The Flats: Silence, Memory, and the Legacy of the Troubles
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- May 2
- 3 min read
Irish cinema dates announced for acclaimed Troubles documentary The Flats: May 23rd 2025
The Flats: Everyday Brutalism, Memory, and the Legacies of Silence in Northern Ireland
In Belfast, near the interface between the Markets and Donegall Pass, stand the old “Flats”—a cluster of post-war brutalist buildings now largely emptied of their original tenants and slowly being erased from the city’s consciousness. These structures, often dismissed as outdated or eyesores, are rich in layered memories. Their significance isn’t architectural in the traditional sense, but social, psychological, and political. The Flats are repositories of memory—of community, of trauma, of state presence and absence. And yet, they have been left to rot, earmarked for demolition without public debate, formal documentation, or commemoration. Their erasure mirrors a broader pattern in Northern Ireland’s handling of its violent past.
The Silence of the Peace Process
The Northern Ireland peace process, celebrated globally for ending large-scale conflict, has always wrestled with what to do about the past. The Good Friday Agreement was intentionally silent on issues of memory, truth, and justice, focusing instead on power-sharing, disarmament, and political normalization. Subsequent efforts—such as the Bloomfield Report (1998), the Consultative Group on the Past (2009), and the recent Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act (2023)—have attempted to address this silence, but they have been partial, contested, and often met with suspicion or fatigue. The result is a legacy landscape marked by both too much memory and too little: where murals and memorials proliferate in some areas, while other painful histories—especially those involving state forces, paramilitary control of communities, or civilian suffering—are left unacknowledged.
The Flats: A Silent Witness
The Flats occupy this second terrain. They are not memorials, nor are they heritage sites. They are fragments of everyday infrastructure, but ones saturated with the residues of the Troubles. Here, residents endured raids, surveillance, coercion, poverty, and the lingering psychological effects of violence. Yet these memories remain largely undocumented. There are no plaques, no formal testimonies, no efforts to record the stories of those who lived through these years in these buildings. The Flats are haunted—not just by the past, but by the silence that follows it.
This raises fundamental questions about what gets remembered and what gets erased. Why do some buildings, sites, and stories get folded into the collective memory of a society, while others—especially those marked by ambiguity, discomfort, or shame—are left out? In Northern Ireland, the politics of memory has often been shaped by the need to sustain a fragile peace. This means avoiding certain truths, flattening complex experiences, or deferring justice in the name of stability. But this form of peace risks becoming brittle. Without space for the quieter, harder-to-articulate memories—those of women, of working-class communities, of ambivalent or ambiguous experiences—the story of the conflict and its aftermath remains partial.
Memory in the Everyday
In many post-conflict societies, there is an instinct to monumentalise the past through high-profile memorials or curated museums. But often, it is the ordinary spaces—homes, stairwells, alleyways, flats—that hold the most intimate and unresolved memories. These are the “junk DNA” of the built environment: overlooked, unfashionable, but essential to the deeper social memory of a place. Their demolition is not just about clearing land or upgrading housing stock; it is also a form of forgetting.
Reckoning with the legacy of the Troubles requires more than political commissions or symbolic gestures. It requires a shift in how we value memory in the everyday. Adaptive re-use, participatory documentation, and community-led preservation could offer alternative ways of engaging with spaces like the Flats. These approaches don’t freeze places in time, but allow them to evolve while acknowledging what came before.
Refusing the Comfort of Forgetting
The Flats may not be saved. But the stories they hold still matter. They reveal the unspoken costs of conflict and the unfinished business of peace. Remembering them—and others like them—is not about nostalgia. It is about refusing the comfort of forgetting.
