Chris Steele-Perkins first came to Belfast in 1978 to document the lives of the poor. He was working on a book on inner-city poverty in the Seventies and had been to Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Glasgow, and London, but Belfast was “more extreme: poorer”.

He wanted to understand the violence the people at the heart of a conflict lived with. By 1978, 1,850 people had died, and injuries amounted to almost 20,000. An estimated 12,000 homes were destroyed and more than 32,000 damaged. Although Times reporter John Cartes wrote that it no longer went silent when an Englishman walked into a pub, and that violence was slowing, there was still rioting in the streets, and bombing increased through the autumn.

“In Northern Ireland there was a low-intensity war going on,” recalls Steele-Perkins. “The Army patrolled the streets, bombs destroyed lives and buildings, and gunmen roamed.”

Although Steele-Perkins was aware that there was poverty in the Protestant areas too, a poverty that provided the foot soldiers for the Protestant militias, he concentrated on photographing the tough streets and estates of Catholic West Belfast. He came to squat in the Divis flats, dour slabs of housing in the Lower Falls area. They have since been knocked down, apart from the tower block, and replaced with terraced housing, but at the time had a dark reputation for violence and for being a Republican stronghold.

“I don’t know how I came to squat there. It was a combination of my lack of finances and a wish to be at the heart of things. The flats were dirty and, if you were a British soldier, dangerous, but they were also vibrant. Nobody bothered me. It was as if by planting myself there I had to be OK. No informer would have been so stupid.” There he met Paul McCorry, who was working with the Divis Residents’ Association, and who offered him a bed in his flat. This was to be Steele-Perkins’ home from home on his many trips to Belfast.

It soon became clear that, despite the poverty, there was a powerful sense of community. A community held together by a common religion, sense of injustice and enemy, yet also fractured by sectarian politics, the dominant voice of which was the IRA. Steele-Perkins wandered the streets, spoke to all kinds of people, knocked on doors, listened to stories, complaints, lectures, and took photographs.

Thirty years on, he decided to go back to Belfast and photograph some of his subjects again, where possible in the same location, to see how they had changed and how they viewed the transition to peace. Despite a general acknowledgement of greater opportunities – in jobs, education and housing – recurrent themes emerged of community breakdown, increasing crime and rising suicide rates. In the past, paramilitary groups had enforced the law, their law, but one generally seen by the community as necessary; now the police do not fill that void. Many people in poorer areas do not venture out at night.

The rise in suicides, he says, is harder to fathom. “Perhaps it is unconnected, but it is perceived to be a part of the failure to address the ongoing issues of sustaining community and order in a society subsequent to the ‘revolution’: the mismatch between expectation and delivery that follows on every great political achievement.”

Click on the slideshow above to see the pictures and read below for more information.

OWEN AND MOIRA COOGAN AND THEIR CHILDREN, NIáMH AND CáOLAN

Owen Coogan used to live in the Divis flats. He left school at 16 and after working as a roofer with his father, he went to work for Northern Irish Ferries, and now at Montupet, which makes cylinder heads. He lives with his wife and children in Dunmurry, Belfast.

Owen’s father was interned in 1972 and remained so for four years, when Owen was 3 years old. “In Belfast at the time we felt the Falls Road was under siege, so everyone tried to do their bit,” he says. “Even though you were young, you knew what was happening.

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