Tag: Sectarianism
Pádraigín Drinan
Pádraigín Drinan grew up in west Belfast and joined the Republican Labour Party in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. “As I was very young and at school, I was probably the only person to bunk off...
Helen Bell
Born in 1947 in Hopewell Street at the bottom of the Shankill Road, Helen remembers the late 1960s and the first time that real “trouble” started on the Shankill Road, with rioting and flares being shot into the air....
May Blood
May was born during World War Two and grew up in Roden Street, a mixed area of Belfast with her mother and sister. He family was separated due to the evacuations during the war. “For the first six years of my life I t...
Joe Baker
Joe grew up on the New Lodge estate in north Belfast. “When we moved into it, it was a construction site, everything was brand new and spic and span. It was a lot of adventure and a lot of fun playing on the buildi...
Peter Heathwood
Marie Breen-Smyth, the Associated Dean International at the University of Surrey, talks to Peter Heathwood. At home in Cliftonville in north Belfast, Peter was sitting with his wife and three young children after f...
Roisin McGlone
“The Troubles began at the time we moved up to Andersonstown from the Falls Road. My lasting memory is the raids, whenever the army and police came. This would be before Ulsterisation. They closed off streets and sea...
Joseph Ricketts
Born and raised in Jamaica, Joseph’s father was a contractor who believed his sons should be responsible for their own land and be able to manage work on a farm. When they came of age, Joseph and his three brothers ha...
John Scott
“I was probably one of the first ones to bring platform shoes to Northern Ireland so that’s one of my claims to fame.” John who grew up in a family of nine on the Shankill Road, left school at the age of 15 in the ...
Kathleen Kelly
The ten years, Kathleen spent as a teacher in the primary school in North Queen Street, brought home to her the poverty in which the children she taught, lived. Originally from east Belfast, where her father was a ...
Eileen Bell
Eileen has worked extensively in Northern Ireland politics, community work and peace activism. “I was brought up to believe that everybody was the same, that there were no differences…” Born in Dromara at the en...
Billy Dunlop
After a pleasant childhood spent in Delaware Street on the Ravenhill Road in east Belfast, Billy entered the world of work in the post office as a telegraph messenger at a tender age, “I started at the age of 14 years...
Lynda Walker
Lynda Walker grew up in Sheffield, England and came from a working class background. “It was a fairly run down area, we lived in a couple of rooms in the back of a shop, but we moved onto one of the bigger estates ...