Introduction

Construction of Identity in Northern Irish Novels 247
working-class districts clash – have been ongoing for more than one hundred
years (ibid. 165).
Figure 2: A – Distribution of Protestant, Roman Catholic and “Mixed” Residential Areas in West
Belfast, 1976 (Boal and Livingstone 166). B – Subunits of the Belfast Urban Area (Doherty and Poole
524).
During the hottest phase of the Troubles (1969-81) the boundary line lay along
Cupar Street (ibid. 171) and became the official Peace Line when the British Army
intervened in September 1969 (ibid. 174). Boal and Livingstone term this area
“microcosm of national division” (ibid. 175). It is also in West Belfast that young
Roche in Eureka Street is living. When Jake drives him home one day it becomes
clear that the segregated districts still bear some significance in the nineties: “I
turned right down Sandy Row and headed for Beechmount. I should have known.
Upper Falls gamin, he was typical” (McLiam Wilson 203). That Jake having grown
up in West Belfast himself knows where Beechmount is situated, is also telling for
Roche: “I knew you were a Taig” (ibid. 203). Jake realises that hardly anything has
changed. The walls are still covered with murals that show the good sides of
Catholics, the bad sides of Protestants and what is more, “large numbers of British
soldiers […] maimed and killed” (ibid. 205). As the figure on the right shows,
the numbers of segregation in West Belfast in 1991 (A) were still almost the same
as they had been twenty years earlier. South Belfast in contrast was a relatively
mixed area. Although Derry (B) is not of the main concern here it is nevertheless
quite interesting to see that Derry in 1991 was also an almost completely segregated
town. Derry bears meaning because it was here that the first violent outbreaks
of civil unrest took place in 1969 in the famous bogside situated in the
southern part of the Catholic West (and through which Saoirse is driving at the
end of Where They Were Missed).