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Discrimination
in housing has been one of the causes of the problems
in the North. A report from the Northern Ireland Housing
Executive published in October 2000 showed that nationalists
made up to three quarters of the 1650 people on North
Belfast's housing waiting list. The same report also
noted that for the people waiting for urgent housing,
735 were Catholics, while 157 were Protestants. Two
years after, 15 nationalist housing groups in North
Belfast accused the Housing Executive and the Department
of Social Development of neglecting the Catholic community.
While £25 million has been allocated for housing
in Protestant areas in the last two years, only £3
million has been geared towards tackling the huge
number of nationalists on the waiting list. (Irish
News, 14 October 2002) One thing that Republicans
and Socialists should be weary about is the terms
of the debate.
There
is an intrinsic danger of rooting the housing debate
on concepts like "Catholics" or "the
Nationalist community" not getting its fair share
of houses or "Protestants" getting too much
of it. Arguing like that is reminiscent of the fascistic
"Eigen Volk Eerst" ("Our People First")
arguments of Flemish nationalists. The logic of communalism
reduces the legitimate demands of a discriminated
group to particularism and sectional interest. Housing
demands should be formulated in the language of civil
rights, not from particular sectional interest, like
"the Catholic community".
From
a civic and Republican perspective, the right to a
home is universal. People in North Belfast are entitled
to a home not because they are "Catholics"
or "Nationalists" but because they are in
need of housing. Republican Socialists warned that
the so-called Good Friday Agreement would institutionalise
the fragmentation and balkanisation of the Irish people
into Catholic and Protestant "tribes". The
consequence for the housing question is an increase
of sectarian tensions: there is a zero-sum logic at
work, a house for a Catholic is a house less for a
Protestant or the other way around.
This
is a regression from Wolfe Tone. Republicanism is
about substituting for Catholic and Protestant particularisms
the universality of the common denominator of Irish
citizenship, and argues that citizens have a right
to a home and live free of discrimination. Those who
have abandoned the Republican position for that of
Catholic communalism have therefore lost any pretension
to universality.
The
task lying ahead is to shift the ground of the debate
from particularity to universality. A genuine commitment
to universality also clashes with the present socio-economic
organisation of our society. Particular class interests
condemns the working class to a shortage of housing
while luxury apartments are being built all over the
place. Everybody, not just the rich, have a right
to a home. That is what genuine universality is about.
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