NEWTON'S OPTIC:IT IS hard to believe, surveying the empty wasteland it is today, that south Belfast was once home to a thriving equality industry. A century ago this entire area hummed with noise and activity, or at least the appearance of activity. There was a lot of noise, at any rate.
The equality industry developed around Belfast’s natural harbouring. However, as the industry grew, dredging-up was increasingly required. From small if not actually non-existent beginnings, Belfast soon came to dominate the global equality market, helped by the relentless expansion of British and Irish empire-building.
Every day about 30,000 people poured into the massive equality-building quangos, of which Harland and Cry-Wolf was certainly the best known. Black and white CCTV footage from the time shows thousands of identical Volkswagen Polos streaming down the M1 to come off at the Broadway Roundabout. It was said that the rattle of their little diesel engines could be heard across the whole city as they arrived to clock on at 9.30, or probably nearer 10. Or lunchtime on Mondays.
There is a widespread belief that everyone who worked in the equality industry was Catholic, but that was not the case. They just sounded Catholic. The mood of the workforce was perfectly captured in Ulster-Irish laureate Hamish Feeney's poem, Ducker: That Catholic hasn't dropped her hammer and sickle Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again
In the broad detached streets behind the sprawling quangos a vibrant middle-class culture took root. To be honest it was more of a lower-middle class culture, but nobody in Belfast really understood the difference, despite all their sociology degrees, or possibly because of them. Front doors were kept locked and neighbours were always ready to stab each other in the back. Dozens of highly-skilled trades were practised and passed down from mother to daughter. Boiler-plating, propeller-heading, stern-reporting and funnel-visioning kept whole families in work for generations. However, there was absolutely no riveting. None at all.
Across the Six Councils (formerly Northern Ireland), thousands more supplied the industry with wool, flannel, tar and pork. At its height, it is thought that the entire working population was manufacturing research on the entire non-working population.
From the slippy-ways of South Belfast were launched some of the world’s greatest initiatives: Section 75 Equality Impact Assessment, Targeting Social Need With Respect To Community Need and of course the most famous of them all, the “unsinkable” EU Peace III Cohesion and Integration Strategy Review. Many of these initiatives carried the huge wave of people who left Europe for the wide open conferences of the US. Others sailed to exotic locations like Gaza, Rwanda and Limerick.
Little did the men and women, but mostly women, who built them know their world was about to end in the cataclysm of the Great Funding War, with millions wiped out in the tranches.
After that the decline came quickly. Within a few years the entire industry had relocated to Korea where workers were more productive, although it was impossible to say so in Belfast at the time as Asian stereotypes were illegal. Today this important part of Belfast’s non-industrial heritage is preserved in the Equality Quarter. Visitors should note that for monitoring purposes, the Quarter is divided into two halves.