After Sinn Fein Councillor James McVeigh called for the families of those rioting over the August 9th bonfires to be evicted from their homes; James Millen spoke to The Last Round about poverty, disenfranchisement and why state oppression isn’t the answer to complicated community issues.
On Friday 23rd July 1999, a stolen car collided with another vehicle in Ballybogey, County Antrim killing Justin and Charmaine Watson and orphaning their three-year old son.
Brian Donnelly was the front-seat passenger in the stolen car. He was also killed at the scene. Brian’s joyriding activities first became known to his family when he was just fifteen after he was arrested for driving the wrong way up a dual carriageway.
Shortly after the crash which claimed three lives, Donnelly’s mother gave an interview to Radio Ulster saying “Even before he started stealing cars, we spoke to Parents Advice. We called in social workers, but we got nothing from them because we were told our son was an angel compared to the people that they dealt with”.
In 1993, shortly before his death, 16-year-old Twinbrook joyrider Johnny McGivern described to the journalist Malachai O’Doherty the immediate aftermath of his kneecapping:
“I seen everybody making way and I knew it must be my Ma or Da and then I seen my Ma. I told her I was all right but she was in shock and I had to tell her to stop shouting because she was nearly taking it out on the people helping me. Then I heard the squeal of tyres and the sound of our car, then the shouts of my Da when he came round the corner. Almost immediately I held my hands out and said, ‘Hold me, Daddy, hold me Daddy’, and he held my hands and the grip in his hands helped me take my mind off it a bit.”
Now, I don’t want to excuse joyriding, or become an apologist for it. Dozens of innocent people, like the Watsons, have lost their lives to this scourge. Dozens of joyriders, too have lost their lives for the quick thrill of pulling donuts in a high-performance car in a built-up residential area, and we shouldn’t apologise for the joyriders, but we do need to address why it is happening rather than thinking that a short stint in Hydebank or a kneecapping is going to solve the problem.
The same goes for any anti-social behaviour in the working class communities that run from Divis Street for 5½ miles out to Twinbrook, whether that be burglaries, murders, assault or alcohol and drug abuse. Or even, as has grabbed the headlines in recent weeks, bonfires and rioting.
Now, we’re all familiar with the work of the Provisional IRA, and we’re all familiar with the line that young men and women from across Ireland took up arms because they saw it as their only option. They had no money, no jobs, no future. Take a walk around Divis today, or Ballymurphy, Turf Lodge, Lenadoon, St James. You’ll see plenty of people with no money, no jobs, no future.
Sure, these areas have also produced doctors and nurses and teachers, artists, musicians, sports stars; but in the main the people who live in these areas will leave school at 16 (or earlier), with no qualifications, no real skills and no prospects beyond a menial minimum wage job on a zero hours contract. Many of them will come from single parent household where their main role model is absent or on benefits. Their parents will not be in high-flying jobs, they will have few qualifications, multiple mental health issues and no great desire to work for poverty wages a little above the pittance provided by the state. Their houses will be small and cramped, damp and dingy. Their extended family will live within a few doors or streets and they will be distrustful of outsiders.
They will also be distrustful of their political ‘representatives’. Those who spent the best part of the last half century as outlaws but who now appear in pressed suits, sitting in the House on the Hill voting through things like Welfare Reform or library closures. These people talk about things like an Irish Language Act when many of their constituents can barely write a coherent sentence in English (probably because their library is closed). Now they talk about evicting them from their small, crowded, damp and dingy homes.
They talk about punishing the parents and siblings of those who set fire to the derelict Credit Union building on Ross Road because they won’t control their children but we have to look back at the words of Brian Donnelly’s mother who went to Parents’ Advice and social services to get help for her son only to be told the resources weren’t there. We don’t have to ask why these kids are burning rubbish in the streets or stealing cars they’ll never have the chance to own; it’s evident, there’s nothing else for them to do. It’s what they’ve always done and all the Frankie Boyle or Derek Warfield gigs in the Falls Park at £18 a ticket won’t change that. The attempts to replace the 9th August Bonfires with Féile an Phobail means little to kids who won’t venture past Castle Street never mind give a damn about Palestine or Colombia.
There are no easy answers. There is no magic bullet – in fact that’s been tried, although most of them have been decommissioned now, but the one sure fire way to improve day-to-day live in run-down communities is to improve the future prospects for these kids. Teenagers on the Malone Road aren’t burning rubbish on the street or stealing BMWs because they know they have a future, they know when they leave primary school they’re definitely going to a grammar school. They know when they leave grammar school they’re definitely going to university. They know if they ask to borrow money from their parents that the words giro cheque or social fund definitely won’t be used. These points that I’m trying to make aren’t about making Divis or The Markets more middle class, they’re about giving all children the chance to be something they can be proud of.
A charity once used the line “What if the cure for cancer was inside the head of someone who couldn’t read”, well, what if the cure for cancer was inside the head of a sixteen-year old kid lying in an alleyway in Twinbrook with his knees shot out crying “hold me, Daddy, hold me Daddy”?
The Last Round 