History
Disputes over access to public space are central to the continuing conflict in Northern Ireland. One key to resolving these disputes is to recognise that public space is not a timeless absolute, but the product of the municipal revolution that took place in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom. From the start, access to that newly created public space involved a balance between liberty and restraint characteristic of Victorian Liberalism. Analysis must also take account of a recent body of theory, the ‘spatial turn’, which emphasises the extent to which space and place are both social product and material actor.
The Donegall family dominated municipal life through their power as landlords and their control of the Corporation. Civic events reflected traditional Tory values of hierarchy and deference. However, the financial difficulties of the second marquis led him to surrender his power as proprietor, while parliamentary reform in 1832 ended the family’s control of the town’s two seats in Parliament. Municipal reform in 1840 transferred control of municipal affairs to an elected council dominated by the town’s business elite, ending the era of proprietorship by the aristocracy.
The new ‘urban squirearchy’ created by municipal reform, in contrast to the traditional Toryism of the Donegalls, was a forward-looking and dynamic group that initiated large-scale schemes of urban redevelopment. Both public and private building reflected a strong ethos of civic pride. The new urban elite was less effective in dealing with the environmental and public health problems created by urban growth. It was also deeply rooted in sectarianism, ruthlessly excluding Catholics from any share in the running of the town. At popular level too, there was segregation between Catholic and Protestant districts in the expanding working-class areas, and sectarian clashes became progressively more prolonged and violent.
The Northern Ireland of the 1960s was marked by rising living standards, and a new climate of optimism and openness to outside influences. Against this background new expressions of identity and aspiration for a time made their claim to a share of public space. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament staged marches and rallies. A tenants’ movement united Catholic and Protestant occupants of public housing. Regular May Day parades reflected attempts by the trade union movement to promote class unity over sectarian divisions. By the end of the decade, however, all of these movements were being overshadowed by the revival of ethnic and sectarian tensions in response to the growth of the civil rights movement.
Belfast in the late eighteenth century was an expanding commercial and social centre, transformed by an extensive rebuilding programme initiated by the first marquis of Donegall, and by the development of factory-based cotton and linen manufacture. Rising population made necessary the tighter regulation of traffic and behaviour, including the creation of a police force. But by later standards this was still a relatively small and intimate urban community.
By the late nineteenth century sectarian and political divisions were inscribed on Belfast’s urban landscape. Residential segregation, creating a large Catholic residential district in West Belfast, permitted the growth of a Catholic and nationalist associational culture that would not otherwise have been possible. Key sites – the Custom House, the Ulster Hall, the city centre – acquired a political significance. Attempts by militant Protestants to impose an absolute veto on Catholic access to the city centre were defeated. But events during the Home Rule crisis of 1912–14 showed that Belfast was already on its way to becoming the capital of a potential Protestant and unionist state.
After Belfast became the capital of a politically separate Northern Ireland, civic ritual became more explicitly Protestant and unionist, echoing to some degree the theatre state favoured by authoritarian regimes elsewhere in inter-war Europe. The Special Powers Act was used to restrict demonstrations and parades both by nationalists and by socialist and Labour movements. Attitudes became more relaxed after 1945, particularly following the collapse of a renewed IRA campaign of violence. In 1966 the government tolerated extensive celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916, though at the price of dividing Protestant and unionist opinion.
The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement contained little direct reference to public space, partly because the creation of the Parades Commission had already dealt with one central issue. However, it created a legal and institutional framework within which local authorities were required to address the broader question of shared space. This was the background to a long series of decisions on the flying of flags on official buildings, culminating in the mass loyalist protests of 2012–13. The same process led to the negotiated admission of republican and nationalist events to the city centre, while at the same time the Orange Order found itself struggling to reclaim the legitimacy it had once enjoyed without question.
Extreme political violence of the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s forced radical changes in the use of public space. The Twelfth of July, formerly an unchallenged part of civic ritual, now came to be seen as problematic. The Lord Mayor’s Show, a celebration of commerce and unionism, dwindled before being revived as an apolitical, carnival-style event. St Patrick’s Day, formerly associated solely with Nationalism, was promoted, with mixed success, as a cross-community festival.
This chapter reiterates the main points of the book. Essentially, it confirms that while the Irish Parliament clearly was a colonial assembly in its origins and in its development, there is also a clear line of development that is more local and more organic than might first meet the eye. It brings together the many strands of the book to make some strong concluding statements about the nature of the institution and its place within the kingdom, its constitution, and the institutional history of Ireland.