St Joseph's as it used to look c. 1900
One of Belfast’s oldest and best known churches world-wide, St Joseph’s in the heart of the city’s Sailortown district, has been closed by the Catholic Church and sits at the mercy of dockland developers.
The “Chapel on the Quays”, as it is known, was home to thousands of Sailortown people for four generations and a beacon of light for nearly as many foreign sailors since it rose to dominate the dockside skyline exactly 120 years ago last August.
Births, deaths and marriages were the spiritual bread and butter of the worker Saint’s humble home and ordinary people showed extraordinary faith and courage over the years to scrimp and save to give it life and keep it alive. Their badge of faith was the building that was, and is, St Joseph’s.
The chapel is a minor masterpiece of craftsmanship, it included monumental sculpture by the father of Patrick Pearse, that has become the holiest of homes to the tragic diaspora that is the population of Belfast’s most unique village.
The
countless working class folk who did most of the living and working and
dying in the shadow of St
Joseph’s asked for little in return. Like the
worker, they had been reared in a culture where
giving and sharing were the ebb and flow of life itself and the little chapel
that looked out to sea, where so many of its parishioners were to spend and lose
their lives, was the anchor that kept its community steady and together.
Belfast’s Sailortown was just another ribbon of red-bricked, little streets
when the town developers turned
the bulldozers on it in the the late 1960’s.
Dockland houses that had been homes to three generations were destroyed as the
bureaucratic ball and chain went to work. Lives were disturbed forever and
hearts broken as 100 years’ of history went under the hammer.
For the first time, the City Fathers’ message to the people was clear – it was time to for you to go, there is money to be made and no-one gives a damn.
The
promises of the previous decade, of a new Sailortown with houses worthy of the
residents, were recognised for the empty lies they had always been. But it was
too late. Progress had made a bargain with profit and people were no longer part
of the equation.
Families, like heart’s blood, slipped away from streets headed for dereliction. Tears became the last goodbyes as furniture was packed onto lorries, photographs tucked carefully into mothers’ bags and memories of better days consigned to nostalgia. The politicians and planners had washed their hands of Sailortown, then rubbed them with glee.
The two
dozen or so dockside streets, which had bred legends, were practically no more
by 1973. Between bureaucrats and bombers, the houses that hard work and
dedication had forged into wee palaces, were demolished to make way for a
wasteland fit only for motorways and container parks.
Houses were levelled and people scattered across the city in a diaspora of despair. But the fire of defiance and sense of community of its people has not been doused by distance or time.
The marshy bogland, known as Points Fields, that had been drained and piled to bear the weight of the rows of terraces that would make up the streets of the new district of Sailortown in the 1870’s, had been a hard home to thousands of souls for nearly one hundred years.
Sunrise over St Joseph's by Ciaran Gallagher
(Sept.2004)
Their humour, hard work and heart-felt faith had taken them through the darkest of days of poverty and pogrom and St Joseph’s church remained at anchor when times were rough and uncertain.
The little church, built in heady industrial days and since sandwiched between the graveyards of commercial feed mills, remains the oldest building in the area . It’s fine architecture has seen it listed for preservation but, even that, and the dedication of a vibrant congregation ,to what they consider is a scared place, may not save it from destruction.
Paul McLaughlin
