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National Geographic : 1981 Apr
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... in pain as a woman that travaileth: they shallbe amazed one at another; theirfaces shall be as flames. ISAIAH 13:8 M IDSUMMER MIDNIGHT. Once more Belfast burns. Now it is early August, and militant Irish nationalists have declared a weeklong ob servance of the war's anniversary. For days children have ransacked ruins for wood and broken furniture to build enormous bon fires, and now they leap bright faced around the roaring flames. From the shadows older youths dash with rubble and junk to throw hasty roadblocks across empty streets tokens of the barricades of hijacked buses and trucks behind which Catholics fought off police and Protestant attackers with pet rol bombs and stones in 1969. Some of the young are Fianna, junior warriors recruited by the IRA to create dis ruption. Others are free-lance troublemak ers. Now most adults are indoors. It is another night for remembering. "I was 12 when it all began," says a young mother. "The whole Lower Falls was burn ing, our house where I'd been reared, and our church too. The whole sky was red. It's funny-just the day before my aunt and I were up to the Protestant shops on Shankill Road, buying flowers for the Virgin." Now she has two children of her own. She lives in Turf Lodge, one of many decaying, overcrowded public-housing estates in the ghetto. Although hundreds of new homes stand empty in Craigavon, 22 miles away, Catholics won't occupy them; they do not consider the area "safe." It's a relative term. "Vandalism-it's like a monster here," she says. "I've been flooded out by kids steal ing the pipes to sell. Three babies next door got the dysentery because of it. The hoods have taken over. They hijack our vans, our shops. In the beginning it was all our cause, our country, but I don't believe in it any more. Women take the brunt of it-they're our kids that are out on the streets, and we not knowing what trouble they're in. "It's hard to take sides in a vicious circle." Part of that circle are the British soldiers who patrol the neighborhoods, making fre quent searches for terrorist suspects and weapons. They were greeted as protectors in Awaiting trialfor their actions, members of the Divis Demolition Committee (above) protest dilapidated public housing by destroying vacated apartments.Inadequate heating, leaky pipes, broken toilets, and rat infestationmake the Belfast high rises unfit to live in, says Sean Stitt, at left. The government plans to raze two of the buildings, put up in the mid-1960s, and to renovate the remainingten. In anotherprotest, social activist FatherDesmond Wilson (right)says Mass at his home in a tough Belfast neighborhood.He resignedfrom his parishin 1975 to more strongly advocate programsfor the poor. NationalGeographic, April 1981 490
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