829, Orange Institution parades in Belfast were banned, leading to demonstrations and serious rioting in the city. This spread to County Armagh and County Tyrone, lasting several days and resulting in at least 20 deaths. On 12 July 1857, confrontations between crowds of Catholics and Protestants turned into ten days of rioting, with many of the police force joining the Protestant side. There were also riots in Derry, Portadown and Lurgan. In the summer of 1872, about 30,000 Nationalists held a demonstration at Hannahstown in Belfast, campaigning for the release of Fenian prisoners, but leading to another series of riots between Catholics and Protestants in the city. In June 1886, Protestants celebrated the defeat of the Home Rule Bill, leading to rioting again on the streets of Belfast and the deaths of seven people, with many more injured. In the same year, following the Twelfth Orange Institution parades, clashes took place between Catholics and Protestants, and also between Loyalists and police. Thirteen people were killed in a weekend of serious rioting which continued sporadically until mid-September and an official death toll of 31 people.[2] For more information see: 1886 Belfast riots.
In the second half of the 19th century, the city underwent much change. It had started to overtake Carrickfergus as the main settlement in the area. So much so that, at some point, Carrickfergus Lough was renamed as Belfast Lough. Industries were set up and concentrated on Belfast, which resulted in a high level of internal migration to the town. Though Belfast had seen some growth before that. Of the migrants, a fair proportion were Roman Catholics from the west of Ulster, settling mostly in the west of Belfast. Until that point Belfast had been overwhelmingly Protestant. Towards the end of the 18th century, money was raised by collections from both the Presbyterian and Church of Ireland congregations of the town and, together with monies donated by Protestant businessmen, enough was raised to erect the first Roman Catholic church in Belfast - St. Mary's in Chapel Lane.
A couple of years later, at the opening and first mass on the 30th of May 1784, the mostly Presbyterian 1st Belfast Volunteer Company paraded to the chapel yard and gave the parish priest a guard of honour, with many of the Protestants of Belfast also present and sharing the event. At the time, the Roman Catholic population of Belfast was only around four hundred. By 1866 that number had risen to some 45,000.
Although the county borough of Belfast was created when it was granted city status by Queen Victoria in 1888,[3] the city continues to be viewed as straddling County Antrim and County Down with the River Lagan generally being seen as the line of demarcation.[4] By 1901, Belfast was the largest city in Ireland. The city's importance was evidenced by the construction of the lavish City Hall, completed in 1906. As noted, since around 1840 its population included many Catholics, who originally settled in the west of city, around the area of today's Barrack Street which was known as the "Pound Loney". West Belfast remains the centre of the city's Catholic population (in contrast with the east of the city which remains predominantly Protestant). Other areas of Catholic settlement have included parts of the north of the city, especially Ardoyne and the Antrim Road and the Markets area immediately to the south of the city centre.
Conditions for the new working class were often squalid, with much of the population packed into overcrowded and unsanitary tenements. The city suffered from repeated cholera outbreaks in the mid-19th century. Conditions improved somewhat after a wholesale slum clearance programme in the 1900s.
Belfast saw a bitter strike by dock workers organised by radical trade unionist Jim Larkin, in 1907. The dispute saw 10,000 workers on strike and a mutiny by the police, who refused to disperse the striker's pickets. Eventually the Army had to be deployed to restore order. The strike was a rare instance of non-sectarian mobilisation in Ulster at the time.
Partition 1912-1920
In 1912, the Third Home Rule Bill was introduced to Parliament by the Liberal government, which would have given limited autonomy to an all-Ireland Irish Parliament. Unionists, led by Edward Carson raised a militia, the Ulster Volunteers, to resist this, by force if necessary. The political crisis heightened tensions in Belfast and rioting took place in city in July of that year.
It was then proposed that Ireland would be partitioned, with unionists demanding that the six north-eastern counties of Ireland (four of which had Protestant majorities) would be excluded from Home Rule. Home Rule and partition had been accepted in principle by 1914, but were postponed until the end of the First World War.
