Belfast murals

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chronicle of Higher Education, October 31, 2003

By KATE GALBRAITH

Belfast, Northern Ireland

"This is the Sinn Fein headquarters." Bill Rolston has pulled his car
over about 20 yards from a modest red-brick building that bears the name
of the party that is the political wing of the outlawed Irish Republican
Army. Looming above, on the building's side wall, is an enormous
portrait of a gentle-eyed man, with flowing dark hair and a red sweater.
A spatter of white drips down from his chin.

"You see, it's got a white paint bomb?" Mr. Rolston gestures at the
blotches. "That's relatively recent."

He waves towards gray streaks just below the portrait. Those, he
explains, are left over from an earlier paint-throwing that was patched
up just hours before an important march. The culprits were probably
young hoodlums who decided to defile Bobby Sands, the IRA hero pictured
here. Sands died in prison in 1981 after a 66-day hunger strike.

Mr. Rolston turns on the ignition and swings back onto busy Falls Road.
Now it is off to more murals in this heavily republican, working-class
neighborhood. An especially striking one is dedicated to 17 people who
died from plastic and rubber bullets used by the police. Their faces
smile out from 17 cream-colored bullets, which look like so many
oversize corks. Another, in a neighborhood further along, shows a woman
who is painted in red and holding a gun, with smaller portraits
memorializing local women who died fighting for the IRA.

Driving around Belfast with this easygoing sociology professor from the
University of Ulster's Jordanstown campus is like taking a crash course
in the dismal and complicated politics of Northern Ireland, which is
divided between those who would like the region to rejoin Ireland
(nationalists) and those who would like it to remain a part of the
United Kingdom (loyalists). In studying murals, Mr. Rolston has made it
his business to know the city's neighborhoods intimately. "Nationalist,"
he will say, and then, "Loyalist," waving a hand at what appear to a
visitor to be identical row houses and corner shops on either side of
the same street. Down a block, the street sides may be "nationalist,
nationalist" or "loyalist, loyalist" -- and sometimes even divided
between factions of loyalists.

Belfast's extremists, especially the loyalist ones, often use flags and
painted curbsides to mark their territory. But the most ubiquitous form
of political representation is murals. Painted on the sides of houses or
shops, or on roadside walls, the brightly colored images in effect serve
as political advertising. Few, if any, appear in well-to-do areas, but
in the working-class neighborhoods of Belfast and other Northern Irish
towns, they are inescapable.

"Our gallery is the streets; we try to get our message out to the
biggest audience," says Danny Devenny, a muralist who once belonged to
the IRA and began painting while in prison. Mr. Rolston finds him on a
Friday morning about a half-mile west of downtown Belfast, working with
a colleague on a mural that he explains is a celebration of the local
(nationalist) community. It shows a neighborhood woman, a church,
contented schoolchildren, a tin-roofed school, and what will probably be
a horse, though its face is yet a great brown blob.

The scene is peaceful enough to make a latter-day Impressionist smile.
But Mr. Devenny's words betray little good will toward those who believe
Northern Ireland should remain part of Britain. Clutching a coffee cup
in paint-spattered hands, he says of loyalist mural painters, "Just
because we use the same medium doesn't mean that we have anything in
common."

Mr. Rolston first became interested in murals in 1981, when he was a
young lecturer at Ulster. Until that time, he explains, few republican
murals existed. As for loyalist murals -- some of them nearly 100 years
old -- they were so much part of the cityscape that "I wouldn't have
more thought of photographing a loyalist mural than I would of
photographing a tree."

Thirteen years into what the long-suffering residents of Northern
Ireland call "the Troubles," the death of Bobby Sands and nine other
Republican hunger strikers protesting their status as criminals (rather
than prisoners of war) prompted a burst of republican murals. In the
course of two months, 150 of them appeared around the city, according to
Mr. Rolston. He began photographing them as a hobby.

