The Falls Road was yesterday (Sunday) under strict curfew, but it was not at the hands of the British this time, but a re-enactment of the infamous and failed crackdown of July 1970.
All the colour and sounds of yesteryear were brought to the 35th anniversary of the Curfew when a ring of steel was placed around the Falls Road leaving a whole community facing limited food supplies and CS gas.
Pints of milk, a rarity when people couldn't get out to the shops, headscarves, barricades and banners were again the order of the day at the colourful spectacle of street theatre attended by a large crowd.
And kids were looking at their grannies in a different light realising that in earlier days they were in fact dedicated revolutionaries as they sang those old songs We Shall Overcome and We Shall Not Be Moved.
For the men who had drawn the short straw and were delegated to playing British soldiers, the reality hit home as the drama unfolded and the famous female revolutionary resolve of West Belfast took hold.
One desperate corporal who was getting the worst of a beating cried out "It's only acting. Stop hitting me, missus!" to rapturous cheers – and barking of dogs.
The re-enactment of the Falls Road curfew that lasted from July 3 to July 5 1970 and was eventually broken by women from all over Belfast bringing relief in the form of food and other items in prams, is part of a series of events commemorating the curfew in which four people were killed.
Lt General Alan Freeland ordered the curfew in the lower Falls in an area bounded by the junctions of Falls Road and Grosvenor Road, Albert Street and Cullingtree Road.
Daily Ireland columnist Danny Morrison gave a talk on the context of the 1970 Curfew and its implications for the rest of the conflict when the British army turned on the people of West Belfast.
He referred to the West Belfast women who eventually broke the curfew.
"It was the end of the so-called honeymoon period when the working class section of the nationalist community realised they would not get to achieve their civil rights without a major struggle against the state and the British army."
Robert McClenaghan of the Falls Curfew Commemoration Committee, who was 12 when people were ordered into their houses in his grandmother's street, said the days of the barricades were brought alive.
"The women of the district have again driven out the army from the Falls Road. It brought it all back seeing the women with their bottles of milk, scarves and loaves of bread," he said.
"We walked down from St Paul's chapel and met more people at Leeson Street. I could still smell the memory of the CS gas. As a child you were part terrified but part excited and we had a lot of fun walking out into the front doors of houses that were part of the curfew but out the back doors of the same houses that weren't. There was certainly a lot of banging of bin lids."
