The GAA is thriving in Ardoyne. The Kickhams is the oldest branch of the association in Belfast and 15 of its members died violently during the Troubles. These days it has 11 teams - but no pitch. Every football game for Ardoyne is an away game, writes Dan Keenan
Earlier this week club members cleared out a store room in the clubrooms and furnished it with an old sofa, a desk, a TV and a kettle. A fax line was diverted and a phone installed. On Tuesday night, volunteers began keeping watch on the youth of the area in a concerted attempt to stem the spate of suicides in the area. About 13 young men are believed to have taken their own lives since Christmas.
That morning Brendan "Barney" Cairns was buried in the City Cemetery. He had been found hanging from the highest point on scaffolding at Holy Cross church by Fr Aidan Troy and Fr Gary Donegan the previous Saturday. The discovery was made shortly after the funeral of Barney's friend, Anthony O'Neill. He had also killed himself. Both of them were 18.
Stephen and Clare were looking after the phone in the converted GAA club storeroom, just as other volunteers were doing the same in two other centres - one in the Ardoyne Association in nearby Etna Drive, the other at the Survivors of Trauma centre on the Cliftonville Road.
Both students, Stephen and Clare have photocopies in front of them telling them how to handle distress calls.
"Act only as a listening ear," the papers recommend. "Comfort, reassure and engage. Professional help is available." Other pages, headlined "Guidelines", take the rookie volunteers through the basics of dealing with potential suicides. "Engage in a personal manner," it recommends. "Identify their current situation, encourage expression of concerns, give individual acceptance and support. Look for suicidal intentions."
The soothing encouragement runs to six pages. "Allow airing of feelings through acceptance and openness. Focus on the part of them that wants to live (has he something to live for?), which can provide a new renewed commitment to life."
Heads pop around the door, kids run in and out, the kettle boils. The volunteers' mood is chatty, relaxed and accommodating - the mood is almost one of fun - in contradiction to the gravity of their task.
The crisis helpline service and phone numbers have been advertised on some 2,000 leaflets handed out at the Cairns funeral that morning and left in local shops. One call has been received already and the word is that the Etna Drive helpline has been busier.
The Ardoyne community, as always, has turned to its own resources.
Even within Belfast, Ardoyne and the tiny adjoining enclave known as The Bone have their own unique spirit. At the height of the industrial revolution, textile mills sprang up here to produce linen - Ewart's, Brookfield and Flax Street. Catholic workers were drawn from rural areas and crowded into streets around the mills.
There is no park, no common area and no grass, save what surrounds Holy Cross parish church. Hemmed in by the loyalist Shankill and Oldpark, Ardoyne's limits were clearly delineated. The boundaries became more real in the early 1920s when the place was ring-fenced by barbed wire and "policed" by the B-Specials.
As a result, Ardoyne became self-sufficient. Everything its inhabitants needed was there and there was little reason to run the risk of leaving.
Riots in the docks area in 1935 meant Catholic refugees poured in, swelling the population. The Catholic Church responded by building houses along Brompton Park, Estoril Park and Velsheda Park which run like furrows down the slope of Glenard and are still there.
The ghetto is still fenced in. Of the 11 walls, or peace lines, in Belfast, six of them surround Ardoyne and provide a curious mix of security and claustrophobia.
Yet despite the walls, 99 residents died in the Troubles. They were killed by loyalist or republican paramilitaries or British forces - all the victims came from an area so small it takes under an hour to walk around it. The population, now perhaps as high as 12,000, has a majority under the age of 25. A majority of that majority is under 16.
The paramilitary ceasefires of 1994 changed things in Ardoyne and challenged the cult of self-sufficiency, says Phil McTaggart, a community activist who is helping to co-ordinate the volunteers' rota for the suicide helplines.
"The community has been turning a blind eye on teenagers' needs for too long," he says. "There are youth facilities for younger ones - table tennis and pinball. But there's nothing for older ones."
"There are four leisure centres in north Belfast," he explains. "Shankill, the Grove, Ballysillan and the Valley - all of them in neighbouring loyalist areas. And you can't travel now, not after the Holy Cross school dispute. Be realistic - we wouldn't ask a young Protestant to come to Ardoyne." There are political campaigns to get another leisure centre nearer and safer for Ardoyne's adolescents. Sinn Féin has suggested one at the Water Works on the Antrim Road. The SDLP is pushing a site at Girdwood security force base - but there's no chance of that before 2010.
Second-level schools are also outside the area. Pupils travel to the likes of St Malachy's, St Gabriel's, St Gemma's, Hightown and Our Lady of Mercy among others. But even getting to the primary schools, like Holy Cross Girls' School, via neighbouring Glenbryn has proved trouble enough.
