I Am A Stranger Here Myself. Falls Road 2025…

I was in West Belfast last Wednesday..

The Falls Road. The main arterial road heading west out of the city centre. There are other intersections, Albert/Northumberland Street. Grosvenor/Springfield, Donegall Road, Whiterock and the fork on the road where Upper Falls goes left and Glen Road goes right.

It was my part of the world from birth until I was almost 27 years old. The childhood years, school years, the Troubles. To 1970, I lived in a side street off the Grosvenor Road and until 1979 at New Barnsley.

Of course nowadays I am a visitor and travel on the glider. But many a time I have walked that road.

Strange that I have been all around Ireland waving my free travel pass on trains and buses but I never really consider Belfast as part of that.

So Wednesday.

Castle Street is a dump.

It was not always a dump. My mother used to go into Anderson McAuley and the two ladies in the Young Person Clothing Dept at the Castle Street entrance would tell her if they had any shirts and sweaters “suitable for your John”. My wife for her many good points, does not buy my clothes.

John Frazer where I bought my first polo neck sweater in the Summer of Love 1967 and Harrisons record shop where I bought my first single in 1968 but before that I would see Mr Harrison sellotape the new records to the window. That was the beauty of it…blue Decca (the Rolling Stones), orange CBS (Bob Dylan) and black Parlophone (the Beatles).

As a child with my parents, there was the Continental Cafe and as teen, there was Victors.

There was St Marys Church. My father would never pass and would often remind me that Belfast’s first Mass House was a gift from the Presbyterian community in the city.

Now when I speak of this to my children and grandchildren, I have to add that two RUC officers were shot dead outside the church by gunmen who had been hiding inside. Shameful.

Across King Street and much developed now but I can vaguely remember old buildings there including a mission hall.

Millfield goes from Divis Street towards unknown territory to me…North Belfast. I just recall it as dangerous in the 1970s and a bad spot for abduction.

Westlink…is somewhere around what I would have called Boundary Street, Townsend Street and Campbells Row and Durham Street.

Campbells Row/ Boomer Street was easily the worst housing I had ever seen.

For those who missed the clue, at points in the city’s history Townsend Street was literally the end of the town and Boundary Street was literally the boundary.

St Mary’s CBGS… first there in September 1963 with over 200 first years in the court yard to be taken off to six class rooms in the oldest part of the campus, a building now knocked down at John Street.

For a reason I never understood, class assignment was on the basis of alphabetical order.

I was in 1D with a load of Murrays, Murphys and the like.

The old art block still stands, as does the main building.

I wonder if the block of outdoor toilets still stands.

From 1963 to 1968, I can honestly say I never went to the toilets at St Marys (I only lived 10 minutes walk away)…the smell was overwhelming…mostly Embassy Regal, Silk Cut and Senior Service.

For fans of the Irish language there was a dunderin called the Ard Scoil which was symbolic of how limited the language was.

Divis Tower, the place derided by middle class comedians, is there from about 1967.

Within a while it was known as the High Chapparel….the first gale force winds after it was built sent us all out on the streets to watch it sway backwards and forwards. People said it was going to fall but others said it had to move like that.

Behind Divis Tower is where the Loney was…swept away by maisonettes that turned out to be bigger slums than the dwellings they replaced.

I had a friend in the maisonettes. They were scary. At one time dubbed Planet of the Irps (sic) and along the balconies could be Republican snipers and British foot patrols. The maisonettes were swept away and better homes built.

To the right Dover and Percy Streets where the incursion in 1969 was stopped at St Comgalls school. And to the left, St Peters (then) Pro Cathedral where I was an altar boy from 1961 to 1963. We were scandalised when a lad from the neighbourhood had a lassoo and took the head off St Anthony.

Andrews Mill where my grandfather and Uncle Jackie worked. Now the so-called International Wall of Art……..who “owns that?”….who decides what right on political art will be displayed? A lot of stuff about Gaza and Palestine displayed and whether I agree or disagree is secondary to the questions. Can I go to that wall and paint a tribute to (say) John Hume? Or Dr Joe Hendron?

A group of tourists are listening to a tour guide. And around the corner in Northumberland Street there is another group of tourists and another tour guide. As an open top tourist bus goes past, I know I missed my vocation. I should have been a tour guide to West Belfast. Nobody does SPOOFING better than I do.

