Fear, force, and flight: configurations of intimidation and displacement in Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’

ABSTRACT

While the presence and intensity of armed conflict is often understood as the logical and axiomatic causal factor of flight, this article offers a more in-depth understanding of the myriad of circumstances and factors that shape forced displacement from homes and communities. Based on extensive field research, the article schematically aggregates displacement in Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ into three broad categories; 1. Direct intimidation 2. Indirect intimidation and 3. Mutual Arbitration. While the ‘extraordinary’ violence of burning homes, smouldering streets, and mass population movements came to symbolise something of an archetypal form of displacement in Northern Ireland, the majority of intimidation and movement during the ‘Troubles’ were the product of more tedious though no less effective forms of ‘everyday’ intimidation and threats. For many, the decision to flee was the culmination of months and sometimes years of enduring a variety of monotonous attacks and intimidation. While the turn towards rational choice within recent refugee approaches seeks to shift the emphasis from predominant narratives of disempowerment and victimhood, nevertheless, the research presented here underscores the primacy of fear and intimidation as the common determinants of forced movement. The communication of those threats, as this article demonstrates, came in many forms and complexions.

KEYWORDS:

• Displacement
• Northern Ireland
• the troubles
• intimidation
• armed conflict

Introduction

Though there exists a voluminous body of work examining conflict-related forced movements, many of these, tend to focus on processes of humanitarian aid, re-settlement, host communities, long-term integration, and the pursuit of a ‘just return’ home (Ager and Strang 2008; Davenport, Moore, and Poe 2003; De Vroome and van Tubergan 2014; Heimerl 2005). Relatively less explored and understood are the multi-causal factors that force persons to abandon their homes and communities. Moreover, the burgeoning body of research examining causes of displacement are primarily quantitative, drawing upon large-scale data-sets and statistical models (Czaika and Kis-Katos 2009; Moore and Shellman 2004; Steele 2011), thus bequeathing a relative dearth of qualitative approaches. While the presence of fear and armed violence is often understood as the logical and axiomatic causal determinant of flight, this article offers a more forensic understanding of the circumstances and factors that shaped decisions to flee homes and communities. The predominance and disproportionate focus on structural factors such as the magnitude of armed violence or the role of the state furnishes a vision of displacement that often omits or precludes the actions and voices of those forced to flee. This article seeks to address this shortfall.

While thousands of displaced Catholics crossed the border into the Republic of Ireland as refugees, particularly during the early years of the conflict, and hundreds of Protestants evacuated to Liverpool and Glasgow, it is important to note that the 30 years of armed conflict in Northern Ireland also generated considerable levels of internal displacement whereby people increasingly left their homes and sought safety within their own ethno-religious group and residential areas. While the arresting and discommoding footage and images of rows of terraced houses burning in Belfast in 1969 embedded particular understandings of forced displacement in the public consciousness, the research presented here contends that forced movement in Northern Ireland was rarely linear or consistent. In many ways, predominant interpretations of forced movement are tied to what is understood as an archetypal form of displacement, typically involving direct, physical attacks on homes, individuals and communities. While such acts of violence and intimidation were of course commonplace, they were, however, one of many complex patterns of fear and intimidation. Based on extensive field research, the article schematically aggregates displacement in Northern Ireland into three broad categories; 1. Direct intimidation 2. Indirect intimidation, and 3. Mutual Arbitration. The purpose of the article is therefore two-fold; first, it offers unique insights into the first-hand narratives of fear, violence and displacement that have hitherto been largely side-lined from the history of the Troubles, and second, it seeks to categorise displacement in Northern Ireland by its temporal and spatial dimensions via qualitative understandings of plural determinants which caused flight.

Context and extent of displacement

The armed conflict which engulfed Northern Ireland from 1969 until its peace accord of 1998, euphemistically dubbed the ‘Troubles’, claimed over 3700 lives and injured over 22,000 people. While the roots and trajectory of the conflict are historically complex, broadly speaking, the state of Northern Ireland, created out by the partition of Ireland in 1921, represents a contested territory between two competing ethno- national blocs. Typically, the Protestant population, which historically formed the majority population of the state, identify as unionist, loyalist and/or pro- British, while Catholics, a significant minority population, self- identify as Irish, nationalist, and/or republican. Given the chaos and confusion in the early years, and the frenetic and disparate forms of displacement, it is not possible to put an exact figure on levels of forced movement (Shirlow 2001).¹ The task of quantifying movement is further complicated given that many did not liaise with the Northern Ireland state, particularly those from the Catholic community, and so any formal record will invariably be incomplete. However, the figures that do exist are sobering. The Scarman Tribunal that examined the violence of the 12th to 15th August 1969 stated that at least 3500 families were displaced during these tumultuous days (McCann 2019). As the violence intensified in the early 1970s, between 30,000 and 60,000 people were forced to evacuate their home in Belfast from 1969 to 1973, comprising 11.8% of the population (Darby and Morris 1974). The city of Londonderry² saw the Protestant population in the city centre’s West Bank decrease from 8459 in 1971 to 1407 in 1991. In August 1969, hundreds of Catholic families were forced out in the town of Dungannon and Derry City. During the same period dozens of Protestants in Derrybeg in Newry were also forced out of their homes (Moffett et al. 2020). In April 1974 the Catholic population in the town of Newtownabbey (just north of Belfast) had been reduced by 95% since 1970 (180 families down to 16) due to intimidation, with the number of Catholic children at school in Rathcoole having dwindled from 1000 to 350 during this time. In the same period around a third of the Catholic population had departed Carrickfergus. Indeed, the census data supports this decline of Catholic families in Carrickfergus from 16.2% in 1971 to 8% in 1981. There was a forced ‘exodus’ of dozens of Protestant families from the Suffolk area of West Belfast in July 1976 while on the border with the Republic of Ireland, hundreds of Protestant families fled South Armagh and Fermanagh because of killings and intimidation. Overall, the Protestant population along the border declined from 19% to 1% between 1971 and 1991, the period of the most intense violence and threat (Murtagh 1996). According to the Northern Ireland Census, although the overall population of Newry increased by 32% between 1971 and 2001, the Protestant community decreased by over 50%.