Following the end of the War and radical Irish nationalist politics after the Easter Rising of 1916, the issues of Irish independence and the partition of Ireland again came to prominence. The separatist Sinn Féin party won a majority of seats in Ireland, though not in Ulster, where in Belfast nationalists continued to vote for members of the Irish Parliamentary Party and unionists for the Unionist Party. Thereafter a guerilla war developed between the security forces and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, Ireland was partitioned into Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland (the six most-Protestant counties of the province of Ulster) and the Catholic-dominated rest of the country. James Craig was Northern Ireland's first Prime Minister.
Conflict 1920-22
The period immediately before and after partition was marked by major sectarian conflict in Belfast, and some areas became much more dominated by one religious group. Although coinciding with the Irish War of Independence, the Belfast conflict had a nature all of its own. Unlike the rest of Ireland, where the war was largely fought between the IRA and Crown forces, around 90% of the 465 deaths in Belfast were civilians, as the violence often took the form sectarian assassinations and also of armed clashes between Catholic and Protestants.[5]
The conflict began in Belfast in July 1920. On 21 July 1920, rioting broke out in the city, starting in the shipyards and alter spreading to residential areas. The violence was partly in response to the IRA killing of a northern RIC police officer Gerald Smyth, in Cork, and partly because of competition over jobs due to the high unemployment rate. loyalists marched on the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast and forced over 7,000 Catholic and left-wing Protestant workers from their jobs.[6] Sectarian rioting broke out in response in Belfast resulting in about 20 deaths in just three days.[7] Both Catholics and Protestants were also expelled from their homes in the trouble. The IRA assassination of an RIC Detective, Swanzy, in nearby Lisburn on August 22 prompted another round of clashes, in which 33 people died in the city over the following 10 days.[7] The violence led to the reviving of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a unionist militia first formed in 1912.[8] Thereafter there were recurring cycles of violence until the summer of 1922.
In response to this violence, southern nationalists imposed a boycott on goods produced in Belfast. In Northern Ireland, an auxiliary police force, the Ulster Special Constabulary was recruited for counter-insurgency purposes.
The year 1921 saw three major flare ups in Belfast. Just before the Truce that formally ended the Irish War of Independence on July 11, Belfast suffered a day of violence known at the time as 'Belfast's Bloody Sunday'. An IRA ambush of an armoured police truck on Raglan Street killed one RIC man, injured two more and destroyed their armoured car. This sparked a day of ferocious fighting in west Belfast on the following day, Sunday 10 July, in which 16 civilians; eleven Catholics and five Protestants, lost their lives and 161 houses were destroyed.[9] Gun battles raged all day along the sectarian 'boundary' between the Falls and Shankill Roads and rival gunmen used rifles, machine guns and hand grenades in the clashes. Another four died over the following two days [10] The second spike in violence came in three days from August 29 to September 1, in which twenty people were killed and the third in November, when more than thirty died. In the November violence, the IRA bombed city trams taking Protestant workers to the shipyards, killing seven people.[11]
The violence peaked in the first half of 1922, after the Anglo-Irish Treaty confirmed the partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. Michael Collins the Free State leader, sent arms and aid to the northern IRA with the aim both of trying to defend the Catholic population there and trying to destabilise Northern Ireland. Roughly thirty people were killed in Belfast in February 1922, sixty in March and another 30 in April.[11] The IRA actions in Belfast, such as the killing of policemen, resulted in retaliation with attacks on the Roman Catholic population by loyalists, sometimes covertly aided by state forces.[12] The McMahon Murders of 26 March 1922, and the Arnon Street Massacre of a week later, in which uniformed police shot a total of twelve Catholic civilians dead in reprisal for the killings of policemen, were two of the worst such incidents.[13]
On 22 May, IRA assassinated unionist politician William Twaddell, in Belfast. Immediately afterwards, under the new Special Powers Act, 350 IRA men were arrested in Belfast, crippling its organisation there.[14] The cycle of sectarian atrocities against civilians however continued into June 1922. May saw seventy-five people killed in Belfast and another 30 died there in June. Several thousand Catholics fled the violence and sought refuge in Glasgow and Dublin.[15] However, after this crisis, the violence declined rapidly. Only six people lost their lives in July and August and the final conflict related killing took place in October 1922.[11]
Two factors contributed to the rapid end to the conflict. One was the collapse of the IRA in the face of the Northern state's use of internment without trial. The second was the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in the south, which distracted the IRA's attention from the North and largely ended the violence there.
According to historian Robert Lynch's count, a total of 465 people died in Belfast in the conflict of 1920-22. A further 1,091 were wounded. Of the dead, 159 were Protestant civilians, 258 Catholic civilians, thirty-five Crown forces and twelve IRA members [16]
The Great Depression
As the largest city in Ulster, Belfast became the capital of Northern Ireland, and a grand parliament building was constructed at Stormont in 1932. The Government of Northern Ireland was dominated by upper and middle class unionists. As a result of this, conditions in the poorer parts of Belfast remained bad, with many houses being damp, overcrowded and lacking in basic amenities such as hot water and indoor toilets until about the 1970s.
In common with similar cities worldwide, Belfast suffered particularly during the Great Depression. Partly as a result of these economic tensions, in the 1930s, there was another round of sectarian rioting in the city, although the most significant unrest of the period, the Outdoor Relief Riots of 1932, was notable for its non-sectarian nature.[17]
Second World War
During the Second World War, Belfast was one of the major cities in the United Kingdom bombed by German forces. The British government had thought that Northern Ireland would be safe from German bombing because of its distance from German positions, and so very little was done to prepare Belfast for air raids. Few bomb shelters were built and the few anti-aircraft guns the city possessed were sent to England. The Belfast Blitz occurred on Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941, when two hundred German Luftwaffe bombers attacked the city, pounding working class areas of Belfast around the shipyards and north Belfast-in particular, the New Lodge and Antrim Road areas. About one thousand people died and many more were injured. Of Belfast's housing stock, 52% was destroyed.[18] Outside London, this was the greatest loss of life in a single raid during the war.[19] Roughly 100,000 of the population of 415,000 became homeless.[18] Belfast was targeted due to its concentration of heavy shipbuilding and aerospace industries. Ironically, during the same period the local economy made a recovery as the war economy saw great demand for the products of these industries.
The Troubles
The post-war years were relatively placid in Belfast, but sectarian tensions and resentment among the Catholic population at widespread discrimination festered below the surface, and the city erupted into violence in August 1969 when sectarian rioting broke out in the city. The perceived one-sidedness of the police and the failure of the IRA to defend Catholic neighbourhoods of the city was one of the main causes of the formation of the militant Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), which would subsequently launch an armed campaign against the state of Northern Ireland.
The violence intensified in the early 1970s, with rival paramilitary groups being formed on both sides. Bombing, assassination and street violence formed a backdrop to life throughout The Troubles. The PIRA detonated twenty-two bombs, all in a confined area in the city centre in 1972, on what is known as "Bloody Friday", killing nine people. Loyalist paramilitaries, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) retaliated against the PIRA campaign by killing Catholics at random from around August 1972 onward. A particularly notorious group, based on the Shankill Road in the mid 1970s became known as the Shankill Butchers.
The Army, first mobilized in 1969 to restore order, became a feature of Belfast life, with huge fortified barracks being constructed, predominantly in nationalist west Belfast. Initially the Army was welcomed by the minority nationalist community, but the relationship soured after such incidents as the Falls Curfew of July 1970, when the Army fought a three-day gun battle with the Official IRA in the Falls Road area, resulting in four deaths. Major confrontation continued between the Army and Republican paramilitaries throughout the 1970s, notably in Operation Motorman in 1972, when the Army re-took nationalist "no-go areas" in Belfast and elsewhere.
