Shore Road, Belfast

The Shore Road is a major arterial route and area of housing and commerce that runs through north Belfast and Newtownabbey in Northern Ireland. It forms part of the A2 road, a traffic route which links Belfast to the County Antrim coast.

The Shore Road is one of Belfast's oldest roads and is mentioned in the first census of the city – taken in 1757 – as being home to a colony of "Papists". At the time the Shore Road name was applied to a larger area, including what is today known as York Street. The York Street-York Road and lower Shore Road experienced growth during the Industrial Revolution as a number of factories were located in the area. One of the main factories on York Street was Gallaher's Tobacco factory. It is no longer in operation and the building has been demolished. One of these few industrial buildings still standing is the Jennymount Mill, off the York Road. The building, renamed the Lanyon Building after its architect Charles Lanyon, was reopened as an Office block in 2002. According to Irish journalist Susan McKay, the area was the scene of fierce sectarian rioting throughout the nineteenth century until it was eventually established as a bulwark of working-class Protestantism. The areas further up the Shore Road towards Newtownabbey are for the most part more recent than these areas, with some housing developments such as Shore Crescent and the Rathcoole estate dating to the 1960s and later. Many residents of the overcrowded area at the bottom of the road were moved up to these new estates. Much of the housing throughout the road has been redeveloped and regenerated.

Like much of Belfast, the Shore Road saw a number of paramilitary attacks during the Troubles. Paramilitaries from both the Ulster loyalist and Irish republican sides were both active on the Shore Road, both in terms of recruiting members and in carrying out attacks.

The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was active locally from early in the Troubles. They placed a bomb in Conway's Bar, Greencastle on 29 March 1974 with two Catholic civilians, James Mitchell and Joseph Donnelly, killed in the explosion. The UVF carried out a bomb and gun attack on the same bar a year later on 13 March 1975 resulting in the deaths of a Catholic woman, Marie Doyle, and a UVF bomber, George Brown. On 23 May 1975 the UVF, under its Protestant Action Force (PAF) codename, killed two Catholic brothers, John and Thomas McErlane, as they visited friends in Mount Vernon, before shooting another Catholic civilian in late August, who would die from his wounds on 8 October.

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