Despite the significance and extent of forced displacement, it has nevertheless constituted little more than a footnote or fleeting reference in most academic accounts. Some welcome and notable exceptions, however, have either explicitly incorporated displacement as part of their overall thematic analysis or in some instances, alluded to its importance. The role of housing, segregation, territoriality, and identity in the perpetuation of ethno-sectarian antagonisms is well established and remains a feature that has endured despite the advent of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) peace accord (Boal 1969; Coyles 2017; Poole and Doherty 2010; Power and Shuttleworth 1997; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). Also noteworthy is Shirlow and Murtagh’s (2006) ground-breaking examination of place and territoriality in post-GFA Belfast, cogently demonstrating the role of segregated places in the reproduction of violence (and its mutation from armed violence to everyday forms of sectarianism) and the consequences for residents not only in terms of deepening communal polarisation, but also social exclusion, fatalism, and economic truncation. Until very recently, John Darby’s research on intimidation, violence, and housing in the early to mid-1970s and again in the mid-1980s was effectively the lone academic in-depth account of forced displacement. Although limited to the greater Belfast area only, nevertheless, his 1974 (with Geoffrey Morris) and 1976 studies examined a variety of forms of intimidation and their cyclical patterns, the immediate effects on individuals and communities, the importance of housing shortages in patterns of resettlement, and the role of various agencies in dealing with intimidation and its consequences.

More recently, a small but burgeoning body of work has begun to address the relative paucity of attention. The 1995 report ‘All over the place’ (Conroy, McKearney, and Oliver 2005) represented the first post-Troubles endeavour to shed light on the extent and impact of forced movement. Though highly informative the report was limited due to the relatively small number of interviewees (thirty-two) and also that it focuses excessively perhaps on former members of paramilitary organisations. Katherine Side’s (2015, 2018) work on displacement included visual representations of displacement across a range of diverse outputs, while also examining the efficacy of ‘Scheme for the Purchase of Evacuated Dwellings’ (SPED).³ Other recent outputs argued for the necessity to shift the harms and losses of displacement from the margins to the centre of scholarly approaches to Northern Ireland (Browne and Asprooth-Jackson 2019; Gilmartin 2021). Based on focus groups across a wide geographical spread, the ‘No Longer Neighbours’ report (Moffett et al. 2020) documented the sentiments of displacement, the impact of violence on land tenure, as well as housing and redress schemes during and after the conflict in Northern Ireland. This article, which is part of a comprehensive examination of forced displacement throughout the Troubles, builds upon and adds to these important works. Its unique contribution, however, is its in-depth analysis of the disparate factors that led to forced displacement during the Troubles, both in terms of its geographical scope and the diversity of perspectives.

Methods

The field research adopts an interpretivist methodological approach using semi-structured, narrative-based interviews with 67 persons conducted by the author between April 2018 and September 2021. The interviews occurred in Belfast, Londonderry, Liverpool, Shannon, Fermanagh, Newry, Dundalk, and Dublin. Of the 67 interviewees, 39 were male and 28 were female. Thirty-nine self-identified as a Protestant or unionist, while 28 self-identified as Catholic or nationalist. Some interviewees requested that their identities be kept confidential and therefore in those instances, the article used pseudonyms. Methodological considerations within the field of refugee studies have led many to concur that qualitative interviewing, specifically narrative approaches, are an important and effective way of learning from refugees because it permits a fuller expression of refugee experiences in their own words. A narrative-based data collection method is grounded in the belief that meaning is ascribed through experiences, and furthermore that we can only know about other peoples’ experiences from the expression they give to them (Eastmond 2007). While the politics of ‘storytelling’ is of course subjective and reflects perspectives and standpoints, its strengths reside in the ability of research participants to structure a narrative that signifies events and experiences in a particular order. In the case of displacement, the use of personal testimony challenges erroneous assumptions regarding the homogeneity of experience among refugees, thus displacing generalised analytical accounts in favour of a more nuanced understanding of the diversity and complexities within those groups forcibly displaced. While memory is indeed about the past, perhaps its defining feature is its presentism (Misztal 2003). As an active and dynamic process, recalling and narrating past experiences is shaped and filtered by the present, and moreover, the content of what is recalled or not is situational and contingent on the audience and narrator and the power relationship between them. Testimonies of tumultuous and violent ‘life experiences’ such as forced displacement should therefore be considered constructions and products of active agents and ‘experiencing subjects’ seeking to make sense of violence and turbulent change, paying particular attention to the ways in which experience is framed and articulated (Eastmond 2007).

