Making sense of the Troubles: the murals before, during and after the conflict in Northern Ireland

For more than a century, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland saw the construction and destruction of thousands of murals that were painted outside the houses and commercial premises by local inhabitants and artists. Such murals displayed the ideology of Loyalists/Protestants and Republicans/Catholics and not only became a form of communicating what was happening within their communities but also turned into one of the most dynamic forms of symbolic expression. Although the first murals appeared in 1908 in Belfast’s Protestant neighbourhoods, it was only after the beginning of the conflict named Troubles that such practise was spread to Catholic areas and the country witnessed a boom in the construction of murals.

The Troubles was a period of urban violence that plagued Northern Ireland for over three decades, leaving more than 3,500 dead, which is a considerable figure for a population of about 1.5 million. The conflict can be seen as a violent expression of existing animosities and unresolved issues of nationality, religion, power and territorial rivalry between two communities: the Nationalists/Republicans – mainly Catholics – and the Loyalists/Unionists – mainly Protestants. Briefly, the former sought independence from the British crown and more political participation while the latter wished to maintain loyal to the British government. Its beginning is conventionally dated from the late 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, and its end in 1998, with the Good Friday Agreement. However, both dates are arguable, since the animosities in fact began with the English occupation in the 16th and 17th centuries and after 1998 there have been a few isolated bombings and new political arrangements, such as the disarmament of the IRA in 2005 and the beginning of the power-shared government between Republicans and Loyalists in 2007.

Throughout the Troubles, the murals were in constant change. It is easily noticeable that the issues chosen to be painted would vary according to the political and social changes at a given time. Hence, how do these murals make sense of the Troubles? What are their roles before, during and after the war? Furthermore, to what extent do they represent truly the events that took place during the conflict? This essay, thus, takes the case of the murals in Northern Ireland to examine how alternative media make sense of wars, which meanings are conveyed and how events are represented before, during and after a conflict takes place.

The murals as media

There are many terms that can be used when defining the murals as media. They can be called alternative media (Downing 2002) or can also fit into Allan and Matheson’s (2009) description of citizen media even though the authors refer to digital media. Both terms refer to the type of media that is more sensible to the voices and aspirations of the citizens/community as they are the ones who produce the messages and circulate them. They are usually independent from political and economical institutions[1] and they present an alternative view from what is being conveyed by mainstream media.

The murals before the war

The first murals appeared in the early twentieth century and were recognized as manifestations of Protestant popular culture. The main theme depicted was the Battle of the Boyne (1690), in which the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange was praised, and it was chosen due to the annual commemorations of the Battle. The Catholics, on the other hand, were not allowed to develop similar activities and the police constantly stopped any attempt. As Neil Jarman (1998) exemplifies, in 1970 two men were sentenced to six months' imprisonment for painting the Irish flag in Belfast and in 1980 a 16-year-old youth was shot dead while painting republican slogans on a wall by a policeman who claimed he thought the paintbrush was a gun.

Although it cannot be said that the main function of the Loyalist pre-war murals was to prepare for a further war like mainstream media did in other conflicts worldwide (see examples in Carruthers 2000), they influenced to a certain extent the discontent among Republicans once the murals displayed the British ‘supremacy’ over the Irish. Therefore, by constantly displaying the Battle of the Boyne the murals ‘have accordingly been used to animate hatreds both between and within states, castigating one or more two groups as “foreign” and “other”, even though they may share (or have shared) the same nationality and a common (though denied) ethnicity (Carruthers 2000: 44)’. Hence, the restrictions in displaying their own culture plus the lack of participation in the main institutions and political decisions in the society inevitably led to the outbreak of the Civil Right Movements[2] in the late 1960s and the Loyalist murals indeed played a part in it.

The murals during the war

With the beginning of the Troubles, loyalist murals now began to include images of violence and militarism but also kept displaying loyalty to the British crown. The Republicans, on the other hand, were finally able to start developing such activity and the first ones depicted the infamous 1981 Hunger Strike in Long Kesh[3]. Among the themes depicted, there were militarism, Irish culture, elections, historical events, comparison to other struggles such as Palestine, and so forth. Both Protestants and Catholics made a lot of use of the murals to pay tribute to their ‘martyrs’ and victims, to intimidate outsiders while entering in their territory, to draw support for the war, to validate the engagement of the community to the war effort and to highlight their past and culture.

Many murals were painted during campaigns, whether it was to ask for the release of the prisoners of war (POW) or to support the hunger strikers, while other murals were done straight after an event took place, becoming a memorial, a form of telling what the community has just gone through. Moreover, some murals reproduced - or worked as - news reports, displaying numbers and facts. Interestingly, media in wartime – including the murals - appeared to be at war with each other as much as with the state, or with the enemy (Carruthers 2000:10). The murals, thus, were also in war with each other. For instance, as a response to the Republican mural in Derry with the writings You are Now Entering Free Derry, Loyalists from Belfast also decided to demarcate their territory by painting the mural You are Now Entering Loyalist Sandy Row.