The area's drinking clubs are the stuff of legend. The Star, Henry Joy's and the Shamrock are among the dozen or so which dot the enclave, some boasting a huge turnover. The drinking culture is infamous.
Following the ceasefires and in the more relaxed and hopeful times after Good Friday 1998, many young people began to socialise in the city centre, says McTaggart. The takings at the drinking clubs went down and tolerance of under-age drinking went up to compensate.
There is a substance abuse problem in addition to street drinking, with "blow" (cannabis), ecstasy and glue-sniffing top of the list. Paramilitary involvement, "punishment attacks" and racketeering complete the already grim picture.
"There's been no peace dividend here. We need resources in north Belfast as a whole," McTaggart continues. "And we really need new facilities here. Young ones here need to get ownership of some place and to make their own rules - to make them feel grown-up. For we've no employment, no training facilities. Nothing." He finds the words to sum it up. "Everything isn't in Ardoyne and The Bone the way it once was." Drink, drugs and hopelessness are taking their toll on the local youth, and so too are the paramilitaries. They have their own response to drink- and drug-fuelled anti-social behaviour; and beatings, threats and other sanctions are common.
Barney Cairns had been warned, then shot by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). His friend, Anthony O'Neill had been beaten, stripped and pushed down a manhole. Both had been traumatised and that trauma is shared by their friends.
The social pressures and paramilitary intimidation are too much for some, says McTaggart - and he should know. His own son, Philip, took his life nine months ago. He was 17. That's why he is backing the helpline initiative fostered by the community group Public Initiative for Prevention of Suicide and Self-harm. PIPS - a take on his son's name.
Fr Aidan Troy, a Passionist priest and native of Bray, Co Wicklow, reflects on the needs of his parish.
"There's just not enough space on the board here for the game of life," he says of Ardoyne's actual and metaphorical confines. Despite the hype over the double suicide that week and the loss of three young lives in a high-speed car crash in January, he fears that the Cairns suicide will not be the last. There is nothing to suggest yet that the cycle which leads to young men killing themselves has been broken.
Deprivation and boredom leads to anti-social behaviour, which prompts punishment attacks by paramilitaries. But the plot thickens when, filled with revenge motivation, a victim aligns himself with the INLA to rival the Provos. And so it goes on.
"I tell people to be careful when they think that during the Troubles there were no suicides. There were often worse things happening from a public point of view." There is a suggestion that the tragedies of last week are not that new.
He runs through the list of recent suicides - the two of the previous week, and the case of young Eamonn Clarke who was tarred and feathered and later shot at the age of 14.
"There can be very different causes behind what finally pushes these lads over the edge." He believes each suicide victim goes to the grave with his own secret.
There is a further danger that each tragedy holds the potential for yet another.
"When a best friend has taken his life and you don't see any way out for yourself there is almost an attraction to say 'I could solve this for my family and I could solve this for myself and I could be faithful to my friend' by saying 'if he went, then I'm prepared to go and join him'." As he speaks, the monastery doorbell rings. It's a bunch of kids, aged about 10, who report to the priest that there's been a scuffle and a friend of theirs has run off, possibly with a length of rope.
That the tragedies of the week permeate every age group to this extent is scary, says Fr Troy.
"How do we create a real sense of belonging, a real sense of connectiveness with each other, a sense that there are standards and principles and values?" he asks. From his perspective suicide is the result of the community's problems, not the cause.
He insists that the appropriate response has to come from the community itself - not be handed down from outside. "I think there are enough people looking around and admitting this is so bad that we have to do something. There is a realisation that the church, politicians and statutory bodies have to feed in - but if we don't do it, it's not going to happen. That's a very positive thing." He cites the spirit of parents during the Holy Cross school dispute who persisted in walking their girls to school every morning through the hate campaign waged against them. "Something like the Holy Cross spirit will be the salvation of this place." The kids arrive back at the door - it's about 11 p.m. - to report a false alarm. The errant friend has been found and reconciled. There was no length of rope.
McTaggart echoes the notion that the community needs to work out its own salvation despite the tremendous injustice it faces. He refers to experiments in community restorative justice where young offenders and their families meet the people they have harmed and work out what is to be done to put matters right.
"A blind man could see that [paramilitary] punishment attacks don't work," he says. He rages against the "badge of honour" glorification that some victims seem to revel in. He talks of the six plots at the City Cemetery where young men lie buried near each other. "Now, where is the glory in that?"
Of the small but significant telephone helpline initiative, organised in the course of an afternoon, he says: "Maybe this is the start of a revolution in Ardoyne - people starting to improve themselves."