Belfast’s murals are an open-air gallery of history and art
And the walls are suddenly changing
For years in Northern Ireland, walls have talked through words and images. Even after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brought an end to the three decades of sectarian strife known as the Troubles, what walls said could be deadly. When “Eamon Collins: British Agent 1985-1999” was scrawled on a gable in Newry, the person named, a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) man, painted over it, but to no avail. Hours later he was butchered nearby, the anti-British terror group gouging out his face in what police described as “the act of primitive cavemen”.
Other wall art lauded sectarian killers, or proclaimed the name of a terror group to mark out its territory. The state’s inability to remove such open homage to illegal organisations made public its weakness.
Lots of these murals endure. But their number diminishes with each passing year. Research by four academics—Dylan O’Driscoll, Birte Vogel, Eric Lepp and Dan Morecroft-Rice—found that in the quarter-century since 1998 three-quarters of the most intimidatory murals in the loyalist Shankill area have gone.
David Campbell is chairman of the Loyalist Communities Council, an outfit whose complexity reflects that of Northern Ireland: it is legal, but made up of banned paramilitary groups. Mr Campbell, who is not a paramilitary, says of the balaclava-laden imagery: “Some of it artistically is horrible, quite apart from the message it conveys.” He says loyalist commanders broadly support removing militaristic murals as they degrade over time. Newer murals in these areas have commemorated Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III. Mr Campbell hopes all of the most offensive murals might go within five years.
Not everyone agrees. In 2024 a storm toppled a wall in north Belfast’s Mount Vernon estate, an Ulster Volunteer Force stronghold. The wall had long been host to an infamous gargantuan threat: two balaclava-wearing gunmen aiming rifles along with the slogan “Prepared for peace; Ready for war”. Within months, the wall had been rebuilt and the mural repainted.
This can be a negotiating tactic. “Conflict transformation” has become a lucrative industry. Millions of pounds are available from multiple funds. If an area does not seem to be at risk of conflict, it is unlikely to bag as much cash, some of which finds its ways to paramilitaries or their cronies. Newton Emerson, an acerbic writer from Belfast, once referred to a summer riot in east Belfast as “a grant application”.
Lonely Planet, a travel guide, recommends the murals as a free attraction in Northern Ireland’s capital. Tourists flock to Belfast’s Troubles wall art, from the slick iconography commemorating the most famous IRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands, to the Ulster Defence Association’s stark territorial markers at “Freedom Corner”.
Some locals believe removing all Troubles murals would be a mistake. Just as people want to go to see concentration camps or battlefields, macabre history has appeal. Ben Lowry, editor of the News Letter, a Belfast-based daily, says that after the Troubles he showed murals to American visitors, one of whom returned the following year with a friend. They were disappointed to find the murals painted over. While Mr Lowry has no sympathy for paramilitaries, he says: “We need to find a way to preserve the best of them where there is local support for such history.”
Murals need not be dark to attract. In recent years Belfast has been bedecked with spectacular non-sectarian ones: artistic images, floral studies and even a poignantly hopeful tribute to Lyra McKee, a journalist murdered by dissident republicans in 2019. To wander around the centre of Belfast is to encounter breathtaking images, from duelling men to animals—so many that there’s an app to guide you. In an annual street-art festival at the start of May more than 50 muralists were let loose on (approved) walls across Belfast.
Some of the most dramatic new murals are the work of Dan Kitchener, an artist from Essex in England. For nearly two decades his full-time job has been turning walls into canvasses. He has worked everywhere from Australia to Kazakhstan but says Belfast has been the most welcoming place to paint. His Belfast work is optimistic and apolitical. One depicts Belfast’s Ormeau Bridge at sunset, full of saturated colours which transform a road bridge into a work of wonder. Mr Kitchener sees this as an open-air gallery for those who would never enter a building filled with watercolours and ornate frames.
Standing in front of a blank wall before sketching an outline is daunting even for someone who’s been doing it for years. Mr Kitchener likens it to running a marathon (which he also does). As with marathons, “the mainstream now has embraced it, so there’s more desire for it commercially.”
But new beauty can’t entirely hide a past still recent and raw. One glaring omission from Northern Ireland’s tourism offering is a museum of the Troubles, meaning most tourists get far more partisan tellings of the violence by guides, some of whom were themselves paramilitaries.
Political disagreement has prevented such a museum. It could be a place where horrific murals conveyed what previous generations lived through, and the barbarism of the Troubles. For the mural-painters of old, however, painting over commemorations of the killers might be a more attractive proposition than facing up to what their heroes did.■