Painting Peace? Murals and the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Abstract

Murals have figured as a prominent feature of the visual environment of Northern Ireland since the early twentieth century, developing, during the Troubles, into one of the best-known examples of political art in the world. This article examines the position occupied by these murals in the period (since 1994) of the peace process. It focuses on the multi-government-agency Re-imaging Communities programme (launched in 2006) and its attempt to intervene in the visual environment and steer the Northern Ireland muralscape away from expressions of sectarianism towards more ‘positive’ themes. The aims and achievements of this programme (to date) are assessed, along with the issues the programme and related initiatives raise with regard to the governance of the visual environment. The article moves on to examine a further means by which murals have been repositioned in the period since 1994 – the attempt to present them as tourist attractions – and closes by discussing the issues raised for remembering the Troubles by these interventions in and attempts to reconfigure Northern Ireland's murals.

Keywords:

• governance
• murals
• peace process
• Re-imaging Communities
• sectarianism
• visual environment

Notes

What though are the ‘origins’ of mural painting in Northern Ireland? Latent in much of the literature on murals in Northern Ireland is an association with Belfast's tradition of shipbuilding. Like many of the early efforts, the 1908 Beersbridge Road mural was painted by a shipyard worker, a profession overwhelmingly Protestant and which had ready access to mass-produced paint. The huge rise in unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s accentuated this association (Rolston, 1987: 8; Loftus, 1990: 31–32). The ties to shipbuilding were manifest in the content of murals, with the Titanic featuring in interwar murals and a painting of a welder in loyalist north-west Belfast by the son of a shipyard worker being one of the most well known of a Belfast City Council scheme in the late 1970s, discussed later (Rolston, 1987: 8–9; Watson, 1983: 8).

Though the row of terrace houses that it abutted have long been knocked down, the gable wall still stands and continues to function as a display for republicans' political campaigns.

According to Rolston (1987: 22), loyalist depictions of its own paramilitaries did not appear on the walls of Belfast until a few years after the 1981 republican hunger strike. Loftus (1990: 32) estimated that King Billy featured in only around 12 of 75 loyalist murals in Northern Ireland in the mid-1980s.

This piece does not discuss the government initiatives we examine here – it all but pre-dates them.

The ‘clean-up’ involved the Mount Vernon Environmental Group removing sectarian graffiti and transforming a ‘mucky’ and derelict field in the centre of the estate into a community garden (Sustainable Development Commission [NI], 2010).

An addendum to this story is provided by the fact that during the painting of the murals initiated by Adair's supporters, a mural depicting Princess Diana was produced in response to complaints from local residents that the area had become dominated by images of gunmen (McCormick & Jarman, 2005: 64). This image was itself, though, one of those removed in 2003.

Independent Research Solutions produced the official report on ‘Re-imaging Communities’ commissioned by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Belfast City Council (2010), Re-imaging Communities Project, available at: http://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/re-image/lowershankill.asp

After this section was written, the authors were in Conway Mill in August 2011 and noticed the almost complete (and no doubt recent) defacement of Tom Kerr's ‘The Sky’ by graffiti, a stark contrast to the pristine-looking section of republican murals along Falls Road/Divis Street.

Griffin made a similar observation when she visited the Loughview estate in Holywood, an estate that was a recipient of ‘Art of Regeneration’ funding. There she saw newly planted shrubbery plagued by rubbish, including glass bottles (Griffin, 2007: 45). These observations are made not to undermine the whole ethos of the Re-imaging Communities programme, but to highlight the precarious nature of its interventions.

‘Forty years of peace lines’, BBC, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8121341.stm, 1 July 2009. With regard to this issue it is worth pointing to Lisle's (2006: 45–46) observation that the Northern Ireland Assembly's September 2002 tourism inquiry did not focus on political tourism, and was not interested in the role of murals.

This is an issue that Robert Bevan (2006: 175–201) considers more broadly in relation to the architecture of post-war Europe and the more recent Balkan conflicts, focusing not only on the erasure of the past through the obliteration of buildings and monuments but also on the reconstruction of the built environment in well-meaning, though crude, attempts to restore the status quo ante.

Lundy and McGovern's study in 2006 indicated that only 27% of people in Northern Ireland thought that a truth and reconciliation commission was ‘important’ for the future, an additional 23% believing it ‘fairly important’. However, even among those who supported the idea, there were considerable disagreements on how a future commission should be constructed, doubts about whether it would uncover the truth and a feeling that it was not a high priority (Lundy & McGovern, 2006). These results prefigured the response to the Eames-Bradley proposals for a truth and reconciliation process in January 2009, whose recommendations had not been taken up by politicians or the general public by the time of writing (July 2010) (see Rowan, 2010).

A certain number of murals of this type might already be said to exist – although a mural such as the bird of peace displayed on the NITB website is, primarily, optimistic and forward looking, rather than reflexive about what has taken place.