Uniting people from the grassroots, with community relations activist, Eileen Weir

Forget Stormont: women, grassroots activism and broadening horizons

Community development practitioner and activist, Eileen Weir talks with Professor Bronwen Walter (Anglia Ruskin University) and the IoI team about uniting people from the grassroots without the intervention of Stormont. Weir tells how she went from joining the Ulster Defence Association as a teenager in the Shankill, to fighting for civil rights across borders and political divides, firstly as a trade unionist and then as a community organiser with the Shankill Women’s Centre. How have trade unions and women’s groups transcended the unionist-nationalist divide? Can grassroots activism offer an alternative to Stormont government action? And are mainstream politicians out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people in Northern Ireland? 

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• Executive summary
• About the speaker
• About the discussant
• Watch the conversation
• What was said

Executive Summary

Community development practitioner and activist Eileen Weir talks with Professor Bronwen Walter (Anglia Ruskin University) Dr Barry Colfer (St Edmund’s College, Cambridge) and Dr Niamh Gallagher (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge). They discuss how women’s activism has evolved in Northern Ireland, the effectiveness of Stormont government and its disengagement from grassroots politics.

• Weir explains that, although the women’s movement was able to move “above the radar” after the Good Friday Agreement, it never received a “peace dividend” and is still waiting for a “seat at the table”.
• To increase female representation in a political culture that is still male-dominated, “We need more men feminists, asking around that table, where’s the women?”
• She argues that both trade unions and the women’s sector have always transcended the unionist-nationalist divide through a focus on rights-based activism.
• Weir and many activists she knows are deeply frustrated with Stormont governance. Stormont is “always this orange and green fight, everything comes down to orange and green”. This eclipses other urgent issues, such as inequality, women’s and workers’ rights, a broken benefits system and climate crisis.
• Weir does not believe that a united Ireland will happen in her lifetime. She thinks that the SDLP would be more attractive to voters if they stopped campaigning on reunification, as the GFA already has adequate provisions for reunification if and when majorities in NI and the Republic supported it.

About the speaker

Eileen Weir is a well-respected community development practitioner with extensive experience in building community capacity, supporting community cohesion and strategic community development. Eileen has project managed the design, implementation, and evaluation of a broad range of community development programmes. Eileen is currently employed by Shankill Women’s Centre as the Greater North Belfast Women’s Network Co-Ordinator funded by the Community Relations Council and TEO/North Belfast Good Relations Programme. She has also worked to establish neighbourhood networks to enable the groups to meet, share information and build capacity. Eileen also works within West Belfast with a wide range of community organisations and women’s group and is currently working towards creating a West Belfast Women’s Network. Eileen’s unbiased approach through her community development work has helped her to reach out to various communities and build relationships and networks throughout the Island of Ireland.

About the discussant

Professor Bronwen Walter, Emerita Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. Bronwen's research and publications include Outsiders inside: whiteness, place and Irish women (2001) and Discrimination and the Irish community in Britain (with Mary Hickman) (1997). She is currently researching multigenerational Irish identities in Britain, Newfoundland and New Zealand and comparative experiences with Korean-descent communities in Japan.

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What was said?

Eileen Weir grew up on the Shankill Road, a Loyalist hub in Belfast. The Troubles began during her early teens, and at sixteen she joined the Ulster Defence Association, Northern Ireland’s largest Loyalist paramilitary group. Weir says that she, like other female recruits, was never offered a gun and worked on the UDA’s “welfare side”, caring for the elderly in the community and keeping “a wee eye on the men who were on the barricades.” She contrasts this auxiliary role with the more equal status of Republican women, who often became combatants. They were “seen as equals, and that goes right back to 1916 and all that. And they were very, very strong.”

Weir soon left the UDA, and in 1975 she started work at Gallagher’s tobacco factory in Belfast. She became involved in trade unionism, firstly as a shop steward, and then as a member of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union’s Women’s Advisory Committee. In a formative episode, she decided to support a WAC motion to oppose the strip-searching of female paramilitary (and alleged paramilitary) prisoners, who were overwhelmingly Republican. Weir knew that such a stance would be unacceptable in her own Loyalist community, but opposed the searches “on the basis of civil and human rights”. She found that, if she “widened [her] horizon, that if we took the labels off and we looked outside the box, then we could see the truth, and what we should be doing as women to stop anything like this happening”.

In the 1990s, Weir left trade unionism and went to work at the Shankill Women’s Centre, which offers education, training and support for women of all ages. Currently, she is working at the Centre for the fourth time, having been in a variety of activist and community roles, such as rehabilitating women leaving prison. Weir explains that Northern Ireland’s women’s sector, like trade unions, have always been largely free from Unionist-Republican divisions, and were crucial for building relations across communities prior to Good Friday. Weir emphasises the historical importance of this work, but also warns that the binary discourse of “cross-community and cross-border” work is unhelpfully exclusive. Northern Ireland is a diverse society, with many people not part of the “two main dissident communities”, including the migrant women whom the Shankill Women’s Centre helps with English courses and GCSE tuition. “If we don’t change our language here, then how are we expecting to make these people feel welcome”.
 

Weir believes that grassroots women’s activism helped lay the foundations for Good Friday, but these groups never received a “peace dividend” after it was signed. This is not necessarily a material dividend, but rather a “seat at the table” to influence government policy. She says, “We need more men feminists, asking around that table, where’s the women?”

Weir is deeply frustrated at Stormont politics more generally. It’s “always this orange and green fight, everything comes down to orange and green”. She believes an overwhelming focus on Northern Ireland’s membership of the UK, and the bitterness around this divide prevents meaningful and urgent political action in other areas. She does not believe Irish reunification will happen in her lifetime, but thinks that the Good Friday Agreement provides adequate resources for it if and when majorities in Northern Ireland and the Republic support it. Therefore she wishes Stormont parties would drop the constitutional question from their campaigning – for example, she thinks the SDLP would attract a wider range of voters without their commitment to a united Ireland.

Weir believes a wide range of important issues have been left by the wayside in the “orange and green fight”. These include the climate crisis, inequality and poverty, a broken benefits system that penalizes people moving between temporary jobs, and zero hours contracts, which Weir thinks should be outlawed. She wants politicians to “bring the wages up and create proper jobs”, but is not optimistic about this happening. Instead, she’s been working on this herself at the grassroots; for example, the Shankill Women’s Centre has also been working with men, putting them through building site courses and forklift certification. 

She thinks many Stormont politicians are detached from these concerns and out of touch with voters. Many “grew up with money in their pocket”, and do not understand the harsh poverty experienced by many of their constituents. Recalling meeting with Sinn Fein’s Martina Anderson, the party’s unionist engagement officer at the time, she notes wryly, “It’s a pity the Unionist Party didn’t have a unionist engagement person.” Asked by Barry Colfer whether she’d go into Stormont politics herself, Weir says, “I could get more done at grassroots level than I could at Stormont twiddling my thumbs, listening to two parties.