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A year later this was still a major topic of conversation on the estate, the Tenants' Organization having exhausted its funds (raised at monthly dances and weekly bingo games) to compensate the bus company to the tune of several hundred pounds. I arrived on the estate forewarned by the Voluntary Service Bureau that the children were 'high spirited.' A report from volunteers of the previous summer suggested what a remarkable understatement that was on an evening field trip some Cranston teenagers had burned and slashed the inside of an Ulsterbus.

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They commanded attention by hosing down a dressing room at the public baths, by smashing windows in the community center, by setting fire to vacant bungalows, by flinging a visitor's ivory bracelet into the murky boating pond of a neighborhood park. Their children, like children everywhere, followed their parents' lead. Like many of the original residents they traced the decline of the estate to the tensions of the sectarian 'troubles' and to the arrival of a 'different class of people.' Ten or twelve of Cranston's eighty families drank heavily, fought readily, and almost eagerly stirred up trouble on the estate.

I lived with the Douglases, who had moved to Cranston thirty years ago, when it was new, and had raised nine children there. I was on Cranston Estate at the behest of Belfast's Voluntary Service Bureau to organize a summer recreation program for the children. The latter, mixed with alcohol, was a combustible that brought Scotts and Hardwicks to blows in the street and left a man beaten and bloody in the gutter for not paying his fifty pence to enter the monthly dance. Unemployment was high at Cranston and boredom kept pace. The streets were paved in broken glass, testimony to the popularity of bottle-smashing. Fresh white houses with brightly painted shutters and well-tended rose gardens were competing with graying, graffiti-trimmed bungalows-and losing.

As it was, Cranston appeared to be dying-at once the victim of apathy and violence. The whole estate was poised for the transformation, or at least the drama of the fire and the pomp of the parades. (The name of the estate has been changed, as have the residents' names.) Union Jacks and Red Hands were hoisted above doorways banners of red, white, and blue were stretched from house to house and the mountain of refuse continued to grow in a vacant lot, awaiting that midnight match that, on the eve of the 12th, would transform it from a pile of junk into a blazing bonfire. At Cranston Estate, the Protestant housing project where I was living, preparations began early. For weeks in advance huge banners arched the streets, exhorting everyone to 'Remember 1690.' Indeed, the people spoke of 'King Billy' with such familiarity that it was easy to forget the battle occurred almost three hundred years ago. On the 12th of July, Orangemen and many Protestant followers would take to the streets to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne, where William III of Orange (a Protestant) defeated James II (a Catholic) to take control of Ireland. When I arrived in Belfast in late June, the Red Hand was waving from Protestant doorways to herald the impending Orange Parades. The passions that led O'Neill to bleed for Ulster have survived as well. O'Neill's bloody hand has been preserved through the ages as the Red Hand of Ulster, seen on flags, postage stamps, pendants, and paramilitary banners. Ulster, but for three counties, is now Northern Ireland. Her account of that summer shows a vicious cycle of everyday brutalization and bigotry, handed down from generation to generation.Īn old Irish legend tells of a boat race where the prize was the kingdom of Ulster and the victor was the first to 'touch the shore.' O'Neill, seeing his boat slip behind, cut off his hand, flung it ashore, and won the kingdom.

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Find the entire archive online here.) Moir spent the summer living in a Protestant housing estate in Belfast, where she organized a recreation program for the children. (WORLDVIEW magazine ran from 1958-85 and featured articles by political philosophers, scholars, churchmen, statesmen, and writers from across the political spectrum. She is a freelance writer and is on the staff of the Community Crime Prevention Program in Seattle.' From WORLDVIEW Magazine: 'Patricia Moir traveled through Ireland in 1975 under the auspices of the Chinook Learning Community.

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