Cluan Place is a small working class area in East Belfast right on the peaceline with nationalist Short Strand. It is surrounded by 40 foot fences and often comes under attack with bricks, bottles and any other rubble that can make it over from the nationalist side. Have to give it to the people living there, they have some balls. The place is decked out in red, white & blue bunting and awash with every loyalist, unionist flag you could imagine. Check out google street view to see how they roll. They have their bonfire on the entrance to their area, on the road so that no one can come in to attack them. Basically blocking themselves in and hoping for the best. So good luck to all the Cluan Place residents, here's hoping your homes survive the riot season.
It is yet to be constructed. Have to let the postman, milkman etc in before they can build it. It's not usually that big, just stretches across their road.
I just checked it out. There's a dodgy looking black man in a green tracky standing at the entrance. It looks like a decent wee street apart from that and of course the peace wall situation.
Here's a thought. Maybe if they held back on the bunting and the bonfires, they wouldn't be getting pelted with rocks by the cave dwellers on the other side of the ****ing great wall?
Exactly what Trev said. They aren't getting attacked for their bunting or flags, they get attacked because they are Unionist/Loyalist/Protestant and are literally a stone throw away.
We throw rocks at them cos they throw rocks at us cos we throw rocks at them cos they ****in started it. It's all a bit ****ed isn't it?
But that's not how it happens. They get attacked for living on an interface and for being Unionist/Loyalist/Protestant.
Would you throw rocks blindly over a wall when you know they will come straight back over and more than likely hit your house? The Short Strand is a huge area and the people that go to these interfaces to cause trouble do not live nearby for the same reason.
No, never! Dont you get it by now (read all of Medros articles) - Loyalists/Proddies = good/ Republicans/Kaffliks = bad!
Did I say that? No. Cluan place is basically two streets. The Short Strand houses 1000s of people. Do you think the people that are throwing stuff over from the Short Strand side live within a stone throw from the peaceline? Of course they don't.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/jun/07/northernireland.owenbowcott "Welcome to Hell" reads an improvised sign on an abandoned home in Cluan Place. Two doors down a bullet hole is visible in a boarded-up window. The redbrick cul-de-sac appeared deserted yesterday apart from a several Royal Fusiliers and a family loading their fridge into a removal van. Behind this isolated Protestant estate in east Belfast stands a high, protective "peace line" separating residents from Catholic homes in the Short Strand. The two communities may be neighbours but there is little now other than hatred between them. The wall is not high enough to provide a sense of security. Over the jubilee weekend, republican gunmen twice opened up with automatic weapons into Cluan Place, hitting five people. The political reverberations of that gunfire - and the returned shots from loyalist paramilitaries - still echo around Northern Ireland, threatening to destabilise the peace process. Most of the displaced residents were yesterday sheltering in a nearby community centre. Shirley Anne Ritchie, 26, had spent four nights in a hotel with her two-year-old daughter, Alicia. "On Saturday, we were told to pick up the children and run out of the house," she said yesterday. "My kitchen is blackened from a petrol bomb and I have no clothes. "I had to carry my girl through a barrage of stones. She wants to go home now. She wakes in the night saying 'where are the bad men?'. I don't know where I'm supposed to go, but I want a transfer out of the street." Richard Polly, 66, one of the few remaining in Cluan Place, witnessed both shootings. "On Sunday, the gunman just poked his gun over the peaceline wall, probably didn't even look before he opened fire," he said. "Three people were hit. It was amazing no one was killed. "On Monday, a gunman climbed up on to the roof of a house behind us and shot two people putting up boarding over the windows. I saw this guy running past, hands to his chest, blood pouring out over his fingers and shouting 'I'm shot, I'm shot'. He made it out on to the main road before he collapsed." But it was a victory dance, performed by Monday night's gunman on the rooftops in full view of his victims in Cluan Place, which has most infuriated the loyalist community. "I saw him dancing," said Ms Ritchie. "He was pleased with what he had done. We could hear cheering from his supporters on the other side of the wall." Ellen Boyce, 56, emerged from a house right up against the peace line: "I was hit by a brick on the head and later that day had all my windows put out by stones. I went over to one of the soldiers today and said 'Give us your rifle, son, I'll silence that lot'." With both republicans and loyalists convinced they are the victims, political mediation between Sinn Fein's president, Gerry Adams, and the loyalist PUP leader, David Ervine, has made little headway. A protest by loyalist women yesterday blocked the nearby Lower Newtownards Road. "No Short Strand nationalists or republicans allowed into east Belfast", read a wall poster. A woman said: "These Fenians in the Short Strand want to take over the houses in Cluan Place. We don't want them shopping on our road anymore. We want the police to go in there and restore order. Our kids musn't go through what we had to endure in the 1970s." The jubilee bunting, which sparked off the rioting, the women insisted, had never been draped around the railings of St Matthew's Roman Catholic church. "It only went from lamppost to lamppost." The police record for Wednesday night recorded: a pipe-bomb attack on a woman in west Belfast, 50 petrol bombs thrown at Springfield Road police station, a kneecapping, and stone throwing between loyalist and republican mobs on the Ormeau bridge. Acting chief constable Colin Cramphorn said yesterday that 28 officers had been injured and six civilians needed hospital treatment following clashes around the Short Strand. One gunman wounded by police is expected to be identified by DNA tests
