Murals

As I’m currently looking more into the creative scene in Northern Ireland, specifically political art, it’s only right to mention the infamous murals of the country. Belfast and Derry contain arguably the most famous political murals in Europe. Around 2,000 murals have been documented since the 1970s. I suppose they’re almost an artistic timeline of political and religious troubles. From hunger strikes to bombings, there’s a mural depicting most major events from the Troubles and beyond.

I’ve learned from a BBC article, that murals used to be a Unionist tradition, which predated the partition in 1921, but from roughly 1981 onwards, Nationalists joined in to support their Republican inmates in British prisons. Protestant murals tended to focus on the link between Northern Ireland and Britain, while Catholic murals targeted more international issues, such as situations in places like Palestine. “The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has spent several million pounds removing supposedly offensive murals (often of armed men in balaclavas) and replacing them with murals of cultural and sporting figures.” Although some muralists are trying their best to replace the very one-sided murals with those celebrating cultural and sporting heroes, often they’re replaced once again, proving once more how far we still have to go before we achieve a shared identity in N.I.

Below are some scanned images of murals from a book I read that explains the meaning behind many of the murals: