Strife breakers

The Crumlin Road in north Belfast has seen some of the worst clashes between Catholic and Protestant communities since Northern Ireland’s troubles began more than 30 years ago. It is one of at least 15 informal “peace lines” that divide the city into Catholic and Protestant zones.

It’s a challenging place to run businesses or social facilities open to people from both groups, but this is what one charity and housing provider has been doing since 1977.

That was when the Flax Trust took over a former linen mill on the border between the Catholic district of Ardoyne and the Protestant Greater Shankill with the aim of providing neutral ground where the two communities could meet.

It’s still going, offering services from a health centre and business facilities to a drink at the trust’s bar, and provides a model for housing organisations in other areas where communities are in conflict.

Indeed, at next week’s National Housing Federation conference, Flax chief executive John Patterson will explain how the trust fulfils its mission statement of “bringing peace, one person and one job at a time”.

Crossing the line

Unfortunately, the peace lines restrict the trust’s ability to develop mixed housing just as much as they restrict the day-to-day lives of local people. The trust had a painful reminder of this earlier this year, when a planning application for sheltered housing for elderly Catholics on an Ardoyne site bordering Greater Shankill had to be withdrawn after Loyalist extremists made death threats against its staff.

Instead, the Flax Trust is encouraging an indirect route to integrated housing. It works closely with other housing associations in North Belfast at a strategic level while they continue to serve their separate communities.

“The critical issue here is territory, and we’re not into taking on one another’s territory,” explains Father Myles Cavanagh, the trust’s chairman. “But if we can put up good houses and people start to get jobs, that’s the name of the game. There’s less sense of anger if people have less sense of deprivation.”

The trust has made a few tentative inroads into delivering mixed housing, however. It has built a foyer in an interface area, and move-on accommodation for 11 vulnerable families in partnership with the Salvation Army, where residents have left their homes and are waiting for rehousing.

They are drawn from both Protestant and Catholic communities. Ten years into the peace process, these labels are as central to Belfast life as they ever were.

“I don’t like saying Protestant and Catholic, I’d like just to talk about the community. But at the moment, you have to differentiate,” says John Patterson.

Other parts of the trust are working on integration at Brookfield Mill, showpiece of the Flax Trust’s operations. Four wings of the 19th-century linen mill house a business centre, home to ventures including a car mechanic and upholsterer, three cinemas, an arts centre, theatre and community television station, a business school and a meals-on-wheels service for both communities.

Then there’s the Pittsburgh Bar and The Steelers restaurant, their names a nod to the Irish-Americans that provide much of the trust’s financial support.

“People feel they can move in and out [of Brookfield] without fear,” says Patterson. “And if you can have a bit of chat, put people at their ease, you get on better that way.”

Brookfield Mill is kept free of flags or emblems associated with either community. There has been some tension but, Patterson says, “we don’t have post-mortems, we just say ‘let’s just get on with the job’”.

Cavanagh admits Brookfield isn’t immune to tension but believes it’s no worse than the kind of problems that crop up in many large organisations. “A while back in the business school, a woman complained to me that the assistant manager of the training facility had dealt with her in a discriminatory fashion because of her religion – she was a Protestant and said he was a Catholic,” he says.

“But it turned out that he was a Protestant as well. In the everyday world, these things happen.”

A friendly drink

Even in the social areas, community tensions rarely surface, he says: “The regulars at the bar are mostly Catholic, but if people are using other facilities like the theatre, they would retire there for a drink. There’s always the possibility of a falling-out but it wouldn’t necessarily be sectarian – it’d just be someone taking too much to drink.”

The trust is now refurbishing the business centre to attract start-ups in the media, graphics and communications fields. “These will be more outward-looking than traditional businesses, and will attract skills from outside,” explains Cavanagh.

The trust is also exploring the integrating effects of local television – for instance, last month, a version of Big Brother was run, open to both communities, where seven local people were locked in a house with a camera crew. Sixteen young people, from both sides of the peace line, worked on the project. On the last eviction day, 13,000 people voted.

Meanwhile Flax Housing Association, the trust’s housing arm, is addressing housing need in the Catholic community. Although its housing is open to people of all faiths, most of its homes are located in Catholic areas. It plans to add 120 units to its current stock of 280 sheltered and general needs homes, which will mainly mean increasing densities on existing Catholic estates since developing brownfield sites could focus the territorial claims and resentment of one or other community.

“I don’t want to sound sectarian – it’s just the constraints we operate under,” says John Donaghy, the association’s eneral manager.

“We have the same [integrationist] ethos as the rest of the Flax Trust, but factors in Northern Ireland do not allow us to do it [in housing]. It’d be pointless to say differently.”

The trust’s visitors’ book is full of entries from divided communities all over the world – a delegation from Bosnia-Herzegovina recently made the trip – and Cavanagh believes addressing social issues before trying to de-segregate housing could be the answer for many neighbourhoods dealing with ethnic divisions.

“It’s useless trying to go down a route of reconciliation, when reconciliation is a by-product of a just society,” he says. “If people feel they’re not getting a fair crack of the whip, it generates pain and anger. But we have worked on systems that could be implemented elsewhere – in that sense, this place is a socio-economic laboratory.”