I am saddened that there are no businesses on the left hand side of this part of Falls Road. Clonard Cinema, the launderette, the TV repair man and Lenas have all gone. In the 1960s Lenas stayed open into the wee small hours. The showbands who played Belfast….the Orpheus, Astor and the rest met up there and bought their cigarettes and snacks. Their publicity photos decorated the shop.

There is a memorial garden dedicated to “D Company, 2nd Battalion, Belfast Brigade”. Much as I dislike the International Wall there are better, smaller murals to local history including the 1920s pograms.

On the right hand side of the road, the Diamond Cinema is even longer gone than the Clonard. And the big car showroom (was it Isaac Agnews?) was burned down in August 1969. Now a shopping area called Twin Spires. The Falls Baths is still there now re-branded as a Leisure Centre. Uncle Jackie, a swimmer and lifeguard often talked about the bodies from Belfast Blitz that he saw there.

The Falls Library….when I was a child the staff scared me. I never felt at ease there.

Ah the Bobby Sands Mural …some Europeans getting photographed there and at the Sinn Féin office and gift shop next door.

And Cupar Street Clinic where I can still hear the screams as children went to the school dentist. And this is Clonard area where Uncle Jackie and Auntie Mary lived in Waterford Street and had no children but had a TV set where I was a child with my daddy watching Cup Finals in early 1950s and Uncle Jackie called Auntie Mary (a pretty good singer) to sing Abide With Me.

We called Dunville Park, “The Wee Park”. There is a statue for local boxer Johnny Caldwell. We all went to his street (Cyprus Street I think) to see him and the boxing championship belt. It was near Dunville Park that a Sticky shoved a gun in my mouth.

Grosvenor Road/Springfield Road goes across Falls Road. St Pauls Church (my grandparents parish) with the group of white statues in a Calvary scene. Reputedly in the Second World War, unionists wanted them painted black as the Luftwaaffe were using the white figures as a guide. Can that be true?

I worked in the Royal Victoria Hospital. Awful place to be in the 1970s. And Bostock House, the nurses home. To her dying day, Auntie Sheila never forgave Constable Pig McNeilly of the Royal Ulster Constabulary for making her cross and re-cross the new fangled pedestrian crossing while I waved up at my cousin Philomena (Meena! Meena!) from Coalisland.

And St Dominics still wearing the maroon uniform my sister wore. Now I see other uniforms….green for boys and girls. No idea what that school is. The Brown Bombers are still on the road but… there are BOYS at the school. Trying not to think that Saint Louise’s Spread Diseases cos thats not very nice.

St Marys Teacher Training College (for “girls”) is now a University college. Co-Ed of course.

Before Christmas 1954, I was treated for burns in the Childrens Hospital and was there for a month in 1958 because I was not thriving (as they said in the 1950s) and in 1964 for some surgery.

Broadway… Brighton Street, where my grandparents and Auntie Sheila lived. My spiritual home much more than my actual home off Grosvenor Road. In 1957 my parents were at a funeral in County Armagh and I convinced my two year old sister that our mother had died and I took her walking from Brighton Street down Falls Road and down Grosvenor Road to our home. Luckily a man saw us and followed us and reported it to RUC in Cullingtree Road.

Broadway…the Beehive, the post office, Breens Shop, where the bus stop was. And Auntie Sheila and I stood there every night and as a trolley bus (Whiterock 11, Falls 12, Glen 13, Falls Park 12 and City Cemetery 15) went up the road…maybe to where the buses went to bed we shouted over “Bus, Bus, tell another Bus to come!” And coming from the bend on the road at Daly’s Garage we would see Greencastle (7), Fortwilliam (8) or Whitewell (10) come towards us.

I am old enough to remember Orangemen parading to Broadway Presbyterian Church. I am no fan of the Orange Order but I am not a fan of An Cultúrlann the real and spoof home of Irish language in West Belfast…the Gaeltacht Quarter. I just liked it better when it was a church and had a minister of the calibre of Rev Ray Davey and a small Protestant community in the streets around it.

One of Uncle Jackies formative experiences was the aftermath of a church worker being murdered in the grounds of the church in the 1920s.