Furthermore, the murals also reproduced many iconic images similarly to what was also done in other conflicts by (mainly) alternative media during war times. Here it can be drawn a parallel between some mural images with the Abu Ghraib scandal images. Like the iconic image of the hooded Iraq prisoner with arms wide open was reproduced in a mural in Iran as well in an IPod poster in the US (Andén-Papadopoulos 2008:17), the murals also made use of iconic images from other conflicts or films as well as from their own conflict, mainly reproducing the images of the squalid bodies of the Hunger Strikers. Moreover, some murals were mere reproductions of other photographs or of some iconic elements taken from a photograph, such as the case of the Bogside mural to the Hunger Strikers.

The murals after the war

With the peace process in 1998, the murals also began to change. The most militaristic have been replaced by peace murals in order to ‘brighten up’ the environment. Ex-members of loyalist and republican paramilitaries group are now working within their respective communities to transform negative imageries into positive messages to new generations, investors and tourists. According to a report of Marie Irvine for the BBC News website, the new emphases are on celebrating the achievements in sport, literature or music.

Not only the issues painted have changed with the peace process, but also the way the murals are seen. Although they have kept being seen as an important medium to give voice and to pay tribute to their heroes and victims, some murals were also seen as rather intimidating or as a mere display of paramilitary ideologies. Now they have become the symbol of the Troubles and received worldwide recognition[4] as works of art though there is still some disagreement among some scholars and artists whether it can be regarded as such. Nevertheless, which roles can the murals perform in a post-war environment? They can perform a pedagogical memorial role once they seek to ‘instruct posterity about the past and, in so doing, necessarily reaches a decision about what is worth recovering (Sturken 1997: 48)’. Carruthers goes further and says that media after war may ‘serve as a collective act of memory or forgetting, or remembrance in order to forget; as a warning against war in general or conversely as stimulus to current (or future) conflict (Carruthers 2000:267)’.

Hence, the way a nation remembers a war and constructs its history depends on how that nation has been propagating the war – both during and after it took place. Therefore, taking the Miltown Massacre[5] incident as an example, it is regarded by Catholics as a brutal event which took the lives of three people and injured other 60 while for Protestants the perpetrator of the attack, Michael Stone, is praised as a hero for surviving the lynching and carrying out the attack. Thus, It can be said that remembering through the murals is in itself a form of forgetting (Sturken 1997:82) as each community only makes sense of the conflict through their own experience, heroes and victims while the other side is never depicted the same way, only as the wrong-doers.

Others, War Images and Alternative Media

Interestingly, the murals seldom depicted the ‘Other’ unlike mainstream media that constantly utilise the dehumanisation of the enemy as a propaganda tool in order to justify the engagement in a war. Looking at war history, it is easily noticeable that Nazis, Vietcong, Iraqis, Communists, and so forth have been portrayed as ruthless enemies that should be fought. Daniel Hallin observed that during the television coverage of Vietnam, for instance, like most of 20th century war propaganda, tended to drain the enemy of all recognisable emotions and motives and thus banish him not only from the political sphere, but from human society itself (1986: 158). The murals in Northern Ireland, on the other hand, focused more on depicting their cause and the characters involved in it and when they did depict the enemy it was usually done in a rather sarcastic way, mostly through cartoons.

Hence, what else makes the murals depiction of the conflict different from mainstream media? This type of alternative media – or citizen media – has become another space of war where the very citizens tell the stories the way they experience them not with the ‘neutral’ look of a journalist. As there is no dependence from any political and economical institution, they are free to do it as they want, giving the communicative power back to ordinary citizens caught up in war (Allan and Matheson 2009: 25). Therefore, at the same time the murals occupy an important role in giving voice to the citizens which is generally forgotten by mainstream media, they can also function as an efficient propaganda tool, especially if they are done by paramilitary groups. And that is where much of the criticism towards citizen media comes in once they can act as echo chambers for fixed opinions among like-minded individuals, stifling rather than facilitating discussion (Allan and Matheson 2009: 118) and consequently blurring the distinctions between work of art of ordinary citizens and paramilitaries ads.

Moreover, another characteristic of the murals – and other forms of citizen media - is that they can also lead to a weakening of governmental authorities’ influence over public during times of national crisis (Allan and Matheson 2009:115) specially when voices are banned from mainstream media[6] which turns the murals into a reliable source of information. Interestingly, the same media that bans voices is the one that helps to publicise the murals. Zuuckerman (in Allan and Matheson 2009) notes the irony in the fact that citizen media gain much of their public profile from the attention paid to them by the institutions they set out to challenge (Ibid 2009:99). In December 1995, for instance, when Republicans found out that the then American president Bill Clinton would pass through the Catholic’s Falls Road, in Belfast, they rapidly erected a mural so that it could draw visibility from worldwide media.

Whether being dependent from each other or not, both medias – alternative and mainstream – share the same question: why do war images have received a lot of coverage and have had a great impact on people? What is their strength? For Susan Sontag, war images, mainly photographs – and here it can be extended to the murals - ‘say this is what it is like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open eviscerates. War scorches, war dismembers. War ruins (2003:7)’. Furthermore, many murals have raised opposing responses; they have called for peace and increased awareness to the brutality of the war. Photographs and paintings can also objectify, turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed or function as a species of alchemy for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality (Sontag 2003:72), even though sometimes it is more biased than transparent, as it has been argued previously. Andén-Papadopoulos similarly argues that photographs – and the murals – ‘to a certain extent speak a language of their own. They are complexly coded cultural artefacts that to some extent place us in specific viewing positions and convince us to see matters in a certain way (2008:9)’.

Conclusion

This essay examined how the role of the murals before, during and after the Troubles took place. Along with explanations of how events, victims and heroes were depicted, the discussion was broaden to the representation of the Others, differences and similarities between mainstream and alternative media as well as the importance of war images for them.

Before the war, as Republicans/Catholics were forbidden to display their culture and had to witness the construction of several murals by Loyalists/Protestants which displayed British ‘supremacy’ over Irish, it can be said that the murals played a significant role in increasing the discontent of the former and leading to the Civil Right Movements. During the war, the murals continued to display each side’s ideologies and other roles were included such as pay tribute to the victims and martyrs, demarcate territories, protest against war policies, and so forth. Moreover, during the conflict – and after - some images were turned into icons of the struggle and they were rapidly reproduced by other murals as well as iconic images from abroad were incorporated into the Northern Irish context. After the war, militaristic murals began to be replaced for peaceful ones with a more positive message and the murals of Northern Ireland began to be recognised not only as a form of art but also as a form of communication.

Another feature of the murals, unlike mainstream media, is that they emphasised on depicting their own struggle instead of focusing on the enemy ruthlessness and when they did so they usually adopted a sarcastic tone. Furthermore, the murals, as argued by Carruthers, may serve as a collective act of both remembering and forgetting once they represent the conflict through the point of view of each community, and not the conflict as a whole. And at the same time the murals are a fruitful space for unheard and neglected voices by mainstream media, they can also work as an efficient propaganda tool.

However, the question of the content of murals being truer than mainstream media should not be the main focus when analysing them. Instead, it should be emphasised its role and its importance within Catholic and Protestant communities. They have penetrated into the memory of not only those who have experienced the conflict but also of the outsiders who had the chance to come across the murals. Their power in telling their own story, paying tributes to what they considered their heroes and victims and showing the meaning of war for each of the communities is indeed unquestionable- and surprisingly touching.

References

· Allan, Stuart and Matheson, Donald. (2009) Digital War Reporting. Cambridge: Polity Press
· Andén-Papadopoulos, K. (2008) The Abu Ghraib torture photographs: News frames, visual culture, and the power of images, Journalism. Theory, practice and criticism, vol. 9, no 1.
· Carruthers, Susan L. (2000) The Media at War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
· Downing John D. H. (2002) Mídia radical: rebeldia nas comunicações e movimentos sociais. São Paulo: Senac
· Hallin, D. C. (1986) The ’Uncensored’ War. The Media and Vietnam. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
· Irvine, Marie (2005). Old Masters Change Murals. BBC News website. Available on: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4562793.stm. Accessed on: 20/06/2009
· Jarman, Neil. (1998) Painting Landscapes: the place of murals in the symbolic construction of urban space. The Institute of Irish Studies. Belfast. Available on http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/murals/jarman.htm#chap5 . Accessed on: 15/01/2008.
·McKittrick, David; McVea, David. (2002) Making sense of the troubles: The story of the Conflict in Northern Ireland. Chigaco: New Amsterdam Books.
·Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
·Sturken, M. (1997) Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. University of California Press

[1] Although there were many murals that were produced by Loyalist and Republican paramilitary groups, the majority were done by the very community without any political connection to a party or paramilitary group.
[2] The Movements called for more political participation, better housing allocation system, less police discrimination, etc.
[3] Several protests took place in Long Kesh prison and the most notable was the two Hunger Strikes, one in 1980 and the other in 1981. The first hunger striker to die was Bobby Sands, after 66 days refusing food while other nine hunger strikers also lost their lives. All of them became immediately martyrs for the Republicans and their faces appear in several murals.
[4] To exemplify this point, in 2007 muralists from Derry – who are called the Bogside Artists - were invited to Washington, D.C. for the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival, in which they recreated murals in the Washington Mall.
[5] The Miltown Massacre took place in 1988 when Michael Stone attacked mourners at an IRA funeral. After been chased and almost beaten to death by the mourners, Stone was arrested and released after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
[6] Regarding the censorship during the Troubles, see Rolston, Bill; Miller, David. War and Words: The Northern Ireland Media Reader. Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1996.

All the photos were taken from the CAIN Mural Directory: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/mccormick/