Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

In 1977 having finished my time at North Tyneside CDP I got a job at the Ulster Polytechnic located in Jordanstown in the Belfast Urban Area suburbs. I was appointed as Reader in Sociology – it took me about 20 years to get back to being a Reader when I went back to Durham and my job as a Lecturer in 1981.  I made contact with people working with Community Organizations Northern Ireland (CONI) and with Belfast Trades Council. My job role was to say the least poorly defined but I took on some generic teaching of undergraduates and of women doing a Health Visitors Course. When we were double booked in a room and Engineers tried to throw us out – I was not brought up to take lip from greasers and was about to resist vigorously – but the Health Visitors got in first and to use an Ulster expression “ate the face of them” and saw them off. They were great students.   My main academic role at Ulster Poly was to establish a part time Masters Degree in Social Research Methods and I taught a lot of the modules on that to a mix of students working in various roles from the police to social work. Part time students with real world work experience bring a lot to their study programmes and have always been a real pleasure to engage with.

I did a lot of research for community groups and quite a bit for trade unions. Standard Telephones at Monkstown was taken over by British Calendar Cables and I worked for about a week in the Commercial Section of Belfast City Library looking into the taking over company in the financial press, at its annual reports, and at a very useful report from the Monopoly’s Commission. This resulted in a report for the shop stewards at Monkstown. There was nothing particularly dodgy about BICC then, but the shop stewards wanted to know what they had to deal with and found this background report useful. Quite a few of them had UVF associations and that loyalist group whilst then utterly sectarian – its leadership found the light after the peace process of the 1990s – was very worker oriented so I got a reputation as useful and sensible with them. CONI in the 70s was ‘cross community’ i.e. had membership organizations from both working class catholic and protestant areas. This was before the hunger strikes after which many of those cross community links broke down.

Most of my work for the community groups was on housing issues although I helped with research for a group of women clothing workers on the Shankill Road when Coates and Paton closed their factory and they established a workers cooperative take over. I also did work for groups in Newtonabbey – the  big suburb to the North of Belfast where the Poly was located – on the implications of their area being placed in the Northern Health Board whose hospital provision was in Antrim – reachable by a minor road across the mountains, rather than Belfast. As I recall they managed to retain access to Belfast A and E and Maternity services.

Public sector housing in Northern Ireland was provided by both local authorities and the Northern Ireland Housing Trust. The local authorities were deeply sectarian and the Troubles kicked off over housing inequalities with the trigger being the allocation of a house in Derry to the single woman secretary of a unionist politician. Originally this was addressed as a civil rights / equality matter but the vicious response of the Unionist state and protestant para military groups in attacking a peaceful civil rights march at Burntollet Bridge changed things, On the Northern Ireland housing estate at Rathcoole in Newtonabbey where houses had been allocated on a need rather than sectarian basis – the NIHT was straight – 800 catholic families were intimidated out of their homes when the violence began. It was at its worst in the earlier 1970s but was still going strong when I arrived in 1977.

Many of the members of community groups associated with CONI had paramilitary connections on their own side. It would have been hard to function otherwise. However, these did not impinge on the kind of research support work I was doing and that work gave me a reputation and made my position easier, particularly when I moved for a better flat and a shorter commute to the corner of the Antrim and Limestone Roads in North Belfast. Northern Ireland is not a big place and getting known helps. For the catholic elements in CONI I was acceptable in having an Irish name, being related to a prominent republican family in South Derry, and above all else having been to school with the Christian Brothers. If I had had a Jesuit education it would have been a very different matter.

In essential respects the Belfast Urban Area was entirely familiar to me. It was the product of 19^th and early 20^th Century industrialization and was a urban industrial city region much like Tyneside but lacking coal. Like the NE of England there had been in the 1960s a relatively successful programme of industrial diversification with a number of plants incoming – for example Firestone Tyres in Craigavon New Town and a range of synthetic textile plants in and around Belfast. Craigavon New Town, located in North Armagh between Portadown and Lurgan was occupied by young families who had moved out from Belfast. It was a mixed area and survived as such during my time in Northern Ireland. One of my colleagues, Mike Morrisey, lived there and was a key player in community action. I spent a lot of time in Craigavon and made friends there.

One of CONI’s activities was to run weekend schools for activists and I regularly participated in them. CONI’s leadership had a typically quakerish style but the activists took little notice of this and were much more workerist on both sides of the sectarian divide. They were in every respect but the sectarianism, exactly the sort of people I had been brought up with and lived among on Tyneside. Northern Ireland was undergoing the same kind of deindustrialization which was happening in the NE of England. When Thatcher came to power the insistence in the interests of City of London finance capital on maintaining a high exchange rate for the pound led to the closure of many of the new plants across the province. My most important publication during my time in Northern Ireland was The Deindustrialization of Northern Ireland David Byrne First published: June 1980https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1980.tb00308.x in the radical Geography journal Antipode.

My then wife was completing her undergraduate degree in Politics (as a young mature student) at Newcastle University and our daughter was rising eleven. Northern Ireland still had an 11+ exam unlike Gateshead where she and her mother were living which was fully comprehensive so Jane had had no preparation for an 11+. The only real schools in Belfast which had any element of non sectarianism were elite Grammar Schools. Also, Christine, my then wife, wanted to take a Further Education PGCE course and would have to live away from home to do so.  When my old job was readvertised at Durham for these reasons I decided to apply for it, got it, and went back to Tyneside with some regret although I was glad not to have lived in Northern Ireland during the hunger strike years. I visited regularly for many years although not so much since about 2000. Chrissie went to Huddersfield Poly for her FE PGCE and became an FE lecture, first in General Studies but then in Trade Union studies. I went back to Durham where I stayed until I retired but continued for five years as a part time teacher and then had fractional co-investigator research roles until I was 76.  Jane went to her local comp, then to both Newcastle and Gateshead FE Colleges to take 4 A levels, one at a night class, and then to study Economics at Manchester University.