Tag: Our Generation Stories
Bobby Foster
Highfield to Canada and back
“As a boy, Highfield was a fantastic place to grow up. We passed our time up the mountain doing the things that kids did. One of the highlights of the year was bonfire night, anything that grew on branches we were tak...
Father Desmond Wilson
Community development in W. Belfast
Father Wilson grew up in the mixed community Ormeau Road area in south Belfast. “Belfast, to us, was an amazing place. When I was growing up I was very fortunate, I was able to go to Saint Malachys Grammar School a...
John Gray
Talking to the Linen Hall librarian
Bernard Conlon talks to John Gray about his work as a social historian, an activist in the civil rights movement, and former Librarian of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. John’s parents left England for Northern ...
Albert Fry
Engineering and the Irish Language
Albert was born during the Second World War and grew up in a family of five in North Queen Street, close to Belfast City Centre. “My main memory is soldiers, soldiers, soldiers. Another main memory is prisoners from G...
Tura Arutura
Talking with the founder of Artfrique
Tura grew up in Chitungwiza in Zimbabwe during the pre-war period. He recalls it as being a “very colourful beautiful country. Very warm, very hot, it also reflects the nature of the people as well. They wear their he...
Paul Gallagher
Surviving a shooting
Marie Breen-Smyth the Associated Dean International at the University of Surrey talks to Paul Gallagher about his injury and it affected his life and future and how he has came to terms with it. On the 6th January ...
May Blood
Talking with Baroness Blood
May was born during World War Two and grew up in Roden Street, a mixed area of Belfast with her mother and sister. He family was separated due to the evacuations during the war. “For the first six years of my life I t...
Jennifer McNern
Surviving a bomb blast
Marie Breen-Smyth, Associated Dean International at the University of Surrey talks to Jennifer McNern about her experiences of the violence of The Troubles. Jennifer was injured on March 4th, 1972, during a shoppin...
Albert Haslett
The Shankill during WW2
As a child, Albert grew up with his parents and 9 brothers and sisters in the Hammer, a poor neighbourhood of Belfast. The area was characterised by poor housing conditions. “The houses were just two up and two dow...
Padraic Fiacc
The life of a poet
Poet Padraic Fiacc was born Patrick Joseph (Joe) O Connor in Belfast on Elizabeth Street in 1923. The First World War had ended and Padraic remembers that “everybody went half mad when the war was over, and my moth...
Joe Baker
Memories of New Lodge
Joe grew up on the New Lodge estate in north Belfast. “When we moved into it, it was a construction site, everything was brand new and spic and span. It was a lot of adventure and a lot of fun playing on the buildi...
Helen Bell
Tales from the lower Shankill
Born in 1947 in Hopewell Street at the bottom of the Shankill Road, Helen remembers the late 1960s and the first time that real “trouble” started on the Shankill Road, with rioting and flares being shot into the air. ...