The 1998 Good Friday agreement, which provided the blueprint for a peaceful resolution to a decades-old conflict, has meant an end to the daily killings that used to define life in Northern Ireland. But the fighting persists in different ways, most visibly through the outdoor murals maintained in many neighborhoods.
In Catholic neighborhoods, murals celebrate the Republican cause or the legacy of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Perhaps the most well-known one marks the office of Sinn Fein, the political party that came out of the IRA.
In Protestant neighborhoods, the iconography is much more aggressive and militaristic. For example, this mural was just off the Shankill Road and celebrates the paramilitaries who became notorious for killing people, primarily Catholics but also Protestants, at random (and this is not to say that the IRA did not engage in bombing that took innocent lives of both faiths — they certainly did).
In contrast, some of the Republican murals are more romantic, evoking a kind of essential Ireland that stands for unity and the end of the British presence. I saw this mural in the Short Strand neighborhood of Belfast, near the Central train station. The portraits belong to known Republican and IRA heroes, including some of the men who died in the 1981 hunger strike.
Not all of the “dialectical art” is strictly political. Belfastians also do battle through the two soccer teams that have come to stand, respectively, for Protestant and Catholic: the Glasgow Rangers (Protestant) and the Glasgow Celtics. These last two murals are as eloquent, in their way, as the overtly political ones.
“The Ulster” is defiantly Protestant
And this mural, off the Falls Road, is all about Catholic pride:
Far from becoming less important, it seems like the tribal identity of the past is as or more important than ever. But somehow, the worst of the violence has been removed, almost like removing the stinger from a wasp. The wasp remains a wasp, with all of its aggression; yet it is unable to do real damage.