BELFAST, 13 September 2003 — Political murals have long been a feature of urban life on both sides of Northern Ireland’s sectarian conflict, but now, five years into the British province’s tentative peace process, they are finally changing.
As new murals are commissioned, and old ones painted over, the paintings and slogans are increasingly taking up historical and cultural themes, replacing the once-common depictions of Kalashnikov-toting, hooded local heroes.
Observers say the trend is clearer on the west side of Belfast’s sectarian divide and in other Catholic strongholds such as Londonderry, where sociologist Bill Rolston says depictions of guns began disappearing as long ago as 1994, after the nationalist militant IRA announced a cease-fire.
Rolston, a university professor who has published three books about the murals, said the changes were immediate, but became even more noticeable four years later, when the Good Friday Agreement heralded the start of the province’s formal peace process.
“Some have guns in them, but they tend to be memorial murals — past guns rather than current or future guns,” he said.
Often, the painters themselves had been behind the early shift in emphasis, he said. “They were very conscious about it.”
He added: “On some occasions, there was pressure from local communities to put up paramilitary murals and they as muralists were resisting this, saying there’s a peace process here, that’s what we have to represent, and it doesn’t look good for our image and credibility to be talking peace, and on the other hand to put up murals representing war.”
In Catholic areas, paintings and slogans glorifying armed militants have given way to commemorative works on Ireland’s 19th-century famine, or murals calling for reform of the police — or even expressing support for Palestinian or Basque militant groups.
“Our last order was a mural commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising on the Whiterock road,” said mural artist Martin Lands.
“The local community were going to have a garden of remembrance and they wanted a mural, so we designed and painted the siege outside the GPO (Dublin post office). It was inaugurated two weeks ago.”
The pace of change is slower, however, in Protestant areas such as East Belfast, where there is a greater reluctance to part with local murals that have become classics over the years.
The sociologist said internal feuding among Protestant loyalists was partly to blame for the lack of progress. “There is a turf war within loyalism that makes it more difficult for them to change,” he said.
“There is a change but it is too early to predict how definitive that change will be.”
Of the six latest murals in Protestant areas — three in territory “controlled” by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and three in an area dominated by the Ulster Defense Association, a rival grouping — none can easily be interpreted as a direct call to arms. Instead they commemorate the ill-fated Titanic ocean liner — built in Belfast — the footballer George Best, the author C.S. Lewis and the founder of the British army’s SAS commando unit, Blair Mayne.
However gradual the changes, however, leaders on both sides of the community see cause for hope in the changing tone of the writing on Northern Ireland’s walls.
