Standing on Bombay Street in Belfast is surreal fifty years after homes were firebombed and Catholic families forced to leave by Unionist mobs left to patrol the streets.

As we stand viewing the “peace walls” built to divide Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, bells ring at the nearby Clonard Monastery that once sheltered Nationalists and Loyalists during Hitler’s bombing of Belfast in 1941. These same bells rang in August of 1969 to warn neighbors that trouble was afoot. And today fifty years later, they ring again on a clear, crisp autumn day as twenty Americans visiting from Boston listen to an account of what happened on Bombay Street from officials from the Housing Executive of Northern Ireland and a leader of Housing Rights, a non-governmental organization set up in 1964 as Catholic Housing Need.

From Disturbances in Northern Ireland: Report of the Lord Cameron Commission appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland. 1969.

 “A rising sense of continuing injustice and grievance among large sections of the Catholic population in Northern Ireland…in respect of (i) inadequacy of housing provision by certain local authorities (ii) unfair methods of allocation of houses built and let by such authorities…(iii) misuse in certain cases of discretionary powers of allocation of houses in order to perpetuate Unionist control of the local authority.”

No tears came but something else stirred in my heart. Pride that most of those Catholic families returned to Bombay Street after those horrific days. Respect for the housing leaders we are meeting with on this trip who work to make the “allocation of housing” more just. Anger that more people of good will in 1969 and 2019 don’t call out injustice when it happens. And determination to create housing justice in Milton, in Massachusetts and in my ancestral home of Ireland.

“Mixed outcomes, but you still have to keep going,” said Padraic Kenna, Senior Lecturer in Law, and Director of the Centre for Housing Law, Rights and Policy at National University of Ireland Galway describing his efforts to change European Union policy on housing. That comment perfectly describes the work of the 20 housing professionals from Boston who have come to Ireland and Northern Ireland to learn, listen, and strengthen our bonds back home. Trips like this make our community stronger, our resolve greater.

Change is hard and yet we have chosen to become change agents. Work done by others in Belfast and our colleagues in Boston will go on inspired by the brave women and men who put much on the line for justice. Our fights will be hard and we will fall short of our goals. But we will be stronger for the struggle knowing that we are united to create a world where, as the Irish say, “you’re welcome” as in “you are welcome here.” Housing justice is created when all are truly welcome wherever they settle.

Fáilte.