Healing the wounds: how social landlords are tackling segregation in Northern Ireland

And at the last census in 2011, on 90% of social housing estates in Northern Ireland at least four in five people were one of these groups or the other – that rises to 94% in Belfast.

“The social fallout from that segregation echoes and reverberates within our estates,” says Jennifer Hawthorne, head of communities at the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE).

This housing authority, established in 1971 to separate social housing from sectarianism and politics, was once the UK’s largest landlord with around 170,000 homes. Its stock has dwindled following a series of transfers to housing associations and the implementation of the Right to Buy, but it remains an 86,500-home behemoth. A fifth of peace walls across Northern Ireland are on its land.

Promoting good relations between religious groups has been a legal requirement of all statutory authorities in the region since the Good Friday Agreement. But, Ms Hawthorne adds, there’s more to it than that for the NIHE.

“We’ve been in these communities for more than 40 years. We know the effects of segregation and living with these walls. So we’re really committed as an organisation because we know our communities and we know that we can really effect a change with them.”

The walls present huge challenges to the NIHE as a social landlord too, brought into sharp focus by a trip through its estates in north Belfast. Take Bombay Street, a republican neighbourhood. The housing stock here is unusually new, with the whole street having been rebuilt after it was razed to the ground by a loyalist mob in August 1969.

High quality though the homes may be, the street is undeniably cramped. The small terraced houses are packed in together with barely any green space. That’s a reflection of the housing pressure experienced by Catholic households in north Belfast, where they make up 45% of the population but 75% of those in housing stress on the waiting list.

And all the while, one of the peace walls looms over them – a huge army-green partition. Some of the houses are literally armoured to protect against missiles being cast over it. This wall creates a physical barrier preventing further development. New social homes are urgently needed to tackle the area’s rising homelessness – but there is nowhere for them to go.

A mural in Belfast commemorates Stevie McKeag, commander of a west Belfast paramilitary group during the Troubles

A report by the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland in June found Catholics still wait six months longer than Protestants for social housing on average. Pass through the spiked gates to the other side of the wall – which will be shut by police after 6.30pm – and it is easy to see why. On the unionist side, the homes have front gardens. The streets are noticeably wider, the buildings sparser. There are large grassy areas in between, frequently used by locals to build dangerously tall bonfires.

But here too, development is suffocated; not by lack of land, but by market forces. Belfast’s Protestant population has been steadily declining for some 20 years – meaning social housing demand in these areas is extremely low compared with the other side of the wall. Here, a new home’s value would barely cover the cost of construction, while its price in a republican area would be nearly twice as high.

“In effect you have two housing markets. You end up with paradoxes. Some areas have a very high demand for land but nowhere to build, while in others there is plenty of land but no demand,” explains Duncan Morrow, a leading academic in sectarian segregation in Northern Ireland based at Ulster University. “And both sides suffer because of it.”

It’s a huge housing management headache, putting some of the issues faced by social landlords across the rest of the UK into perspective. And sectarianism causes the NIHE problems in many other ways, too.

“Walls are a physical manifestation of serious conflict within that area.” - Jennifer Hawthorne, head of communities, Northern Ireland Housing Executive

For instance, a loyalist mural appears on a house on one of its estates in the once-notorious Shankill area of west Belfast. It is a tribute to the late Stevie McKeag. Nicknamed ‘Top Gun’, he was a commander of one of Northern Ireland’s most violent paramilitary groups, a terrorist who the Royal Ulster Constabulary associated with at least a dozen murders. The NIHE has come under fierce criticism for its failure to take the mural down, but there is little to be done; the house has been sold under the Right to Buy, and so it has no power to remove it.

Through its Building Relations in Communities programme, the NIHE is doing its best to ease sectarian tensions on its estates. The programme costs about £1m a year all in, with the money drawn from various sources.

There are huge challenges. The first lies within the people living next to the walls.

“Those walls are a physical manifestation of serious community conflict within that area,” says Ms Hawthorne. “So you have that memory within those residents – many who have been there for 20 to 30 years and whose thought when you suggest the removal of the peace wall is: ‘But my next-door neighbour was shot dead, how are you going to protect me and make sure I’m not going to get attacked?’ Those are real fears.”