HMP Divis? Memories of everyday life in the Divis Flats

The Divis Flats, high-rise housing projects built as part of prime minister's Terence O'Neill's modernizing 1960s vision for Northern Ireland, were a striking intervention into the landscape of west Belfast. Initially concieved of as an improvement on the 'slum' housing of the Pound Loney, with running water, indoor toilets and other modern conveniences, they quickly became associated both with endemic disrepair and with the increasingly violent context of the Troubles. Nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, the first child killed in the Troubles, was killed in the Divis tower during the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969, when the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) fired a machine gun into the flats; according to the Divis Residents' Association (DRA), by 1986, 19 people had been shot dead in the flats. Divis was central to the exercise of state and non-state violence in this period. In the 1970s, the British Army constructed an observation post on the roof of the highest flat and occupied the top two floors, which they generally accessed by helicopter.

Balconies, Brits and Bin Lids: Residents Remember Life in Divis Flats is an oral history collection published in 1998 by the Divis Study Group. Drawing mainly on this source, this paper will consider how residents narrate their memories of life in the flats. Balconies is an ambivalent intervention in the memory culture around the area; former residents critique hegemonic media narratives of the flats as synonymous with crime, poverty and violence, while also describing the appalling conditions that made demolition the only acceptable solution, as they and the activists who campaigned for the closure of the flats argued.

Gerry Downes, the editor of the book, says in his introduction to the collection that: 'Depending on the writer's point of view, Divis has been portrayed as; a fortress, a prison, a republican stronghold, a concrete jungle, a glue sniffers' den, a joyriders' paradise.' In this context, residents' memories are engagements in a discursive web that renders them abject and blames them for their poor housing conditions.

Reading Balconies for these kinds of engagements, the paper will also lay out my plans for a larger project on housing infrastucture, memory and activism in Northern Ireland.