Irish Republican News and Information, 30 April, 2001, http://irlnet.com/rmlist/ 

Feature:

One woman's story
 
 BY LAURA FRIEL

Rita is living with a dilemma that is putting her family's lives at risk. She can't stay. She lives under the constant threat of imminent loyalist attack, but she can't go. The house is owner occupied. Rita can't move without selling and she can't sell it either. "I just couldn't put another Catholic family through this," says Rita. "I couldn't live with someone's death or injury on my conscience."

So every day, the family lives with the constant fear of loyalist violence, at home, in the garden, in the street outside. On their way to work, on their way to school, on their way to the shops or to visit friends. And every night the family sleep with a fire extinguisher at the top of the stairs. Their story is a depressingly familiar one. "We've been targeted on and off since we moved here six years ago," says Rita, "but recently it's been much worse."

When Rita and her husband Chris first saw their Alliance Avenue home, they were very excited. The house was large with a great deal of potential for a young working couple with the skills to improve the property. "We intended to do a lot of work on the house, build an extension and a garage, modernise the interior," says Rita. "We had great plans."

The mortgage was reasonable enough, the couple thought, and if they ever decided to sell the family would stand to make a reasonable profit. "House prices in other parts of Belfast were very high but we could afford this house and the area seemed quiet and the kind of place to raise children," says Rita. "It seemed the perfect solution to our housing needs."

But Rita's children found they could not play in the back garden. And soon they were too afraid to play in front of their home. Rita's children have been attacked on a number of occasions, most recently a couple of weeks ago.

"My husband and daughter were walking along the Crumlin Road when a crowd of youths started throwing stones at them," says Rita. "Behind the youths were men throwing bricks."

It's a familiar pattern which is being used throughout North Belfast. During a recent incident in the New Lodge, when stone throwing young loyalists were challenged by local residents, loyalist men armed with baseball bats and petrol bombs launched an attack.

Rita is particularly fearful for her 14-year-old son. "I'm afraid to let him out and he's always home early," says Rita. "I know he'd get a terrible beating if loyalists ever cornered him alone." None of the children's friends ever visit and none can stay over. "It just isn't safe," says Rita.

Early last Sunday morning the family were still sleeping when a crowd of loyalists armed with baseball bats marched up to the front door and smashed the living room window. "It was 5am," says Rita, "and we heard glass breaking. They smashed the front window and then trashed the car."

This is the fourth car that has been written off." And now Rita is afraid. "That was the first time they came right up to our front door," says Rita. "Next time will they bring a petrol or pipe bomb?"

"Sectarianism was never an issue with us, my family has a mixed background," says Rita, "but the loyalists have made it an issue and if I don't get my family out of here, my children will become bitter. I can see it happening already."

But Rita and her family aren't just victims of loyalist violence, they're also the victims of a sectarian housing allocation mechanism which the Housing Executive barely acknowledges and a skewed housing market which forces nationalists wishing to live in areas safe from sectarian harassment to pay extortionate prices.

Public Housing in the North is allocated through a points system that is supposed to reflect housing need. But if a Catholic family requests housing in a safe nationalist area, naturally an area of high demand, then the fact that they have almost no chance of being housed is their own fault. The natural wish to live in a safe area is interpreted by officialdom as a matter of "choice", which brings with it an indefinite waiting list or years of hostel accommodation.

Nationalists living in North and West Belfast are desperately short of housing, which only a comprehensive programme of new building can begin to address, but until the sectarian boundaries of loyalist violence are challenged, they are also landlocked. The British government, the NIO and the Housing Executive have consistently failed to address the sectarian agenda of loyalism in relation to housing allocation.

Meanwhile, private housing in safe nationalist areas has soared in price far beyond the intrinsic value of the properties. A three-bedroom house in West Belfast can cost over #100,000, leaving a prospective owner with a mortgage of over #500 a month. In an area of high unemployment and in a low waged economy, for most families buying a home is not an option.

Rita and her family took the third alternative, to buy a house in a less favourable area. The price they have been force to pay, however, is the constant threat of loyalist violence and the dilemma of when to go, where to go and how to go. "We have to get out now," says Rita. "We can't stay any longer."