Direct forms of intimidation and flight

I define displacement as a social process involving the communication of intimidation, fear, and threats, or the perception of intimidation and threats, which provokes either an immediate or long-term sense of insecurity and vulnerability that compels an involuntary flight, either permanently or temporarily, for the purpose of securing refuge and safety. Such a definition has the capacity to encapsulate all degrees and formations of forced movement by emphasising, first, the presence or perception of fear and insecurity, and second, the primacy of forced flight. According to Darby, intimidation is the ‘process by which, through the exercise of force of threat, or from a perception of threat, a person feels under pressure to leave home or workplace against his or her will’ (1986, 53). As the most prevalent reason for exile throughout the Troubles, direct intimidation broadly included direct assaults on homes through gun attacks, smashed windows, petrol bombs, arson, physical assaults on persons, verbal and written threats, among others. Drawing upon the work of Kunz (1973), I make the important distinction here between ‘acute’ and ‘anticipatory’ forms of movement as a result of direct intimidation; the former referring to mass movements triggered by a moment of rupture while the latter indicates a series of incremental events, typically over a longer period of time that culminate in a decision to flee. Initial episodes of forced displacement in the Troubles, such as the harrowing events in Bombay Street, Ardoyne, New Barnsley/Moyard, Percy Street, Conway Street and Clonard, are what Kunz (1973) terms ‘acute refugee movements’ which tend to arise from great moments of political and social change. In these instances, persons either flee en masse, or if their flight is obstructed, in bursts of individual or groups escapes. Of fundamental importance here is the immediacy of danger, attack, and insecurity, compelling those to seek safety with little or no preparation.

Between the 12th and 15th August 1969, parts of Belfast witnessed intense and extensive violence resulting in widespread destruction and the deaths of eight people, culminating in the deployment of the British Army onto the streets of Northern Ireland on the 14^th August. Moreover, these momentous events also gave rise to a refugee crisis which at the time, represented the largest involuntary movement of population in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Many interviewees were directly impacted by these painful and decisive events. ‘Anna’ married in 1967 and had a young family living in Hooker Street in August 1969. After the burning of her Hooker Street home, ‘Anna’ and her family found a new home in nearby Ballysillan, predominantly a Loyalist area of north Belfast. As the violence of the conflict intensified in the early 1970s, ‘Anna’ and her family were again forced from their home, and finally resettled back in Ardoyne where she lives today. She described her first experience of forced exile:

I was feeding my daughter and then the windows were smashed all round us and it was loyalists from Crumlin Road and B-Specials and they were coming in and smashed all the windows with their batons and we had to hide, going up the stairs and I had two kids and a wee baby and my husband and I were sitting on the stairs trying to keep them quiet because they [attackers] were running by the door … we just sat there all night and I remember them all shouting “burn everybody out” and we were terrified. So we went over to my mammy’s who lived nearby and the next day our house was just riddled with gunfire … ..my house was smashed up. So the women and the children were evacuated over to the Falls road and there was a school but we were all put into the school into the school assembly and so we slept there for first night. The next night loyalists burnt the next street, Brookfield Street; burnt the whole street.

Though it is tempting to interpret these egregious early episodes of mass burnings, violence, and displacement as simply the outworking’s of irrational violence and outright hostility, at this early stage, discernible spatial dimensions are clear. As with previous instances of inter-communal violence in the 1920s and 1930s, the onset of political uncertainty or general increases in sectarian tensions has tended to result in the frontiers separating ethno-religious residential communities becoming sites of violent enactment and border demarcation (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). Vulnerable homes and populations located on the peripheries and traditional fault-lines between ethno-religious communities became the primary focal points for escalating violence and displacement. While the initial solution of erecting barbed wire fencing and concertina-type barriers by the British Army and the creation of semi-permanent barricades operated by a mixture of persons including vigilantes, citizens defence groups and paramilitaries, the realisation of conflict as a long-term feature of daily life in Northern Ireland, however, demanded more robust and durable forms of separation, most clearly expressed in the creation of large-scale separation walls; high concrete and steel compositions dubbed ‘peace-lines’.

Mass house burnings and direct physical assaults on homes and persons that were distinct features of the early years of the Troubles have, understandably, come to represent something of a popular archetype. Consequently, the propensity to conflate displacement solely with mass burnings and physical attacks draws attention away from other forms of what perhaps could be termed more prosaic though no less common-place forms of attack and intimidation. Formations of direct intimidation also involved houses being daubed with threatening or sectarian graffiti, anonymous letters and phone calls threatening attack or orders of expulsion, and physical assaults of persons in proximity to the home. The outcomes of these instances can be broadly categorised as direct forms of intimidation resulting in anticipatory displacement. The idea of anticipatory displacement, though triggered by similar feelings of insecurity and vulnerability, take place in times when freedom of action, safety of movement and planned departure are still possible (Kunz 1973), though not always guaranteed. Jeanette Warke lived in Londonderry City centre, close to Bishop Street. Up until the early 1970s, she lived a happy and relatively quiet life with her husband and young children. From 1970 onwards however, both her home and family were targets for attack. The family eventually fled their home and resettled permanently in Newbuildings, a small rural, and at the time, an undeveloped village five miles from Londonderry. She described her experiences of intimidation:

