After the release of Naked Ireland videos that looked at the demographic change in the loyalist Village are of Belfast and Belfast’s Sandy Row, I was asked if I would take a look at the lower Ormeau area, a republican enclave of south Belfast with a view to seeing how it has changed in recent years.
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Like The village and Sandy Row, has had its old kitchen house stock redeveloped. But, first we walk up the lower Ormeau Road itself. The Ormeau Road, now also a very ethnically diverse part of the city, is a busy thoroughfare into the city centre. It’s divided into lower and upper Ormeau by the River Lagan. As we walk here the first point of interest is the Hatfield bar. This is a beautiful ornate pub that’s become more accessible to people these days than it was during the troubles. We’ll have a look at this pub in a later video. How the pub has changed over the years is perhaps a good way to measure how the area in general has changed.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to talk about these working-class areas of Belfast without referencing the troubles. And the memorial on the side of Sean Graham's bookmakers shop commemorates the death of 5 innocent people who were gunned down inside this shop in 1992 purely because they were Catholics. 9 others were wounded in the attack by the UDA. It was carried out as a reprisal attack for the 'Teebane bombing' some weeks before and was typical of the 'tit for tat' violence of the time. What was more alarming was that the Police Ombudsman, an organisation whose role it is to investigate contentious behaviour by the police, found that members of the police had colluded with informers who were involved in the attack.
Like The Village and Sandy Row, this place has suffered a lot during the troubles, but has 25 odd years of relative peace brought change and has that change been positive of negative? I was particularly interested to see if the area was still strewn with contentious murals as that was one of the things I noticed in the loyalist areas. However, I was pleased to see that it wasn’t. In fact the new murals that adorn these walls are really quiet impressive and something that I think the whole community can be very proud of.
So, the question I asked in The Village was, was loyalism disappearing in that area? I think the conclusion was that while those protestant areas still exhibited fairly frank murals in support of various paramilitaries, regardless, the natural displacement of a younger generation and an influx of new arrivals from ethnic communities, caused that to be the case. Is it the same here? Is hard line Republicanism fading. Undoubtedly yes, the same phenomenon is taking place, There is no defiant display of republicanism here - no (or very few) murals or flags, no painted curb stones etc.
We pass the offices of the local Sinn Fein Mla (member of the legislative assembly). They’re unable to sit in government at the time of making this video because of the Democratic Unionist boycott of the assembly, but perhaps that will change and the two communities here, or should I say the wealth of communities, can get back to working together for the benefit of everyone.
We walk as far as the embankment of the river lagan to an interesting sculpture, which has a piece of verse, whose exact translation from 9th century Irish is a little in dispute. But this is a tribute to poet Seamus Heaney - The blackbird of Belfast Lough.
Then I notice this plaque on that gable wall opposite which is much less uplifting. It basically commemorates the life of a young 16-year-old who while daubing some graffiti on a wall, was shot and killed by a plain clothes policeman. No one was ever convicted; it was just another one of those bizarre and tragic events that plagued this part of the world for so long.
And we arrive at the Ormeau bridge. For several years this was a point of 'stand off' between loyalists and nationalists. Loyalists wanted to parade down the road and nationalists of lower Ormeau didn’t want the march to go through their area.
We looks at some of the terrace housing in the area, new and old, and go into a newly built estate called the Lavenia area. As we enter the estate, we see that it’s really quite a pleasant community. Neatly trimmed hedges and there’s a bit of space in the way it’s all planned.
I saw a couple of Palestinian flags - republican areas tend to sympathise with the plight of the Palestinians while loyalist areas often (as we’ve seen in previous videos) display Israeli flags. But other that there were no Irish tricolours flying here, or in the older streets, no painted curb stones and no republican murals. I’m hoping that’s all a good sign.