Belfast confetti

Short Strand is a Catholic enclave within a Protestant area. Residents on either side throw anything from golf balls to car jacks over the 'peace wall' that divides them. David McKittrick asks what this small-scale conflict says about prospects for long-term peace

George was sitting in his armchair having a drink when the republican bullet zinged in through the window, bounced off the sill, whizzed just over his head, and went through a lampshade before lodging in the wall.

George had the most convenient drinking system I ever saw. He had a pub Optic mounted on the wall beside his armchair, holding an upside-down bottle of Smirnoff. Below it stood a bottle of diet Coke. Replenishing his vodka was a simple matter of extending his arm and pushing the glass upwards. The bullet narrowly missed not only George's head but also these customised drinking arrangements.

Until the gunman opened fire, it was a cosy routine in Cluan Place, a comfortable street in east Belfast. But it has the geographical misfortune of being a single Protestant street next to the Catholic Short Strand area – when trouble broke out it suddenly became a war zone.

Today, the scene is horrendous. Many of its roofs have been wrecked, while doors are barricaded with wood, wire or metal. Glass crunches underfoot, while paint-splashes and other stains are everywhere. The little street has become a shocking mess, descending from cosiness to dereliction in just a few months. Only four of its original 24 families are still there, living behind wooden ramparts that cast most of their homes into perpetual twilight. A sign says: "Burned out by IRA scum." Another asks: "Whos under seige – them or us?" (Protestant graffiti contains so many misspellings that nationalist educators joke about running "literacy for loyalists" classes.)

One end of the street has become a loyalist shrine, bedecked with Ulster flags and paraphernalia. Many of the shattered roofs sport loyalist paramilitary flags, many of the grilles have been painted red, white and blue, and bits of bedraggled bunting have been strung up. While this may provide colour, it all adds to the sense of wreckage, dereliction and cheerlessness that makes visitors wish they were somewhere else. The message on the wooden sign is entirely appropriate: "Welcome to hell."

George (not his real name) is one of the few determined to see it through. His close encounter with a bullet was some months ago but, he said, "I'm still not right yet with my nerves. It's going to take a long time to settle down. I'm losing weight – I was almost a 36-inch trouser waist, now I'm almost down to a 32". He is also missing sleep, but despite it all, remained capable of flashes of humour: when I remark that the bullet had missed his vodka, he replied with a smile: "I'm telling you, if it hadda hit that, I'd have been over the wall right away myself, jumping over."

George, who is 61 and has angina, has left this house, but rather than moving out of harm's way has shifted only a few doors down the street. He said proudly: "I've spent over a thousand pounds on the new house, I'm trying to put my mark on it." Why doesn't he just leave? His answer is couched in territorial rather than personal terms: "The Catholics are expanding but they've nowhere else to build. They always wanted this bit, always." How does he know this? "That's been the story for years, passed down from one to the other."

George's new house is out of the direct line of fire, but it remains vulnerable to anything coming over the "peace wall" from the adjoining Short Strand. Hence he has a wooden barrier emblazoned with a defiant "No surrender". Outside his house, some Protestant women, who do not live in Cluan Place, display trays of material that they said had been hurled over the peace wall by the Catholics. Their collection included large rivets, many heavy nuts and bolts, fragments of metal, pieces of what were said to be pipe-bombs, clusters of a dozen fireworks taped together, and part of a bottle with a petrol-soaked rag still in its neck. There was also a selection of bread knives, and golf balls and marbles, said to have been delivered by catapult. There was part of a car jack, a piece of vacuum cleaner, garden trowels, a heavy pair of scissors, a rusty old hatchet, a poker, some screwdrivers and a crowbar.

Belfast's history has been so regularly punctuated by riot and commotion that decades ago, somebody coined an ironic name for such missiles: Belfast confetti. "They actually threw over four tins of beans, full tins of beans," said one of the women. Her friend chuckled: "They were Heinz, too, but now they're just throwing over the Tesco economy ones." Their talk is of pipe-bombs, blast-bombs, petrol-bombs and acid-bombs. One of the women, the wife of a Unionist councillor, said a bursting bottle had splashed her "with acid or Nitromors, something like that. The stuff went all over my head, but I'm OK. It felt just like sunburn on the top of my head."

Catholic Short Strand is only a few feet away from Cluan Place, as the crowbar flies. But the walls, augmented now with a lattice of scaffolding and other impedimenta, mean that actually getting there involves a journey of some hundreds of yards. Things there are different. Houses have been damaged and are bedecked with grilles, but hardly anybody has moved out, and, unlike Cluan Place, the streets are not festooned with political and sectarian symbols. There are far fewer flags, and more effort has been made to tidy up.

Residents have tried to brighten things up by decorating their wooden boards with colourful paintings of flowers. Children play, though adults keep a wary eye for missiles. There are some places where they are not allowed to play, and where cars are not parked, because missiles tend to land there. People here have their own accumulations of Belfast confetti, just like those over the wall in Cluan Place, which they, too, exhibit to visitors. Their caches are very similar – how can inner-city Belfast hold so very many golf balls? Short Strand people tell of some extras that have been hurled at them – jars of beetroot and pickles, tins of dog-food, bathroom tiles, and even, mysteriously, a shaving-brush. Their theory is that loyalists ransack the abandoned Cluan Place houses and pitch it all over the wall.