I went out to the Grocery store and I was set upon. She raced across the Abercorn road, grabbing me by the hair, pushing me out onto the street shouting ‘you Orange bastard; orange scum’. So what happened [next], David was on night shift at Du Pont and the doors were getting banged ‘Get out! Get out! You’re being told now to get out’. And so I got the three kids and blankets and we all sat at the bottom of the stairs because I wouldn’t go upstairs because I was afraid of them throwing petrol bombs. So, we sat on the stairs because I couldn’t communicate with anybody. So David came in and the kids were all lying sleeping, actually lying on stairs and we were scared of our lives to move and he came in from his work and said ‘right well that’s that, we can’t do this anymore’

In contrast to the intensity associated with mass house burnings and evacuations, much of the direct forms of anticipatory intimidation were akin to a slow grind; months and sometimes years of smaller incidents that culminated in a decision by families to leave their homes for fears of safety and vulnerability. As is the case with most intrastate conflicts, the violence of the Troubles was unevenly spread across the Six Counties and therefore generalisations depicting ‘two communities’ both engaging in, and suffering displacement belies the importance of locality and place in determining levels of threat against individuals and their families. My research indicates a symbiotic relationship between displacement and the wider armed conflict; the plural configurations and locations of forced movement were shaped both by the general dynamics of the conflict at the time but also by localised boundaries of spatial demarcation and patterns of intercommunal relationships, particularly as the epicentres of displacement migrated from locations of traditional boundaries between Catholic and Protestant communities to the new locus of mixed residential settings. For example, mass displacement in central Belfast in 1969 was both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the forms of intimidation and movement that occurred in the suburban settings of Whiteabbey in the mid-1970s, or that which took place in suburban areas of outer East and West Belfast. Formations of displacement in Northern Ireland, are therefore relative to and contingent on the territorial environment and parochialized spatial relationships of coexistence, integration and animosity derived solely from ethno-religious identity and affiliation. The array of burnings and displacement in 1969 and 1970 effectively map directly onto homogenous residential areas and fault lines deemed to be de facto interfaces and boundaries of residential segregation. The erection of numerous, large-scale separation walls in Belfast and to a lesser extent in Derry, effectively mollified this previously fertile source of mass displacement leading to a reconfiguration of both patterns and locations of subsequent forced movement.

Unlike the acute forms of displacement caused overwhelmingly by imminency of firebombs, violence and attack, anticipatory forms of movement were a mixture of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, the latter typically related to employment, housing, and social networks and familial connections to other, ‘safer’ places of residence. Christina Bennett’s family were forced from their home in Whiteabbey on the outskirts of north Belfast in 1975. The family re-settled in Shannon in the Republic of Ireland, where employment and housing were relatively plentiful. She described a typical form of local intimidation of their home in 1974:

We were all sitting in the living room and there was a bit of panic and group of UVF or whoever they were came marching down the street in formation … like an army … and they stopped at every Catholic house and there were about three Catholic families in our street and they stopped at every Catholic house and they would stop and do their drill or whatever bullshit that made them feel fucking important; they stopped and done that outside every Catholic house and I remember being fascinated by it but I remember my mum being beside herself panicking and we were all told to get away from the windows and to get back and all of our doors were daubed in paint to like single us out.

The specific targeting of persons deemed to be non-co-ethnics, that being those who constituted a minority population in a particular territory, has been termed a strategic process of ‘displacing the disloyal’ (Steele 2011). The violence of forced displacement is clearly embedded in the overarching framework of competing ethno-nationalist claims regarding national territory, self-determination, and the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. However, the ebb and flow of displacement is also contingent on local dynamics of territory, tension, and engagement. Drawing from Steele’s (2009) distinction between selective, indiscriminate, and collective targeting, from 1971 onwards there is a distinct mutation at the level of targeting with a discernible shift from the communal to the individual; from wholesale acts to a more methodical and selective targeting of individuals.

The study of intra-state conflicts has consistently highlighted the need to foreground how spatial variations within a territory or state influence the characteristics and the durations of armed conflict (Cederman and Gleditsch 2009). While the issue of territory has long been identified as a salient mobilising factor in explaining the emergence of intra-state armed conflict and conflicting groups (Weidmann 2009; Wolff 2007), many accounts of Northern Ireland have understandably focused on the disputed six counties of the state at a macro-level, often neglecting the importance of local territory and identities in explaining formations and trajectories of violence. While places such as Belfast do contain some vast concentrations of single, homogenous communities, it was also home to a patchwork of residential enclave settlements, often in proximity to the ‘other’ community. The deliberate and selective targeting of civilians because of their alleged ethnic identity and not their behaviour or participation in political activities constitutes a form of ‘group-selective’ violence (Straus 2015) as it targets at the level of groups but is individually indiscriminate within those targeted groups (Gutiérrez-Sanín and Wood 2017). Mary McAleese (née Leneghan) and her family were forced from their North Belfast home in December 1972. They fled to west Belfast before permanently resettling in Rostrevor, Co. Down. She recalled:

Little by little, they picked off the Catholic neighbours, murdered them; intimidated them; looking back it was obvious that we were next on the list … and I remember the year before we lost our home, it was a year of pure misery; crowds gathering at the door, putting stones through windows, an attack on my brother John who is handicapped, profoundly deaf and an attempt to kill him. So they did that and bit by bit, our house changed from being a home to a place where you felt like you were a hostage and you were a hostage to forces that you simply did not know how to cope with. So we had all these episodes and had screens put up on our windows to prevent petrol bomb attacks; we never even dreamed that they [Loyalists] would come and empty two machine guns in through our house.

