Past Violence and Present Belonging in Belfast: Two Sisters Remember their Childhood Experiences with Paramilitary Violence on Shankill Road

Abstract

SUMMARYBelonging is a shifting concept in Northern Ireland as demographics change and people seek to move past the violence of the Troubles. For older adults in the two majority communities, especially in the lower‐income areas most impacted by the Troubles, belonging can illustrate a sectarian divide over group identity: one is either an Irish Catholic or a British Protestant. Young adults who grow up in these hard‐hit neighborhoods, still struggling with high unemployment and low school completion rates, must also find a place for themselves. I explore constructions of identity and belonging in the narratives of two sisters, Angie and Ellie, who grew up in one such neighborhood, the predominantly Protestant Shankill Road in Belfast, in the last decades of the Troubles. Their childhood and adolescent recollections include IRA bombings and extreme security measures, but it was the violence of the loyalist paramilitaries affiliated with their own community that most influenced their present constructions of personal identity and sense of belonging to the wider Protestant community.