This is a packed district of 3,000 people, once called "this little pocket of Catholicity". Yet one of the surprises is finding scores of Protestants, or people with Protestant connections, living happily in its streets. A dozen of these readily testified that they have been made more than welcome, some living in the district for 20 years and more. "You get the odd bit of banter," said one Protestant. "A neighbour might say on 12 July, "Here, are you not out marching today?', but that's it." Although there has been two-way traffic over the peace wall, Short Strand people take great exception to the easy journalistic description of what goes on as "tit-for-tat" violence. A woman community-worker, shaking with rage, said: "It's been horrendous here for months and the press have totally demonised this community. It's not tit-for-tat clashes, it's a vulnerable community under attack."

A woman whose roof has twice been wrecked, and who now lives behind bullet-proof glass, illustrated just how brittle nerves have become: "I had to get Diazepam off the doctor and had to see a counsellor, but he can't do anything. He says our symptoms are normal for people going through a situation like this."

There is plenty of evidence of loyalist sectarian aggression. Prominent graffiti on nearby Protestant roads where Catholics used to shop now warns: "No Short Strand Taigs [Catholics] on our road – at your own risk." That writing has been on the wall for months now, prompting the question of why the authorities take no steps to remove such an open threat: perhaps they reckon that, if obliterated, it would simply appear again.

Local Protestant shopkeepers confirm privately that they have been ordered by paramilitaries not to serve Catholics. And the reason why so many mixed-marriage couples live in Short Strand is that they have been intimidated out of Protestant districts, where loyalists reserve a special fury for mixed marriages. In religious terms, Short Strand is literally stranded. It is the only sizeable Catholic area in east Belfast, which is otherwise a sea of Protestants and loyalists. Parts of that sea are a hostile ocean, for the most extreme loyalists regard the very existence of Short Strand as an affront. It has come under attack time after time. Almost a century ago, a Catholic priest described it as "surrounded by coarse, savage enemies in numbers 10 to 1."

Michael Collins complained from Dublin that Short Strand Catholics were being persecuted by armed mobs "unhindered by the military or police". But soldiers were often drafted in, once taking over the local convent and setting up a machine-gun in the Mother Superior's cell, so that its occupants went from praising the Lord to passing the ammunition. One newspaper report described residents attending their church "practically behind a hedge of bayonets". In 1970, that church, St Matthew's, was the scene of what republicans revere as an epic defence action, when a few heavily outnumbered IRA men held off loyalists during fierce gunfights. This is seen as a key event in the growth of the modern IRA.

While Short Strand has a remarkably strong sense of community and neighbourliness, its history helps to explain why it also has a profound sense of vulnerability and a strong survival instinct. Republicans there developed a communal strategy for dealing with loyalist attack, based on a theory of quick retaliation. When loyalists killed Short Strand Catholics during the Troubles – and they killed many of them – Protestant bodies would sometimes turn up soon afterwards, the victims of the IRA or other republicans. The republican idea was to hit back hard and quickly, to emphasise that the district would not take attacks lying down. It was an extension of a brutal old Belfast slogan: "God made the Catholics, the Armalite made them equal."

This policy of defiant deterrence helps to explain why the bullet came through George's window and just missed him and his vodka. Disturbances had been going on for some time, and this was the IRA issuing a violent warning that Short Strand, though exposed, was not defenceless. The exact origins of the present cycle of violence are hotly contested, but it is highly improbable that local Catholics started it. The psychology of the district is all wrong, permeated as it is with its sense of isolation. This is no nationalist intifada.

Nor did George and the mostly elderly residents of Cluan Place start the bother. It is far more likely that restless loyalist paramilitaries, of whom there are hundreds in east Belfast, decided to have a go, careless of whether they damaged a peace process that they see as benefiting only nationalists. And there are always scores of Protestant youths around this run-down inner-city area who enjoy bother. They do not live in Cluan Place but they can walk to it, fling things over the wall for an hour or two, and then, feeling like heroes, go home again. The problem was that, since they were throwing from Cluan Place, missiles were eventually sent back into the little street, causing much damage to it.

Today, the throwing is sporadic, but at times it becomes hectic: video footage, provided by a Short Strand resident, shows 41 missiles being thrown from Cluan Place in a period of 18 seconds. It also shows a petrol-bomb, flung by a loyalist, failing to clear the wire and falling back into Cluan Place, where it started a fire. As the bombardment goes on, a powerful jet of water is directed over the wall into Short Strand, playing on the roofs. A Short Strand man explains: "When our roofs get wrecked they stick that hose on, to get water in and bring the ceilings down inside the house."

The IRA gunfire that nearly killed George injured five Protestants, but it did not work. The trouble escalated and the people of Cluan Place and their neighbours in Short Strand have been tormented for months. The sectarian geography of Belfast means that it has been relatively easy to relocate most of the Cluan Place Protestants, shattering that community forever. But the people of Short Strand are clinging on, feeling that their backs are literally to the wall.

This is a small-scale conflict: those homes that are in the front line are numbered in scores rather than hundreds. But because it has dragged on for so long, it is sullying the peace process and poisoning the atmosphere. It is sending the message that, peace process or no, people in Belfast simply cannot live together. Watching it recalls the words of a traveller who, after visiting Short Strand 80 years ago, pronounced Belfast a city with "an uneasy conscience and a sick soul".

People on both sides of the peace wall are the salt of the earth, hospitable even at this difficult time. The visitor leaves wondering whether the children will ever be able to play without fear, and whether George will ever be able to enjoy his vodka in peace.