Having survived some of the worst episodes of violent displacement in the early years of the Troubles, the experiences of Mary and her family were more akin to individualistic attacks on isolated minority families located in increasingly hostile territories. Localised territorialisation, spatial factors, and group concentration are significant geographic aspects that deserve particular attention in the study of intrastate conflicts and civil wars. Expected changes in territorial control creates fear, disrupts feelings of security, often leading to forms of forced movement. For instance, the forced mass movement of Protestants from Ardoyne in the aftermath of the introduction of internment on August 9th 1971 and the flight of Protestants from New Barnsley/Moyard certainly display the characteristics associated with a shift or anticipated shift in territorial control that influenced perceptions of fear and insecurity. One of the largest population movements at that time was in the Farrington Gardens, Velsheda Park and Cranbrook Gardens in Ardoyne, where in a single day, the entire Protestant population of the district fled their homes, many of them torching their houses as they left. Kate Rankin (née Heffernon), her family, and extended family fled their Ardoyne homes and took refuge in abandoned flats in the nearby Glencairn estate. She recalled the panic and chaos of 9th August 1971 in her home street:

It was like a war zone – complete chaos. Some peoples’ furniture was getting thrown out the top windows into the garden because they couldn’t get it out down the stairs quick enough because the shooting had started and you were dodging bullets and it was really hard, hard for everybody but really hard for the older people. We were all trying to get into the car but my Dad could not get into the car because my father was a Dunkirk veteran and this is how he ended his life, by getting thrown out of his own house. And we were trying to get him out but he had arthritis and so he couldn’t sit, and so trying to get him down that path and trying to get him into the car, he was squealing because we had no choice because there was shooting coming up the street and eventually we ended up in a flat in Glencairn.

Fear and considerations of flight, therefore, arise as civilians anticipate a possible shift in territorial control and the resulting implications for their safety and wellbeing. Instances of what could be termed a ‘scorched earth’ policy, whereby fleeing persons either torched or physically wrecked their homes at the point of departure, became an increasingly prevalent characteristic of anticipatory forms of direct intimidation and movement.

For those in rural settings, displacement perhaps had greater significance and consequence where historical ties between ethnic identity, kinship and place were strong, particularly among Protestants close to the border (Donnan 2005). Among rural farmers, displacement had three major implications; first, the loss of a home (often a multigeneration household); second, the loss of livelihood and income; and finally, the loss of lineage to a homestead going back generations. Leslie Long lived with his family on their farm in Garrison, Co. Fermanagh. After the IRA killing of his farming neighbour Johnny Fletcher in 1972, Leslie stated that

the writing was on the wall; if you were going to stay, then that meant putting your life and the lives of your family at serious risk. And the army hierarchy told my father that they couldn’t protect him or the family and Protestants were being pinged all along the border; South Armagh, South Tyrone, South Fermanagh … and within a week of that, the animals were all sold, and we were living in Enniskillen. And that was very traumatic, especially for my parents.

According to Leslie, his parents never got over it.⁴ Furthermore, the grievance of forced movement was bound up in a collective consciousness regarding the increasing patterns of communal exodus and the loss of territory. For some interviewees, it was the implications of the latter that caused much anguish and often resistance to flee. The forced abandonment of farms among Protestants represented a ‘personal’ tragedy for all involved but was also interpreted as a wider socio-political issue, with a distinct fear of being ‘bought out’ or ‘bred out’ (Donnan 2005).

Indirect forms of intimidation

Like direct forms of anticipatory displacement, indirect forms of intimidation and flight typically occurred in instances where Catholics or Protestants lived as a minority within certain residential areas. Drawing upon John Brewer’s (2010) work on ‘communal violence’, members of the ethnic group were often targeted not as an ‘enemy combatants’, but by virtue of their tokenism as symbols of the ethno-religious community. Though it is important to foreground the heterogeneity and malleable boundaries associated with the seemingly solid ethno-religious blocs in Northern Ireland, violence and fear did, however, have the capacity to create a more unified sense of mistrust through the representation and/or perceptions of ethno-sectarian assault as an attack upon the ‘home’ community (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). The violence enacted against individuals functioned to solidify a communal sense of identity and was therefore interpreted collectively as an attack on the entire community, thus creating a mutually reinforcing relationship between collective identity, space and fear. With regards to displacement, a direct attack on one family home was interpreted as an indirect attack on all minority, co-ethnic residents. Added to these were more subtle incidents of exclusion and tension as the conflict persisted through the decades.

