People from all walks of life, particularly those with a sense of humour, are well tuned into Triple FM, the community radio from nationalist West Belfast which heralds the run-up to Feile an Phobail/ The West Belfast Festival each year. For sheer unpredictability and native impudence, you can't get better: the treacly Belfast accents of some of the laid-back characters who spin the discs; the risque lines slipping through the "kiddy-oke" slots, or the inspired touch of having kids (well, teenagers mainly) writing, editing and reading the news.

Some people claim it was even more fun a few years ago when it was a pirate station, moving from house to house, tipping off the local Andersonstown news and keeping one step ahead of the RUC, and indeed coughing up memories of Radio Divis in the early years of the Troubles. But now on a temporary 28-day licence - and campaigning for a permanent one - it still penetrates the local community deeply. This year, they are breaking even on advertising, and can even afford to be selective, having refused slots to a certain English tabloid. As one late night DJ said to me: "It's because of their coverage of this area. People around here have long memories."

The range of slots caters, in a leisurely way, for the elderly and the rave-minded, while, with some former prisoners as DJs, and Danny Morrison's daily, leisurely review of the papers, there is a big emphasis on republican prisoners. There are the often humorous request programmes like Prisoners' Hour and Jailhouse Rock, with aching messages from relatives to inmates in the Maze (where prisoners link in with the Feile with a sponsored run around the yard), and even when the reception is good, in Maghaberry (where the women are doing a reading of Marie Jones's play Women On The Verge Of HRT).

But if you can cope with the incessantly played hip-hop number from the New York rap outfit Seanachie ("Unrepentent Fenian Bastards, never let themselves be mastered"), the station is an invigorating sign of the emerging confidence of local people who are extraordinarily welcoming, particularly of Southerners, even if many would feel the latter had turned their backs on them over the past 30 years. The Feile itself, is an extraordinary testament to the long-term resilience of a community; which, whatever about views of IRA spectaculars and atrocities, lived under a regime of frighteningly inhuman militarisation.

The Feile is overwhelmingly a working class, republican event, with many leading Sinn Fein and former prisoners elected onto its managing committee. This brings a dark-green hue to the events, which has naturally been bitterly criticised, even by some of nationalist West Belfast's own native sons and daughters.

Republican culture peppers it throughout: the omnipresent tri-colours, exhibitions on the Ballymurphy riots in the 1970s; and the "celebration of resistance" theme of the Prisoners' Day, organised by the Felons' Club; "the hierarchy of death" of Roy Greenslade's Damien Walsh memorial lecture this year; even the tours through City Cemetery (neatly maintained by the City Council), or the private Catholic Milltown cemetery, with its ivy-strewn forest of angels and Celtic crosses, and its elaborately decorated memorials and republican plots of old IRA, IRSP, INLA and Provos where some of the hunger strikers are interred.

Feile's origins go back to 1988 and the spasm of murderous funerals which followed the Gibraltar killings. Up to then, the anniversary of internment on August 9th was an annual ritual of bonfires, hijackings and riots - a lethal cocktail of disaffected, unemployed marginalised youth and alcohol; and army and RUC and plastic bullets. The intention locally was to channel energies in more "creative" directions. Apart from one loyalist car-bomb left outside the Culturlann, the Falls Road headquarters of the event, during an openly advertised Feile meeting, it has more than succeeded.

Mayo-born Catriona Ruane, a 36-year-old human rights worker and mother-of-two has headed the full-time Feile staff of six since early last year. "We're not neutral, we come from a nationalist perspective and make no apologies for that. There has been a tendency in the city council to insist that celebrations have to be cross-community, which often means bland and neutral, so as not to offend anyone. But our vision is of a shared city with space for everyone to celebrate what's theirs, like the Just Us group" - the group of women, who with BBC/Dubbeljoint drama director Pam Brighton, produced Binlids last year - "a highly political play about a highly political period, and a community which suffered hugely, telling its own story."

So, er, what brought a Mayo woman to West Belfast? "Well, I had been working in Central America with Trocaire on relief and human rights projects in the liberated zones in El Salvador. In Nicaragua, I was working with a Salvadorian liberation theologian, and I was responsible for all our projects in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, because he couldn't go in there. "We made a conscious decision to work in the guerilla-controlled areas, which makes you immediately politicised. There was an all-out war going on and we worked on bee-keeping and rabbit projects - we couldn't have cattle because of the blanket bombing. And the army wouldn't allow any medicine in so we brought out guerillas and health workers and gave them training in herbal medicine . . . "When I came back, I couldn't believe the fear of even talking about the North. Then I went to West Belfast and I couldn't believe what was going on, because of this blanket on reporting with Section 31. So I founded the Centre for Research and Documentation, and worked with that for eight years. We looked at the similarities and differences between Ireland and South Africa, Asia and Latin America, the ghettoisation, the lack of North-South links, the demonisation of the area." She says she has worked with groups from the Shankill, only a peaceline away. "We have been trying to bring delegations over with people like Billy Hutchinson, discussing issues like policing, and women's groups, and basically, to try and break down prejudice."

