THIS week we carry vivid testimony from an 83-year-old man for whom current events are bringing back unwelcome memories of a dark past.
Tony Neeson lived in Annalee Street in North Belfast in August 1969 and he took the decision to flee with his family in the face of the threat of loyalist mobs. A move to a relative’s home in Ballymurphy that was supposed to last a couple of days became permanent.
After the pogroms of the late 60s, Annalee Street, along with many other mixed and interface streets in the city, fell derelict and the sounds of happy family life became nothing more than a ghostly echo as the empty houses quietly crumbled and were later demolished.
A new lease of life has been given to Annalee Street, with new homes sprouting up on the empty site and excited and happy families taking delivery of the keys last November. But the dream has turned to a nightmare as the spectre of loyalist violence returned and masked men began handing out threats and smashing windows. Some families have fled; some families are about to flee; some families are sitting tight in the hope that the forces of law and order can save Annalee Street after having so dismally failed – some say refused – to save it over half a century ago.
We wish those families still fearfully in situ all the best, and we hope that those families who are fleeing or are about to flee can some day return to live lives of peace and contentment. But let’s be honest: We’re talking about the PSNI here.
While cowardly thugs are running free in North Belfast and deciding by dint of violence and threats who can live where, the police force that was supposed to represent a new start has once put its size nine boot in it. As families scrambled to gather belongings in scenes reminiscent of the summer of ’69, the PSNI considered two women putting stickers on an ATM machine more worthy of an effective, speedy emergency response.
Five officers were tasked to arrest Sue Pentel and Martine McCullough, women who for months have been giving up their spare time in a peaceful effort to stop the genocide in Gaza. While the men who attacked the Annalee Street homes and threatened families out of their new lives retired to a nearby shebeen to celebrate their work, Sue and Martine were locked in a cell. The contrast could not be more stark; the double standards could not be more vivid.
Every time we think the PSNI are incapable of doing more to drive away the people they’re supposed to attract, another outrage presents itself. And once again we look on as – far from doing their best to rectify what is self-evidently a massive PR gaff – the PSNI brass are standing four-square behind the crazy decision to treat stickers as an emergency and human rights defenders as criminals.
“The images of those new houses being attacked and young families living in fear brought it all back to me. It may be 56 years later, but nothing has changed,” says Tony Neeson.
He leaves nothing more to be said.