Much of my research with members of the Protestant community in Belfast, Londonderry and the Border region reflected an awareness of growing separation between themselves and what is often perceived as the ‘other community’. The increasing violence of the Troubles, and particularly the actions of the IRA, were consistently interpreted as mechanisms to mobilise collective fear as part of a deliberate strategy to forcibly move Protestants. Colloquially known as the Exodus, the Protestant population in the West Bank of Londonderry decreased from 8459 in 1971 to 1407 in 1991 (Smyth 1996, 53). Although determinants for this movement have been the subject of visceral debate, and while issues of housing and employment were clearly factors for some Protestants who left the city, the overarching reasons for many were intimidation (direct & indirect), the targeting of RUC and UDR personnel by the IRA, bomb attacks in the city centre, feelings of insecurity and vulnerability, and an overwhelming sense that Protestants, their identity, and culture were not welcome in the city. Jonathan Burgess’ family left the West Bank in the early 1970s due to increasing violence and fears for safety. He recalled the logic of fear among the minority Protestant community in the city:

You see, people didn't differentiate; if you and I [are Protestants and] lived in the same street, and went to the same church, and kids went to the same school, and went do the same clubs, and you happen to be a policeman and I don't, and someone comes to shoot you, well then, I'm thinking I'm going to be next, because fundamentally I am the same as you. And wearing that uniform doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me; civilian targets, commercial targets in the city centre, which led to this utter sense of dis-enfranchisement within the Protestant community in the city centre, so you have this shrinking Protestant community here.

The IRA’s targeting of both UDR and RUC Reserve in the border areas commenced in the early 1970s; given that many were part-time and therefore had other forms of occupation, meant that many killings were in close quarters such as the home, places of worship, and places of work when many were off-duty. Like Protestant experiences in Londonderry, IRA attacks were consistently interpreted by interviewees in the Border hinterlands as a widespread communal attack upon the Protestant population. Some interviewees were former members of the RUC or the UDR in the 1970s and 1980s and described the years of stress and constant vulnerability living in places like Newry, Warrenpoint and Kilkeel, among others. In many instances, the forced uprooting also included members of extended family who had no connection whatsoever to the police or army, such as parents, parents-in-law, and siblings. Many testimonies from interviewees adhere to Darby’s idea of psychological insecurity in an ‘environmental sense’, where the everyday lives of families are enmeshed in a general ‘intimidatory’ situation as opposed to being directly targeted. Darby (1986) distinguished between ‘specific and general’ environmental security; the latter are ‘pressures strong enough to produce enforced population movements, not because individuals have been attacked or threatened, but because the communities to which they belonged have themselves become isolated and vulnerable’ while the former includes

a variety of conditions within one's immediate community which create a feeling of unease or an impression that intimidation might occur, even though no specific threat has been made: neighbours becoming unfriendly; children finding it more difficult to find friends; an increase in the number of political or sectarian slogans on pavements or walls.

Darby refers to these as ‘environmental pressures’ which can induce real psychological insecurity amounting to fear. ‘Mixed’ areas became increasingly uncomfortable for whichever denomination slipped below the majority watermark, resulting in a constant reconfiguration of community space (Kilmurray 2016). Many Protestant interviewees who were forced from Ardoyne in August 1971 described a significant downturn in the general atmosphere after August 1969 onwards, particularly when they went to local shops, daily school trips or generally travelling in and out of their particular residential streets. Similarly, two Protestant respondents who lived in the Rosemount area of Londonderry also recalled similar experiences of hushed silences and whisperings when entering local shops, something they had not experienced prior to 1969. For those who constituted a ‘minority group’ within a mixed residential setting, the pursuit of ‘indirect’ forms of forced displacement functioned by fear, suspicion and vulnerability which tended to cascade through a population via selective, individual attacks; a type of ‘collective targeting by proxy’. In addition, other important factors such as attacks on cultural and political symbols, places of worship, cultural institutions and activities such as sports and language, all compounded existing levels of fear and insecurity. Throughout the conflict and up to present times, sites of cultural and social importance such as Orange Halls, GAA clubs, statues, memorials, among others have been targeted, exacerbating levels of mistrust and anxiety, thus eroding feelings of belonging and safety.

An emerging tendency in Migration Studies is the application of models of conventional migration determinants (rational choice approaches) onto conflict-related displacement to re-frame displaced persons as agentic rather than reactive. Essentially, such ‘rational choice’ approaches suggest multi-causal determinants, including ‘push’ factors like violence, conflict, and war, while also emphasising ‘pull’ factors such as housing, employment, social and familial networks to places of resettlement, among others (Steele 2011). Underpinning such analyses is an assumption that people weigh the benefits of fleeing their homes against the costs of remaining and therefore make strategic choices regarding flight (Adhikari 2013; Davenport, Moore, and Poe 2003; Moore and Shellman 2004, 2007). Though disagreement exists about the level of realism in such assumptions, it is plausible to assume that civilians pay close enough attention to patterns and trends of violence during conflict to make informed decisions about whether to leave their homes. In the context of violence and threats against ‘their group’, households have strong incentives to leave, which increase if others begin to do so, because the odds they will suffer increases (Steele 2011). In short, one will leave one’s home when the probability of being a victim of persecution becomes sufficiently high that the expected utility of leaving exceeds the expected utility of staying (Moore and Shellman 2004). Once the threat to civilians has passed the threshold, displacement should occur without much delay but is often mediated by several factors, including transportation costs, social networks, variation in how individuals assess risk, degree of attachment to home and economic opportunity. The dominance of ‘push and pull’ models is critiqued primarily for its deterministic outputs and its occlusion of other salient factors such as social networks, familial contacts, as well as state policies, among others (Samers and Collyer 2017). Whether an individual can freely exercise agency to emigrate, or is forced to do so, is at the heart of the distinction between voluntary and forced migration; the former synonymous with seeking a ‘better life’, the latter concerned with saving their lives (Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Erdal and Oeppen 2018; Jeffery 2010; Vullnetari 2012; Zetter 2007). Migration scholars increasingly call our attention to a complex variety of economic, political, and social factors, including unemployment and poor economic prospects which often co-exist with weak governance, breaches of human rights, ethnic discrimination, political regimes of dubious legitimacy and ultimately conflict.

