Source Material
Excerpt from SPACE Tours script:
- Hallo, everybody, my name is introduce yourself, and your driver to-day is introduce driver
- Welcome to the 'SPACE Mystery Bus Tour', where we aim to show you a little bit of North Belfast through the eyes of us young people. We will be telling you some of the history of the area but we'll also be telling you about what is happening to young people here to-day. Your trip to-day will take approximately 40 minutes.
- Could you please turn off your mobile phones or silence them. Every seat on the bus has a seatbelt and I'd suggest you might like to strap yourself in, in case of any unexpected turbulence.
- Just on your left here, you'll see a big patch of grass. There are lots of patches of trees and grass in this area, but there's nothing in them, no places for children to play or for us to play sports - we'd like to see more use made of these. We aren't horses.
- We're travelling down the Crumlin Road now. In the Fifties and Sixties, young people would have used this road to get to work. Some would have worked in Gallagher's making cigarettes - people used to complain when they got onto buses that they were stinking of tobacco. Others would have worked in mills like Ewart's and Mackies. But the mills and factories closed and now there is very high unemployment in this area. Just across the road there is Crumlin Road Gaol, which is going to be made into a big hotel; I wonder how many jobs there are going to be for us young people there?
- We're going back up the road now and we're going to be taking you into the Lower Oldpark area, which is where some of us live. In the whole of the Lower Crumlin area, in just 10 years, between 1991 and 2001, 30% of the people living in the area left it. Older people living in Lower Oldpark talk about Jimmy Mc Grath's flips and chips, Mac's chippy, Granny Gardner's, the barber's in Manor Drive, butcher's shops, bakeries, shoe shops and Uncle Joe's pawn shop at the corner of Shannon street. All that's gone now. As one of the members of the SPACE group says 'The view out of my kitchen window is a burnt out derelict house'
- You may wonder why the library is closed up. It has been hushed up in all the newspapers but the truth is that there has been a killer book at loose in the library. This book - we believe that it is an apparently harmless version of 'Spot the Dog' - was defaced by a library user and has been taking its revenge by giving paper cuts to anyone unfortunate enough to open it or even to stand near it on the shelves. The library has been closed as a matter of public safety.
- All right, maybe I've been spending too much time in the fantasy section of the library. The library has been closed because there was a bit of a disagreement between young people and the libraries and that's why the library got shut. We don't want to cover it up and we know sometimes young people can behave like hooligans. But a youth worker could help sort it out and it's a shame if things get ruined for everyone.
- At the right hand side of the library is Cairn Lodge Youth Club, which used to be our youth club. It's closed. Even when it was open you could only have boys in one night and girls another night because the toilets weren't adequate. At least it was somewhere to go, there was badminton, football, a tuck-shop - there's nothing there now.*
*After the project, the youth club re-opened, although only for one night a week.
Resources
Uppsala Conflict Database: http://www.pcr.uu.se/database/
CAIN project, University of Ulster : www.cain.ulster.ac.uk