At the corner of Brighton Street …Toners Butchers, Auntie Sheila, all 4ft 9 inches and angry stood up to the Paratroop who manhandled me. “Leave that child alone! I have every hair on his head counted!”. At the time, the Child was about 19 years old.

The block between Brighton Street and Islandbawn Street…Toners, Fuscos chip shop, McKeagneys shop where Auntie Sheila bought vests for me and liberty bodices for my sister…….are there still liberty bodices?), Meleadys fruit and veg, the Wee Docs and the chemists.

The Wee Doc was our doctor…elderly and diminutive and no appointment necessary. A downstairs parlour waiting room and called upstairs by one of his spinster sisters, Queenie and Gertie. Dr McCormick stood with his back to a roaring fire…Auntie Sheila always said he was warming the (w) hole of his body.

A one man practice but there were other doctors, at Albert Street, Divis Street, Falls Road who shared night calls with the Wee Doc.

Once about twenty years ago, I was at a SDLP meeting and was talking to a doctor who had done some GP training with the Wee Doc and it turns out the wee old man was a hero in the First World War.

He lived somewhere about Cliftonville Road and Queenie and Gertie would sometimes get the bus with us from Breens to Northumberland Street/Andrews Mill.

In 2025, nobody is called Queenie and Gertie. And there used to be a lot of spinster ladies…”unclaimed treasures” who went to church daily and took in a lodger.

The old Broadway Cinema… iconic art deco. I miss it, even if I only saw one film there…James Bond “You Only Live Twice”. It was about a mad billionaire and a Japanese girl in a white bikini.

This part of the road is a shrine to James Connolly. Some murals and James Connolly Visitor Centre, where I spent an hour. A plaque to Connolly is over the door of the dentist surgery where I used to be a patient.

The Giants Foot (aka Beechview Park) where Uncle Jackie and Auntie Mary bought their house for £1,000 in 1961. It had…a bathroom! Uncle Jackie claimed that a British soldier shot at him at his front door. Did it happen? He was prone to exaggerate but there really was a bullet hole.

The Rock streets. The Rock Bar. I never liked the look of it and I still don’t. Never been in it and I never will. The “Rock” streets and the shops at the front where our newsagent’s son was shot dead in a drive-by shooting. The car drove off down the Donegall Road.

St Johns was our parish church when we first moved to New Barnsley. Corpus Christi in Ballymurphy had not yet been finished. St Kevin’s School. St Louise’s.

“The City Cemetery…council owned and therefore defacto “Protestant” . Those funerals all seemed to come up Donegall Road. It was onlhy well into adulthood that I became aware that Catholics were buried there”.

Falls Park…the Big Park. we never even peeped over the wall into the Cemetery. Would we have been struck blind? Any ball that was kicked over among the graves was lost forever. There was a “cooler”… open air swimming pool at the back of the park which closed sometime in the 1970s. Ball games in the lower end of the park and the respectable end of the park was the flower beds, the tennis courts and the bowling green. And there was the jungle…overgrown trees and we ran along the stream, pretending we were Robin Hood.

And out thru the gate into Divis Drive and the Bus Depot …which is where the buses still go to bed. Sometimes a friendly mechanic would let us get close to a bus. Red in the 1960s and Pink last Wednesday.

And last Wednesday, just like any summer Sunday in the 1960s, I crossed the road to Milltown Cemetery. My grandparents, Auntie Sheila (and Uncle Charlie) and Uncle Jackie and Auntie Mary are all there now.

I am a stranger here. It is all changed and some would say for the better. All that diversity. Boys and girls in the same school and seemingly of different faiths and nationality.

But is it so diverse. For all its so called diversity in the corridors and gardens at City Hall, there is not that much diversity on Falls Road. The Protestant churches (there was one on Grosvenor Road and one in Albert Street) are not there in 2025. And while I celebrate Bobby Sands words that “our revenge will be the laughter of our children”, he also said that “everyone, Republican or otherwise has their own particular part to play”.

But it strikes me that every contribution other than Sinn Féin that makes Falls Road what it is has been airbrushed from the narrative.

Maybe Paul Maskey MP and his four Sinn Féin MLA colleagues would consider a memorial to Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams two Nobel Peace Prize winners from West Belfast. Maybe they are the wrong kinda peacemaker.