As a heterogenous group, experiences, and reasons for flight throughout the Troubles were varied and diverse. Adopting the idea of forced/voluntary movement as a continuum (Van Hear 1998), clearly many episodes of displacement in Northern Ireland were located firmly towards the ‘forced’ end of the spectrum. However, agentic qualities were clearly present among others, such as in the cases where employment or housing were sought and secured before flight; choices regarding time of departure, destinations, and transportation also indicate conscious actors securing pathways of flight while simultaneously appraising levels of intimidation, threat, and insecurity in their environment. While many respondents who survived direct forms of intimidation and displacement were repelled by any suggestions regarding volition or ‘choice’, as most stated that they fled for their lives, in other instances, most notably with indirect intimidation, there were degrees of agency regarding exercising of choice, particularly with regards to when and where to move.

Notwithstanding, Crawley and Skleparis’s (2018) extensive research found that even in instances of movement prompted by socio-economic reasons, those factors have to be considered within the wider framework of conflict and political violence. Conflict, they argue, particularly where it becomes protracted, undermines the ability to earn a livelihood and feed a family by killing primary breadwinners, destroying businesses, and making it impossible to travel to work (Crawley and Skleparis 2018). Many Catholic interviewees certainly spoke of discrimination in employment; many Protestants highlighted the deliberate targeting of Protestant businesses in urban centres and farms in rural settings. Added to this is the fact that conflict had a detrimental impact on the overall economy, leading to vast levels of economic subvention by the British government. The point here is that even where there appear to be clearly instances of socio-economic factors shaping decisions to leave, socio-economic insecurity in the place of origin needs to be considered within the overall framework of armed violence. Processes appraising new destinations for flight are therefore relative to and wholly contingent on the turbulent context of the current location.

My research uncovered a range of what could be called socio-economic factors that influenced decisions by some respondents to flee homes and communities; such ‘pull factors’ typically comprised of opportunities for employment, housing, quality of life, and existence of familial networks to new places of settlement. However, many described a whole series of threatening incidents, sometimes stretching across months and even years – a slow grind. For those who suffered indirect intimidation, there was no single causal event but rather a tipping point where the risks associated with staying were eventually outweighed by the benefits of finding security elsewhere. Though ‘Shane’ and his family had previously received threats including phone calls, letters, and sectarian graffiti on their home, it was the increase in attacks on other Catholic houses in their estate that led to them to flee their Whiteabbey home in 1972, but not before his father had secured employment and housing elsewhere. The family permanently relocating to Shannon in Co. Clare. Though the initial and overriding determinant for their movement was fear and intimidation, their decision to settle in Shannon was also shaped by socio-economic reasons.

My father had found work in the South⁵ and he was spending two days out of every eight days with us and the rest of the time he was away working … there were jobs down south; houses down south; there were grants to get people down south. And people came for different reasons; some people came because they were wanted by the [Northern Ireland] authorities; some people just wanted to get away from the Troubles; some people came because there was jobs and housing here, so a real mixture of reasons why.

While there is evidence of a tension in the processes of deciding to stay or leave, nevertheless, the existence of ‘pull factors’ as realistic and viable options are wholly contingent on the pre-existence of ‘push factors’ such as fear, violence, and intimidation. Though evidence indicating socio-economic factors could be conceived as constituting the existence of ‘choice’, the salient issue of departing a home and community was consistently framed by respondents as a ‘forced choice’. The tendency to suggest conventional migration models of ‘push and pull factors’ as co-equal determinants within a logical, rational choice or cost–benefit process should therefore be treated with caution when applied to conflict-related displacement. The critical issue here is that conflict, fear and insecurity in the place of origin consistently precipitates and provokes considerations of socio-economic factors, which primarily arise as a means to safeguard the well-being of individuals and families.

Mutual arbitration

There is also evidence of people entering into informal (non-state sanctioned) forms of ‘house swaps’ as well as the widespread practice of squatting. This type of movement was prevalent in parts of Belfast where the (re)drawing of sectarian boundaries via physical barriers between communities in the early years of the conflict often meant the partitioning of streets, roads, and housing developments. By August 1969, the increasing inter-communal tensions initiated a wave of movement of people seeking to ‘retreat to their own side’ via ‘mutual agreement’ (McKee 2020). Even prior to the eruption of violence over the 14th and 15th August 1969 there was evidence of semi-formal arrangements between voluntary bodies on either side of the communal divide to ‘swap’ houses (Prince and Warner 2019). According to first-hand accounts, the Woodvale Defence Association had been ordering local Catholic families to leave the Woodvale area. Seeking refuge in Ardoyne, Protestant families who had lived in Ardoyne for generations were vulnerable and insecure to threats of intimidation and left the area, seeking refuge in the homes vacated by Catholics in Woodvale (McKee 2020, 7). Michael Liggett stated:

You had people swapping houses; like people saying “fuck this; this is too dodgy; will you swap houses with me?” So voluntarily … so while some were done forcibly others were voluntary. Now it was something like “right you’ve 48 hours to do the swap” and now those swaps and methods was also used in the 20s and 30s.

