They didn't look at the watchtowers

Timothy O'Grady on what people get wrong about West Belfast

There have been nearly 2000 murals documented in Northern Ireland since the 1970s

I first saw the Falls Road in 1982. It was the year after 10 men died on hunger strike in Long Kesh prison, the mid-point and perhaps the climax of the long war. I’d arrived by train from rose-bricked, promenading Dublin and had been driven through the centre of the city, past statues of British generals and monarchs and the City Hall, massive and imposing, a Union Jack flying from the dome. We turned west. The Falls, road of legend, named for tuagh na bhFál, or “territory of the enclosures”, lay beyond.

The car stopped.

“…And this is where the assault on the senses begins,” resumed Tom Hartley, my guide for the day. He had professorial glasses and a rabbinical beard. Like many here, he had served time. Twenty-six years later he would be Sinn Fein Lord Mayor of Belfast.

The change was sudden, jarring. The scene was monochromatic and fraught and like nothing I’d ever seen. Pods of British soldiers wrapped around policemen prowled like single organisms, their rifles out, their eyes in their scopes. Watchtowers loomed. Saracens sped. Hovering helicopters. There were broken windows in an abandoned mill. Broken bricks and walls. Rust-streaked corrugated iron. “Up the ‘Ra” in white paint. Broken glass on wet wasteground. Beyond, images of resistance in reds and greens and blues flaming up in paintings on gable ends – a lark at the end of a rifle, revolutionary women with clenched fists, solidarity across time, with Ireland’s insurrectionist past, and across space, with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) and the ANC (African National Congress).

Citizens moved along. You could see poverty but not vanquishment in their faces. They didn’t look at the watchtowers, Saracens, helicopters or soldiers, though the soldiers tracked them. I learned that every item here is numbered, every room, wall, alleyway, car, every person and their movements, associates, financial circumstances, habits and arrest history, all mapped and logged in intelligence files and passed through a computer system code-named Vengeful. They were raided, searched, check-pointed, punched, phone-tapped, and informed on. West Belfast was a laboratory of counter-insurgency. You saw it in a glance. The security state pressed down heavily on the people.