A: Tell me this and tell me no more. What happened on 20 June 1968?
B: Frustrated by the allocation of a house to a young unmarried Protestant woman ahead of an older married Catholic woman with children, Austin Currie and a number of other people occupied the house in Caledon in protest. They were evicted by the RUC. One of the evicting officers was the brother of the unmarried Protestant woman.
A: Well I’ll be jiggered. But that was 48 years ago.
B: It was indeed.
A: The past.
B: Indeed.
A: None of that stuff now. Housing discrimination, I mean.
B: Yes there is.
A: Eh?
B: There is indeed housing discrimination still.
A: Sez who?
B: Ms Raquel Roinik, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, who visited here recently.
A: What’d she say?
B: “In May 2009, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expressed concern that inequality in housing policy in North Belfast continued to affect the Catholic community (E/C.12/GBR/CO/5, para. 29). The Special Rapporteur recognizes the efforts of the Government to address these challenges. However, during her visit, she observed that long-standing issues related to inequality continue to require concerted efforts
A: Cheesh. Did she say anything else?
B: Plenty. She notes concerns about the way information is “collected, disaggregated and presented”.
A: What’s she getting at?
B: The fact that the NIHE has stopped monitoring ‘perceived’ religious background and uses instead ‘self-reported’ religious background. This meant a lot of people’s religion got listed as ‘unknown’, so masking the need of Catholic families in North Belfast for housing.
A: An example, please.
B: In 2011 the NIHE reported that the percentage of people experiencing housing stress in north Belfast who were Catholic was 46%. However, Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR), the organisation founded by the late Inez McCormack, put the figure for 2011 at 76%.
A: Dirty work at the crossroads – is that what they’re hinting at?
B: You said it.
A: But maybe there’s no room to build houses in north Belfast.
B: Not so. There’s twenty acres available in the Belfast Harbour area. And according to a report entitled Equality Can’t Wait, land which could have provided housing for 60,000 more people is being wasted in Belfast City Centre.
A: You’re kidding.
B: No I’m not.
A: But can’t the politicians in Stormont sort all this out?
B: Probably, but they haven’t. They’ve given priority to a strategy called Shared Space. This has made religious inequality in north Belfast housing worse.
A: That’d be unionist politicians.
B: Them too. But the SDLP and Sinn Féin are part of that as well.
A: I don’t believe it.
B: You don’t have to. Check with the PPR people and see what they say.
A: Which would be?
B: That the nationalist/republican parties want to promote good community relations. Unfortunately, tackling religious inequality is a legal requirement which has more weight than the legal duty to promote good relations.
A: So why aren’t the media – not to mention the lawyers – screaming this from the roof-tops?
B: Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe like the politicians, they’re concerned not to rock the good relations boat.
A: You mean they might sound as if they were showing concern for Catholics and that would suggest they took a ‘jaundiced view’ of the situation?
A: What do you mean by ‘jaundiced view’ ?
B: I’m not sure. It’s just something I heard William Humphrey use on TV last week. I thought it sounded good.
A: So how would you sum up the situation? Great hatred, little room?
B: Nope. Great inaction, plenty of room.
A: Tell us this. Will the politicians be looking for votes soon?
B: Next May.
A: Maybe a good time to have a word with them and get some action? Especially if you’re in north Belfast and in need of a house.
B: You know, you’re not as stupid as you look.
A: Thanks. You too.
Another fine piece of writing Jude, although isn`t the mighty Nelson involved in housing? Oh dear…..bet you he is ripping that some people would think he was named after the great Mandela. Nothing surprises me in this dump, it has been shown that Catholics are still living in more deprived areas than our Protestant friends. Incidentally your opening line fairly brought a tear to my eye as my late mother always used that expression.
Wikipedia puts the population of NI at 98% white, more that any portion of the UK, by far.
Yes, Virginia that is relative to the author’s piece on discrimination.
Am I right in thinking that the NI Housing Executive because they were a government organisation that they were obliged to address new housing on the basis of greatest social need and that the out workings of this policy means that a greater proportion of social housing provision was being directed at Catholic populations with significantly greater social needs?
Am I also right in thinking that this was causing great angst in Loyalist communities where there is not an excess shortage of available housing because “themuns is getting everything”?
Am I also right in believing that minister McCausland does not believe that the NI Housing Executive should be compelled to prioritise all new housing towards areas of greatest social need and rather that if should be on a 50/50 basis, Protestant/catholic but currently this would be impossible under the NI Housing Executive’s current legislative framework?
Would it not be possible for minister McCausland to circumvent the NI Housing Executive’s social need policy by breaking the Executive up and redistributing it’s work to area based housing associations responsible for housing in geographic areas so that they would only need to address the social need in their own areas (a bit like the old gerrymandering thing in Derry)?
Oops!
Jude, I wonder if you could ask B to explain that NIHE monitoring process a bit more as it seems to me to be a bit difficult to follow. On my reading it would appear that the NIHE don’t know the religious background ( whatever that means) of applicants on the waiting list now. Therefore the NIHE would not know if someone is not what they think they’re not. Perhaps someone will gush forth and criticize SF for their alleged part in the plot. I was tempted to describe B as a male but eventually decided that I’ve had enough of a kicking this week.