What is community in NI in 2024?

Dr Anne Darcy is part of Psychologists for Social Change NI who apply psychology to policy and political action.

“What is a community?” I looked down at my five year old daughter as I realised I was unsure how to answer. We were walking through our home town of Randalstown after I had taken her to an event in a Community Garden organised by the Human Rights Organisation PPR. What do I tell her? I look around the housing estate we were walking through, thinking I cannot tell her this is our community. It is a place where hardly anyone knows each other. The only commonality here is being plugged into twenty-four-seven globalised consumerism behind our closed front doors. Is our community the Loyalist estate of Neilsbrook, where she goes to gymnastics, or the Republican Gaelic football club a stone’s throw away? My daughter goes to football and gymnastics every week, moving between communities that may as well be on different planets. It struck me how mad it is to think that holy wars from hundreds of years ago dictate that these neighbours in the one town do not belong to each other. But then, the tensions came from outside forces, ordinary people being pitted against each other. Like crabs in a bucket that cut each other down as they try to climb out. Having had little or no part to play in creating the situation they find themselves in.

My mum fostered two kids who used to hold the strings of the big flag at the front of Orange Order Parades. The Social Services worried it was ‘culturally inappropriate’ to place them with a Catholic family but their birth mum gave consent and we were asked to muddle through. My mum went to Mass everyday and dutifully took her foster kids to Sunday School every week, near Neillsbrook. Maybe my mum fostered kids because she knew what it was to not really belong anywhere. She was already a grown woman with kids of her own when all the Catholics were burned out of the area where her parents lived. Her dad told her they shouted at him that mixed marriages like his were next, but her parents managed to stay through it all. My grandmother had survived in the most bombed country during the Second World War, so maybe the violence and intimidation in Northern Ireland seemed like a minor skirmish to her. She had carried my mum in her womb through months of starvation due to a blockade intended to starve the Maltese and their British colonists into surrender. As my grandmother endured months of starvation, the egg that became me already existed within the daughter she carried, like the smallest of a set of Russian dolls.

Years after my grandfather died they did have a go at burning her out. I remember waking to the sound of hushed voices, with anger and shock ringing through their whispers. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I knew it was bad. Someone had petrol bombed my grandmother’s house. I don’t know if they knew she spent her summers at her first home in Malta, after carefully saving her pension all year and rationing her heating frugally. I think of her when I see campaigns about single use plastics. She used to wash and dry and re-use cling film. It seemed mad to me at the time, but maybe living through war teaches you to be decades ahead of the rest of us. My mum told me recently that family paid for her and her sister to travel over and break the news to my grandmother that her home had been gutted in a malicious attack. My mum’s Protestant cousin walked away from her when she said the motive must have been sectarian. The bonds from growing up together as cousins playing on Portrush strand and rolling Easter eggs down the slope at the Giants Ring became strained for a moment, but then it was not spoken of again. The authorities decided that it was not a sectarian attack, but we did not believe that for a moment, as she was the only Catholic in that area. It is only now, thirty years later, that it dawned on me that the motive might have been racist. Her Arabic sounding language may have seemed out of place to some, but it always sounded like home to me.

My grandfather would not feel out of place in Neilsbrook. He met his wife while stationed in Malta and then was sent off to the Suez Canal when World War II broke out. I doubt he wondered if amongst the ranks of the Ottoman army there may have been not-so-distant cousins of his young wife. Outsiders wouldn’t see the difference between the community of the football club and the community in Neilsbrook, but to anyone from the town, the cultural rift is enormous. It lives on in the present, represented in part by Palestinian and Israeli flags flown far from those South West Asian lands. The violence of colonialism somehow led my Maltese Grandmother and my Ulster-born Grandfather to have a shared sense of Britishness. Although she may have looked on the surface a little more like the enemy he fought in Egypt. My mothers parents had been thrown together by war and when she was 3 years old, the end of the war displaced her from her homeland in the Mediterranean. She was sent on a three week long boat journey to meet her father for the first time, after he had been demobbed from the Army. Making a life on Belfast’s Westland Drive led her to leave that Arabic-sounding language in Southampton dock. Something she yearns for now is the ability to speak in her own first language, but it is long lost to her.

For some reason my grandfather decided to convert to Catholicism, but he did not complete the very last stage before he died. My grandparents were laid to rest in different graveyards, one Protestant, one Catholic. Brian Friel’s play ‘Translations’ speaks of how the pre-colonial Irish looked to the Mediterranean, rather than England. Although back then, no one had convinced the Angles and Saxons and Bretons into believing they were one community. That they should forget their own Elders and follow one set of self-appointed rulers. Friel lived just after Joyce, another Irish man looking to the Mediterranean and taking an old colonial tale and creating new ways to tell stories. Friel argued in ‘Translations’ that colonised people’s need to take ownership of the language imposed on our ancestors and imagine new societies that work for us. I have been trying to understand how my grandfather might have viewed these questions about ethnicity and language and meaning making. I imagine that to him the colonisation of Ireland was about progress and peace building. A version of history that jarrs for me. The stories we tell about what has happened and what should be have the power to create or destroy communities. Our ancestors in ancient times, who were not as white as you might imagine, wandered far and wide and laid down roots, finding home wherever they wandered. While some can see Imperialism as a scourge or a triumph, we have all forgotten our connectedness. Like the rhizomes of Aspen trees growing beneath the earth out of sight, it seems as if we stand like trees, separate and unconnected. But the unseen inter-connectedness is as real as can be.

Those who have been displaced and faced the pain of division and disconnection often strive to connect others and create a sense of home and belonging. When a community adapts to a different language, some meanings are lost. In Irish a beochaoineadh (“bay-oh-keen-yu”) is a lament for someone who has gone away. Which may cause plobaireacht (“PLOH-ber-acht”), when you struggle to speak while crying. The English language doesn’t have a translation for ragaireacht (“RA-gerr-act”) either, which is to sit up talking into the wee early hours or go ‘night wandering’. A change in the language we use causes a change in our thinking and culture that can go unnoticed. Despite this, over the ages, women and men have always been nurturers and storytellers. They tend to our hunger and tell stories of our pasts and futures, shaping our realities. Maybe as my grandmother starved through those months of the blockade and incessant bombings, her unborn child breathed into her the joy and hope of living. I am borrowing this beautiful phrase from a friend in my writing group called Mamadou, a young father who has found a home in Belfast after being forced to seek asylum. As well as bringing his wisdom and skill to our writing group, Mamadou has a degree in renewable energy and has volunteered with the Red Cross. He aspires to make changes that will prevent young people in his homeland of Senegal from having to flee. Mamadou told me how impoverished we are in this rich part of the world, where our nuclear families do not have the strength and wisdom of his home village, where all the adults parented all the children together

My grandparents were laid to rest in different graveyards, but they are forever connected. They found love and connection that surpassed division and flourished in the midst of war. This love lives on in the daughter who provides a home to those who do not belong to her family or her community, and this little five year old whose wise ears hear an important word and her innocent heart implores us to ask ourselves, what is community?