In the early 1970s, there were huge forced population movements as families, mostly but not exclusively Roman Catholic, living in areas dominated by the other community were intimidated from their homes, either directly or indirectly through general fear. The general decline in European manufacturing industry of the early 1980s, exacerbated by political violence, devastated the city's economy. As recently as 1971 the city was overwhelmingly Protestant, but today is almost evenly balanced due to higher Catholic birth rates and rising prosperity, together with Protestant emigration (both internal, e.g., to North Down and external) have fundamentally changed the balance.
In 1981, Bobby Sands a native of Greater Belfast, was the first of ten Republican prisoners to die on hunger strike in pursuit of political status. The event provoked major rioting in nationalist areas of the city. During the 1980s, the most notorious series of incidents in the city took place within a week in 1988. Firstly, a Republican funeral was attacked by loyalist Michael Stone (see Milltown Cemetery attack), then, the following week at the funerals of Stone's victims, two off-duty soldiers were lynched in the "corporals killings".
In the early 1990s, loyalist and republican paramilitaries in the city stepped up their killings of each other and "enemy" civilians. A cycle of killing continued right up to the PIRA ceasefire in August 1994 and the Combined Loyalist Military Command cessation six weeks later. The most horrific single attack of this period came in October 1993, when the PIRA bombed a fish shop on the Shankill Road in an attempt to kill the UDA leadership. The Shankill Road bombing instead killed nine Protestant shoppers as well as one of the bombers.
Despite the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994, today the city still remains scarred by the conflict between the two communities. In all, nearly 1,500 people have been killed in political violence in the city from 1969 until the present. Most of Belfast is highly segregated with enclaves of one community surrounded by another (e.g., Protestant Glenbryn estate in North Belfast, and the Catholic Short Strand in east Belfast) feeling under siege. Fitful paramilitary activity continues, often directed inwards as in the loyalist feuds and the killing of Catholic Robert McCartney by PIRA members in December 2004.
In 1997, unionists lost control of Belfast City Council for the first time in its history, with the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland gaining the balance of power between nationalists and unionists. This position was confirmed in the council elections of 2001 and 2005. Since then it has had two Catholic mayors, one from the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and one from Sinn Féin.
Recent history
The city in general has seen significant redevelopment and investment since the Belfast Agreement. The formation of the Laganside Corporation in 1989 heralded the start of the regeneration of the River Lagan and its surrounding areas. Other areas that have been transformed include the Cathedral Quarter and the Victoria Square area. However communal segregation has continued since then, with occasional low level street violence in isolated flashpoints and the construction of new Peace Lines.
Belfast saw the worst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. However, since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, there has been major redevelopment in the city including Victoria Square, the Titanic Quarter and Laganside as well as the Odyssey complex and the landmark Waterfront Hall.
References
- ^ "Cranes to remain on city skyline". BBC News. 2003-10-09. Retrieved 2007-03-12.
- ^ "Parades and Marches - Chronology 2: Historical Dates and Events". Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN). Retrieved 28 January 2010.
- ^ "Belfast City Hall". Discover Northern Ireland. Ireland Tourist Board. Retrieved 2007-05-18.
- ^ "Belfast, Newcastle and the County Down Coast". County Down Northern Ireland. GoIreland.com. Retrieved 2009-01-17.
- ^ Robert Lynch, The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition p227
- ^ Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence, 155
- ^ a b Alan F Parkinson, Belfast's Unholy War, p.317
- ^ Hopkinson p156
- ^ Parkinson pp.153-4
- ^ Parkinson p154-155
- ^ a b c Parkinson p.318
- ^ Parkinson p.220
- ^ Lynch p 122-123
- ^ Michael Hopkinson, Green Against Green, The Irish Civil War, page 83-87
- ^ Parkinson, p.316
- ^ Lynch p227
- ^ "CAIN: Issues: Sectarianism: Brewer, John D. 'Northern Ireland: 1921-1998'". Cain.ulst.ac.uk. Retrieved 2010-01-09.
- ^ a b "Lord Mayor marks anniversary of Blitz". BBC News. 2010-04-16. Retrieved 2010-05-05.
- ^ "The Belfast blitz is remembered". BBC News. 2001-04-11. Retrieved 2007-03-12.