by Pauline Hadaway

Whitehall Square apartments are located at a crossroads where loyalist Sandy Row converges with Belfast’s increasingly affluent and demographically mixed university quarter. A product of the city’s post conflict commercial and consumer confidence, located close to Queen’s University and the bars, cafes and restaurants around Shaftsbury Square, Whitehall Square has attracted young professionals and students aspiring to a cosmopolitan lifestyle at comparatively affordable prices.

Last month’s protest outside the apartments by hundreds of loyalists responding to a crudely sectarian leaflet and graffiti campaign calling for Catholics and ‘republican spies’ to be driven out of the area, has opened up a new sectarian fault line in a city where, six years on from the Good Friday agreement, segregated living remains the norm for the majority of citizens.

In stark contrast with the experience of Belfast’s residential areas, the peace process has effected a remarkable improvement in the fortunes of the city centre, which is increasingly perceived as belonging to both communities, coming together to share the benefits of new global models of consumerism. Shopping, eating and clubbing have become some of Belfast’s most popular cross community activities, whilst the relaxation in security has invigorated consumer confidence and lead to a boom in leisure, retail and commercial building in the city centre.

A major part of Sinn Fein’s strategy has been to claim the city for its own nationalist constituency, under the slogan ‘our city also’. As property values rise, the improved fortunes of an expanding nationalist middle class look set to drive forward commercial and residential development within the western and northern fringes of the city. There is a sense of inner movement to the centre from the nationalist neighbourhoods and a new sense of accommodation to a previously excluded community, where even ‘republican’ black taxis have been integrated into the new transport gateway at the back of Castlecourt shopping centre on the city’s western fringe.

The opening up of the city to sections of the nationalist working class contrasts with the experience of loyalist communities such as Sandy Row and Donegall Pass who feel themselves shut out from the new office, leisure and residential developments. In the wake of the Whitehall Square protest, the people of Sandy Row have been roundly denounced as violently xenophobic, driven by a suspicion of outsiders, which goes back centuries. There is no doubt that in tolerating ongoing attacks on catholic and ethnic minority groups, Belfast’s loyalist communities rightly stand condemned alongside their compliant and opportunistic political leadership.

Problems of bigotry and sectarianism, however, do not begin and end with the residents of Sandy Row and Donegall Pass. In the towns and cities of Northern Ireland, social mobility has always been confined within strict parameters of national identity. Post 1945, attempts at integrated living collapsed in the face of the state’s inability to reform and modernise. Throughout the conflict, the politics of separation and control were clearly visible in the corrugated iron and stark metal cages, which defaced the landscape. In the transformation from barbed wire to gentrified retail and residential environments, political problems remaining unresolved will continue to disfigure the character and contours of the region.

May 9th 2004