"After the hunger strike was over, they didn't stop," he recalls. "The
republicans kept painting murals, so I kept photographing." The
republican proliferation caused him to look with fresh eyes at the
loyalist murals, and he began photographing them, too. In the
intervening years, Mr. Rolston probably has built up the world's biggest
image archive of murals in Northern Ireland, and especially Belfast.

"He's completely kept track of the nuances that the murals have
broadcast to the world," says Mary Hickman, head of London Metropolitan
University's Irish Studies Center. "For an academic, it's been an
unusually close relationship with what's happening on the ground."

Graduate students from as far away as Germany and the United States who
are doing mural-related projects constantly call him up with questions,
as do conference organizers. But Mr. Rolston still considers
mural-watching his hobby, albeit one "that's got out of control."

"I don't go down very obscure postmodernist or cultural-studies channels
trying to deconstruct these things," he says. Still, his work on murals
is a useful complement to other parts of his research on globalization
and mass media. He has written about truth-telling in political trouble
spots, racism in Ireland, and how the news media represent political
conflict.

Mr. Rolston's latest book, Drawing Support 3: Murals and Transition in
the North of Ireland (Beyond the Pale Publications) argues that even
after the loyalists declared a cease-fire in October 1994 (following an
IRA cease-fire the same year), their murals remained heavy on military
imagery. A drive through loyalist neighborhoods in Belfast confirms the
often-chilling nature of the murals, which tend to be commissioned by
paramilitary groups. Many show masked men or guns; a few show the
brooding insignia of the Red Hand Commando, which Mr. Rolston describes
as a "small group of crazies" connected to a loyalist paramilitary group.

Some do show more benign images, such as the smiling faces of Queen
Elizabeth II and her mother. Mr. Rolston says that pressure is rising on
loyalists to tone down their murals. Pausing by one painting that
juxtaposes ominous-looking armed men with more benign portraits of
fallen fighters, he explains that it is part of a loyalist paramilitary
group's "attempt to come to terms with people saying, 'Look, you can't
paint men with guns and hoods forever.'"

On the more peaceful side, a handful of loyalist murals have sprung up
celebrating the Ulster Scots, people from mostly Protestant Scotland who
moved to Northern Ireland centuries ago and sometimes continued on to
the United States. One, on the side of an eatery advertising Turkish
kebab and pizza, features a portrait of James Buchanan, the 15th
American president. The accompanying quotation reads, "My Ulster blood
is my most priceless heritage."

In contrast to loyalist murals, Mr. Rolston argues, republican ones have
become markedly less menacing since the IRA reinstated its 1994
cease-fire in 1997, a year before the Good Friday Agreement, which
created the Northern Ireland Assembly, its members drawn from across
religious lines. References to armed struggle have mostly been
eliminated, with guns now appearing mainly in memorials to dead
comrades. Republican murals, Mr. Rolston says, also comment more on
current political developments than loyalist murals.

Mr. Devenny himself is proud that his mural-in-progress, a peaceful
scene from the life of the local community, has "nothing to do with
politics." He denounces the loyalists for using imagery that he says is
designed to "intimidate their own community."

In more than two decades of photographing murals, Mr. Rolston has felt
his stomach lurch only a few times. Once, a man shouting, "Hey, fellow,
come here" made him uneasy, so he quickly left.

Another time, he had driven up to a loyalist mural that had a green
circle with a red line through it -- meaning Catholics should stay away.
Undeterred, Mr. Rolston, who describes himself as a "card-carrying
lapsed Catholic," was about to snap a picture when a police officer
drove up and ordered him firmly to leave.

For safety, he observes two rules. One, learned from a photographer
friend in Dublin, is to stay in the open when taking pictures. "If you
start hiding, you get people being suspicious of you," he explains. The
other rule is to stay clear of areas where there has just been violence,
giving them a few days to calm down. Even so, he realizes that
photographing the colorful symbols of the Troubles does not quite have
the feel of front-line work. "It's not exactly like war photography in
Bosnia or anything, you know," he says with an easy laugh. "I have no
horror stories to tell."



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