The dearth of state-led assistance often meant that displaced families, who were now homeless, were engaging in squatting to secure housing and some semblance of stability. Data gathered in the early 1970s certainly corroborates the existence of house swaps and squatting. Of the 2069 forced moves in Belfast during the month of August, 1971, 12% of these moved to houses in close proximity to the homes they fled. In many instances, according to the Community Relations Commission report, families moved to houses that were ‘up the street or in the next street’. During periods of mass evacuations, families and individuals would squat in empty houses, pending the outcome of decisions by the Housing Executive. During the Troubles, squatting practices were used by individuals displaced from their homes to move into a more community-aligned estate at short notice, or by local paramilitaries to distribute housing to selected families. In the mid-1970s squatting had a pattern of a displaced community or estate being replaced by families from the other community at short notice, given the limited housing supply in areas such as West Belfast. (Moffett et al. 2020). From August 1969 onwards, forced movement became both a symptom and cause of intercommunal conflict and tensions. Faced with thousands who had lost their homes and possessions in the violence of August 1969, the Housing Trust allowed displaced Catholic families to occupy completed or near completed houses in the Lenadoon estate, consequently altering the demographic composition of the area which was intended to be mixed with a Protestant majority. Catholic evacuees from Rathcoole and other parts of Belfast also arrived at the newly built Twinbrook estate and squatted in houses there. The increased ratio of Catholics to Protestants engendered high levels of reluctance among Protestants to live there, effectively ending any hopes for Twinbrook as a mixed housing development. By February 1973, squatting had reached epidemic levels with 3300 families squatting in Housing Executive property (Darby and Morris 1974, 57).

Conclusion

Using a case-study of the hitherto neglected stories of forced displacement in Northern Ireland, this article contributes important qualitative insights to wider debates examining causes of flight. Understanding the multifaceted factors that impinge upon forced flight and decisions to flee such as those outlined in this article, underscores the importance of ‘everyday’ forms of violence and intimidation in formations of conflict-related displacement. While the ‘extraordinary’ violence of burning homes and streets came to symbolise something of an archetypal form of displacement, the majority of intimidation and movement during the ‘Troubles’ were the product of more tedious though no less effective forms of intimidation and threats. For many, the decision to flee was the culmination of months and sometimes years of enduring a variety of monotonous attacks and intimidation. While the turn towards rational choice within recent refugee approaches seeks to shift the emphasis from predominant narratives of disempowerment and victimhood, nevertheless, the research presented here underscores the primacy of fear and force as the common determinant. Irrespective of the disparate formations of displacement and the diverse pathways of flight throughout the Troubles, overwhelmingly, displacement was triggered by increasing levels of danger and threat. In other words, it is the fear and volatility in the place of origin which provokes the subsequent emergence of ‘pull’ factors leading to flight to a new location. While the evidence from Northern Ireland suggests a strong corelation between formations and frequency of displacement and the wider armed conflict, the article also pinpoints the importance of ‘localised’ spatial factors such as territorialisation and the overall unevenness of displacement. Though ethno-national and sectarian antagonisms are conventionally understood as the axiomatic root cause of forced movement, however, the likelihood of experiencing and suffering displacement were determined by multifaceted causes including geographical location, local ethno-religious relations, social class, and the presence or establishment of pathways of mobility out of precarious and unsafe residential settings.

Acknowledgement

I wish to express my gratitude to the two reviewers for their comments and feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council; Busteed Postdoctoral Scholarship, University of Liverpool.

Notes

1 Forced displacement was not unique to the ‘Troubles’ but in fact is a historical feature at the very root of division in Ireland. The plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century saw over 170,000 English and Scottish settlers given land in Ulster from dispossessed ‘natives’, leading to the establishment of twenty-three new towns in the province. More than any other historical event, the Ulster plantation copper fastened the tenacious links between land, identity, and power. Ethno-sectarian violence and forced displacement was recorded throughout the 1800s and again during the partition of Ireland in 1921 and the early years following the creation of the Northern Ireland state.

2 Although the city council changed its name from Londonderry City Council to Derry City Council in 1984, (after a change in council boundaries in 2015, it is now Derry City & Strabane District Council) the official title of the city remains Londonderry. Broadly, Protestant interviewees referred to the city as Londonderry while Catholics used Derry. To reflect this diversity, the article uses both terms.

3 SPED, a British Government funded programme, was established in 1973 to provide ‘limited financial compensation’ to homeowners and residents who lost their homes due to the conflict. However, the SPED process was deemed complex and onerous, with tight eligibility criteria, the requirement of ‘evidence’ of displacement, and long, bureaucratic processes involving solicitors, the RUC, and the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. Complicating this further is the fact that many Catholics were reluctant or unwilling to deal with the RUC, deemed by many Catholics as a partial and coercive police force.

4 The impact of displacement on individuals, families, and communities was a central theme across all research interviews, but is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article. See Gilmartin (2021) for an in-depth exploration of loss, harm and long-term consequences of displacement.

5 ‘South’ refers to the Republic of Ireland.