Belfast

Belfast (Ir. Béal Feirste, ‘the mouth of the sand bank, or ford’), the main centre of the industrial revolution in Ireland and, since 1921, the capital of Northern Ireland. Although the site of a 13th‐century castle, Belfast was not a place of any importance before the Flight of the Earls. Founded for English and Scots settlers by Sir Arthur Chichester in 1603, the infant town was incorporated by the crown as a close borough as early as 1613, in order to provide two loyal MPs to the Irish parliament. Belfast's role as the bastion of loyalty in Ireland, so pronounced from the 19th century onwards, thus goes back to its very origins. Its ethos, however, was commercial rather than aristocratic, and for much of the 18th century the small town manifested a radical and democratic outlook, beginning with the mass emigration of disaffected Presbyterians to colonial America, and culminating in the United Irish movement. This long aberration ended in bourgeois recoil from the horrors of the insurrection of 1798, and growing enthusiasm for the Act of Union.

Although the Chichester/Donegall family owned the town until 1844, their belated conferment of long leases on the larger tenants after 1750, notwithstanding the Steelboys' protests, ended a major constraint on growth. At the end of the 18th century the town had a thriving linen trade and an infant cotton industry. By 1830 linen manufacture had supplanted cotton, and Belfast became the world's leading producer; the establishment of a railway network during the 1840s boosted its regional role; and growing confidence in the city's economy generated sufficient capital to transform its shallow river approaches into a major port. Employment in textiles and clothing continued to expand thereafter, together with industries such as shipbuilding, engineering, rope manufacture, whiskey distilling, and tobacco products. It was a classic example of ‘takeoff’, as one economic development provided stimulus for the next.

Economic growth transformed Belfast from a small, Presbyterian commercial town into a large and ethnically mixed industrial centre. A population of 1,000 in the late 17th century grew slowly to about 8,000 in 1759 and 25,000 in 1808. The industrial explosion took it from 70,447 in 1841 to 349,180 in 1901, across which period it was the fastest growing centre in the United Kingdom. It was designated a city in 1888. There were boundary extensions in 1841, 1853, and 1896, and suburban authorities were separately incorporated in 1973. The city proper declined from a peak of 443,671 in 1951, but the Belfast Urban Area contained 475,967 people in 1991, plus a further 250,000 within daily commuting range.

Population growth brought the native–settler rivalries of rural Ulster into the town. By 1850 Church of Ireland/Presbyterian differences were merging into an essentially political ‘Protestant’ consciousness articulated by the Orange Order, but owing much to the Conservative Presbyterian theology of Henry Cooke. The Catholic minority, in contrast, retained a distinct identity of its own: it shifted and evolved during the 19th century, but the main elements included a shared religious practice, growing residential segregation, a relatively constrained occupational structure, and, with increasing coherence after 1885, a political identification with the nationalist programme of the rest of Ireland.

Ethnic division manifested itself in the waves of Catholic/Protestant rioting which became endemic in the main working‐class neighbourhoods, beginning with a 12 July clash in 1813 and continuing with polling day battles in 1832, 1835, and 1841. Flare‐ups in 1843 and 1852 were rather more serious, and 1857 was the first of a series of outbreaks of massive and uncontrollable rioting, lasting over days or weeks, that continued in 1864, 1872, 1886, 1912, 1920–2, 1935, and 1969–71. So great was the scale of conflict that changes in policing, from the Orange‐influenced Town Police to the mainly Catholic Royal Irish Constabulary (1865–1921), and then to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, made little difference.

The undercurrent of fear generated by recurrent violence produced total residential segregation in most working‐class neighbourhoods. This was paralleled in the workplace by high levels of segregation within linen mills and other large places of employment; the virtual absence of Catholic workers from the modern, skilled industrial sector; and periodic expulsions of Catholics and their perceived sympathizers from workplaces, most notably in 1920–2, when up to 10,000 were shut out. The continued pattern of rioting, given a political dimension by home rule and by partition, meant that segregation did not wither with the passage of generations and the decline in immigration: it increased, and reinforced the city's distinct sectoral pattern of ethnic development. The south‐western sector remained Catholic as it expanded, while the rest of the city's development was strongly Protestant, closing off other Catholic inner‐city neighbourhoods from further growth after about 1860. It is probably no coincidence that from this date the Catholics' faster growth rate, which took them from 8 per cent of the urban population in 1784 to 34 per cent in 1861, was reversed: Catholics fell to 23 per cent by 1926, before beginning to rise again, to 43 per cent of the city proper (34 per cent of the Belfast Urban Area) in 1991.

Belfast's politics have been shaped by its ethnic division. Prior to male household suffrage (see franchise) they approximated to British political culture: established church Tories, supported by most plebeian Presbyterians, opposed and usually defeated elite Presbyterian Liberals supported by Catholics. After William Johnston's electoral success (see party processions act) in 1868 this structure collapsed: Irish and British political cultures diverged, as traditional Conservatism embraced Orangeism to become Unionism, nationalism won the support of the Catholic community, and Liberalism died. The Unionist–nationalist dichotomy has continued to predominate, throwing off non‐sectarian challenges from the Northern Ireland Labour Party and various other socialist groupings rather more easily than it has the extreme ethnic challenges from the popular Protestantism of the Democratic Unionist Party and the republicanism of Sinn Féin that were permitted by the reintroduction of proportional representation after 1973.

Bibliography

Bardon, Jonathan , Belfast: An Illustrated History (1982).

A. C. Hepburn