My Life in Loyalism by Billy Hutchinson Gareth Mulvenna

Author:Billy Hutchinson, Gareth Mulvenna [Billy Hutchinson, Gareth Mulvenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Ireland, Great Britain, General, Biography & Autobiography, Military
ISBN: 9781785373473
Google: _eIJEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Merrion Press
Published: 2020-11-19T01:01:32+00:00

CHAPTER 8

RELEASE AND REGENERATION

I was finally released in June 1990. I hadn’t been institutionalised. No political prisoner should allow themselves to become institutionalised. Having said that, there were some things to adjust to. Since 1975 the only horizon I had had was the barbed wire and sky. I couldn’t see anything else from the compounds. When I arrived back on the Shankill, everything seemed magnified. Black Mountain, where I had played as a child, looked vast, like it was sitting on top of the Shankill. It reminded me of the big jelly trifle version of the Hollywood Hills on the cover of the American rock band Little Feat’s The Last Record Album. If that seemed strange, then nothing prepared me for seeing the Castle Court shopping development that was on the site of the old post office building on Royal Avenue in Belfast city centre. With all its metal and glass, it could have been mistaken for something from Star Wars. Walking through the city centre, I couldn’t understand why people were walking toward me; for years I had been surrounded by people walking round the wire in the same direction so that we wouldn’t bump into each other. Millfield, an old part of Belfast that runs along the bottom of the Shankill and Falls, had been completely gutted, and where there had once been old Belfast housing with half-doors that always seemed to be open, there was now just a big road connecting to the Westlink. It was impersonal and surreal.

Everything had changed so much since I had gone into jail a decade and a half previously. My perceptions were heightened as I became accustomed to this familiar but strange environment. When I went into Long Kesh, I had developed a coping mechanism to deal with incarceration; now that I had been released, I had to call on my mental strength to deal with the massive sensory changes that came with freedom.

Despite the redevelopment of the inner city that bordered the Shankill, and that lovely and familiar skyline, the area itself had changed dramatically since 1974. I had been back on the road on parole and for Christmas visits in the run-up to my release, but I hadn’t had a chance to fully absorb the destruction that the planners had wrought on the place I loved and called home. There were large desolate spaces where buildings had been knocked down and hadn’t been replaced. Derelict buildings and boarded up houses dotted the streets. It was depressing to see a once-great community decimated by the hand of developers. Some things were, thankfully, familiar. My mother had moved to Riga Street, another traditional little Belfast street tucked in off the main Shankill Road. Riga Street was just around the corner from our previous houses in Matchett Street and Jersey Street, so it felt like a real homecoming when I left prison and went to live with her. Many of the houses had been knocked down and rebuilt, but there was still a sense of place, a sense of home.

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