Thursday, June 15, 2006
Northern Ireland
The more things change, the more things...well they don't change:
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An Ardoyne Protestant says of his neighbours across the peaceline: “I would love to burn those bastards out. The soap dodgers (derogatory name for Catholics) breed like rabbits. All you ever hear from them is whinge, whinge, whinge. Why don’t they get jobs and live like decent people?” Another says: “If I knew my neighbour was shopping in Fenianville, I’d take a pounder (hammer) and knock his head of his shoulders.”
One Ardoyne Protestant who shops in west Belfast has to hide such ‘disloyalty’: “We shop in Curley’s. It’s so cheap and who is going to know we are Prods? But we take Tesco bags with us and put the shopping in them before we go home. If I walked up that path with Curley’s bags I’d get my windies (put) in.”
An Ardoyne Catholic says: “One of my neighbours bought a suite of furniture from a place in the Shankill. I told him I wouldn’t be in his house as long as that furniture was there. He was giving money to people who (had) attacked us.”
Shirlow found much of his research depressing: “You’d see a playground on one side of the fence, and it was out of bounds for the kids on the other side of the fence. Generation after generation is growing up like this.”