She also worked, voluntarily like everyone else, for the festival from the beginning, running seminars with commentators from Fintan O'Toole to Noam Chomsky. For the first seven years, they operated without funding, collecting £1 door-to-door for street parties and, eventually, attracting funding from a very wide variety of sources, both internationally and from local sources.

Through her Sinn Fein links, she worked recently as an economic adviser to the Garvaghy Road residents. "They were putting forward proposals for a civic forum, there is still huge economic discrimination in nationalist areas, which are still very militarised. People just learn to act as if it's not there. Even with my daughter Eimear, I always put myself between her and the soldier - and they're all so young-looking, 17 or 18, they've a different concept of life than we have."

The Feile operation, run from its three-storey headquarters on the Falls Road, right across from the bristling cage of the IRSP centre, was also instrumental, with Triple FM, in gathering 70,000 people for the first St Patrick's Day Parade through Belfast city centre earlier this year.

Their central committee - key community activists in West Belfast, many of whom are ex-prisoners - organises the showcase arts events, which this year include Opera Theatre Company's The Lighthouse, and a big gig featuring Mary Black, Brian Kennedy and Shane McGowan. Their budget has risen now to £80,000 - "not counting salaries. But you have to understand, we're not like the Galway Arts Festival, we're a community development group, and we're also part of the lobbying process, with the Arts Council, the equality agenda, the Irish language and so on - in a sense we're creating an urban Gaeltacht. There's a nationalist population in West Belfast of about 200,000, and our aim is bring together and build up those local communities."

There is little enough local drama in this year's line-up. The Binlids people are saving their steam for their tour to New York, to play in Manhattan synagogue in October.

But Ruane maintains: "With 80,000 participants, we feel there's a strong sense of creativity in nationalist areas, with the music and simply pulling together things like the carnival parade. There's a sense of vision there which we would hope is inclusive." As usual, there are invited contingents representing other sets of "oppressed peoples and their fights for self-determination": Basques, Cubans, Central Americans, as well as high-ranking observers from the US. Feile has endured its fair share of snobbery from the professional artsy people. But of course, the festival is deeply community-based, with bonny baby competitions, Mass walks up Black Mountain (where people used to enjoy summer days before the Troubles); the Bobbie Sands Soccer tournaments and Mairead Farrell camogie competitions, etc. But it's hard to fault local initiatives like many in the Culturlann, or Briege Hawkins' drama projects with Downe's Syndrome and other disability groups. Tramping around West Belfast earlier this week, I bumped into "the girls" from Just Us, Maura Brown and Niamh Kavanagh, (who also works on the Economic Forum offices on the Falls Road). And those involved in the film festival, which this year has been shunted back to October, so as not to be swamped by good weather and the street parties of the Feile. This is run by Michele Devlin, who runs media courses and animation workshops from the Springvale Centre; and former hunger striker, Laurence McKeown, who himself has a feature film project on that subject on the boil.

The infra-structure is slow enough in coming together, but the elements are there in projects which include the self-taught artists' collective, loosely connected to Feile; or the Conway Mills building where, over the Sinn Fein offices, every kid in the place is roped into painting the banners, and the Culturlann where they are making the masks and puppets for the opening day parade.

There are 52 local committees feeding in from every area of nationalist west Belfast - Whiterock, Divis, Ballymurphy, Spring Hill, Poleglass, Twinbrook, not to mention the Ardoyne and New Lodge fleadhs - although naturally enough, there is no representation from the smaller, older population of the loyalist pocket of the Greater Shankill, which runs its own smaller festival in May.

For all the specificity of the Feile's emblems and republican slogans and POWs campaigns, one would simply hope that the sheer exuberance of the event might indicate some real and lasting thaw, somewhere in the future.

Feile an Phobail runs from Saturday until Sunday August 9th. Highlights include an exhibition of paintings by Rita Duffy (St. Mary's Training College, Monday to Friday); The Lighthouse, Peter Maxwell Davies's opera, presented by Opera Theatre Company (Monday, St. Agnes's Hall, 7.30 p.m.); a Traditional Basque Day (Wednesday, An Chulturlann, 1 p.m.), a Dubbeljoint production of Mother Of All The Behans with Eileen Pollock, at B.I.F.E., Whiterock Road, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m., and Into The West, a concert featuring Mary Black, Shane Mac Gowan and the Popes and Brian Kennedy (Beechmount Leisure Centre, Sunday August 9th, from 6 p.m.) For festival information phone Belfast 313440

Liam O Muirthile's An Peann Coitianta will return next week.