Neighbours, Everybody Needs Good Neighbours…

I’ve always had the good luck to have great neighbours. One of the mantras I try to live by is to always be the best customer possible. I also apply this principle to neighbourliness and to wider human interaction. I’m also very conscious that this isn’t the case with everyone and to live beside bad neighbours and the consequent effect that this has on relationships and mental health over a long time must be horrific.

I grew up in one of the public housing estates dotted along the top of the Whiterock Rd in the Upper Springfield Rd area of West Belfast. Our street was a crescent of around maybe fifty houses and I knew and could name literally every single inhabitant of those fifty houses and quite a lot of the other inhabitants in the other streets in the estate. Even back then as a youngster I was aware that I belonged to something bigger than myself or my immediate family. I lived in friend’s family homes and they lived in mine. If food was short, and yes, sometimes it was, our neighbours would help us and we in turn would help them. The sense of collective communitarianism was palpable with neighbours organising Summer street festivals to keep the estate urchins occupied and out of trouble and there really was a sense of a collective us against the rest of the world.

Disputes between neighbours of course occasionally arose but looking back, with as much objectivity as possible, it really did seem like an example of the old proverb of taking a village to raise a child in action.

I bought my first property, a two up two down in the mid Falls area built in the first decade of the Twentieth Century with a latterly added indoor bathroom extension, in 1991 as a twenty four year old with a very recently born infant daughter. It was convenient to everywhere, the hospital, schools, multiple bars, (including the exclusively Irish speaking club, An Cumann Chluain Árd), shops and walking distance to large supermarkets like Dunnes Stores and West Side Sams, (remember that one, Westies?). Again, great neighbours. My neighbours included the parents of a childhood friend from the housing estate I had previously lived in, a very prominent Sinn Féiner who had recently been released from a considerable spell in the H Blocks was my immediate next door neighbour, and, say it quietly, one of the Slugger team. The warmth, help, familiarity and advice of my neighbours very much reminded me of my housing estate childhood. The second and last property I bought in Belfast was in 2001, a new build in mid Andersonstown, with a drive way, large back garden and a fourth bedroom attic conversion. It was massive compared to where we had lived previously and my by then four girls absolutely adored it. Again, magnificent neighbours which included, (yet again), an immediate next door neighbour who had recently been released as a result of Good Friday after a considerable time in the H Blocks, an Olympic medal winning boxer and a one parent mum who was, incredibly sadly, subsequently hit and killed by a drunk driver on the Andytown Rd.

I now of course live outside Ireland in an apartment block of nine floors with four apartments of eight floors and a ninth floor of two flats where ourselves and another older couple live. I know most of my neighbours to say hello to and a few to converse with, including an incredibly nice Russian lady that lives on the sixth floor. They’re nice but it’s a much less intimate relationship than I had with any of my previous neighbours in Belfast. I’m not sure if this is because of a change in living circumstances, (house to flat), a different cultural norm in another country or simply because society has become less collective and more individual and anonymous from when I was a child / younger man.

In none of the places I lived did I or any of my neighbours have to ask the permission of anyone to live there.

Of course neighbours change and no longer is the nuclear family living next door necessarily the norm. Today it could well be a one parent family, a single career focused professional, a HMO, (House of Multiple Occupancy), a gay couple or a multi generational family from a different country. Let me just say that HMOs are by no means a recent phenomenon, as a teenage punk rocker in the eighties I used to spend most of my weekends in them in South Belfast’s Holyland. Likewise I have a friend who lives in the mid Falls area with a three generational Kurdish family as next door neighbours. He tells me that their children are incredibly respectful and that the family brings him delicious cooked meals every other day. Two streets away in the same area my nephew lives with his husband.

It makes me wonder, how many people take the time to get to know their neighbours and if they did, would their opinions on people change? For me neighbourliness doesn’t only extend to streets but also encompasses the wider expanse where people live together and in my home city it saddens me that there are, as there are in many other places, people who don’t want to live beside other people because of the shape of their eyes, the colour of their skin, the language they speak or their perceived spiritual belief. The difference being however, in my home city we build walls to separate them.

A friendly smile, a simple hello is all it takes. Let’s try to see each other as people, try to be a bit nicer to each other and where we disagree, agree to disagree respectfully.