Taking the violent, sectarian content out of wall paintings is an admirable aim, but can Belfast's mural culture survive being cleaned up for a different era, asks NEIL CARNDUFF.
UNTIL 10 YEARS ago, interfering with Belfast’s murals was tantamount to taking your life in your hands. A mission to deface any of the political wall-paintings would be carried out under cover of darkness, and with the motor running.
It would usually amount to little more than hurling a tin of paint over the likeness of a republican hunger striker or, perhaps, for the more avant-garde vandal, adding a crudely rendered phallus to King William of Orange astride his white horse.
Those days are long gone. Now, murals are being whitewashed and replaced all over the city in broad daylight, by accomplished artists who are being paid handsomely for it.
Last week, the latest makeover of a peace wall was unveiled on the Short Strand at the corner of Bryson Street and Madrid Street in east Belfast. A series of ceramic panels has been added to the wall as part of the Re-imaging Communities project.
This follows last month’s new painting on the wall at Cupar Way in the Shankill, where images of unionist history, traditions, politics and culture have replaced the older and darker references to the UVF, the UFF and KAT (Kill All Taigs). The three pieces were created by Dublin artists Brian Maguire and Brian O’Connor, Northern artists Alan Cargo and Eleanor Wheeler, and John Johnston and Dee Craig, also from the North.
“They’re updating them all around here,” says Alan Heasley, driver with Black Cab Tours NI, when we stop off in front of a King William mural in the loyalist Shankill Estate in west Belfast.
“That’s been changed in the last few months,” he adds. “During the Troubles a lot of local people from these communities came out, and some guy who thought he was a bit of an artist would have a go at painting the wall, but it looked a bit amateurish because the legs would be too small and the bodies would be too big, and so they looked like dwarves. So now they bring professionals in.”
He has a point. There’s nothing diminutive about this made-over King Billy, and the picture is indeed well-crafted.
Artistic competence, however, is not the sole reason for this collective facelift of Belfast murals. Metres away from the King William scene is a tribute to Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States and son of Scottish-Irish immigrants from nearby Carrickfergus in Co Antrim.
“Before this one was on the wall, there was a four-circle one about things the IRA had done,” says Heasley. “This is happening all over the place. The government is now trying to get murals changed, get the more aggressive ones taken off the walls. Some of them should be taken off – they’re just promoting violence.”
As the tour of west, north and south Belfast progresses, there is more and more evidence of this change. In the staunchly nationalist Ardoyne and Falls areas, bellicose pro-IRA murals are nowhere to be seen. The themes covered now are historical, mythical, cultural, and international.
In loyalist Sandy Row, where in the early 1990s you would have been hard-pressed to swing a red, white and blue baton without hitting a two-dimensional balaclavaed gunman, there’s hardly a virulent UVF mural in sight. Interestingly, these ones have not been replaced at all.
Heasley, who clearly knows his stuff, ponders a moment and says: “I reckon that maybe in the next five years a lot of this stuff will have disappeared off the walls. It’ll wind down. Already there’s not as much interest in them. In 10 years’ time, with a very few exceptions, they could all be gone.”
IF OUR GUIDE is to be believed, then, the onset of peace and a change of mindset have taken Belfast’s murals into their swansong. Others maintain that what is happening is a renaissance for murals, a more upbeat Rose Period after the dark, doleful Blue Period of the Troubles.
Danny Devenney, an accomplished nationalist muralist who started drawing while incarcerated in Long Kesh for involvement in an IRA bank robbery, insists murals are here to stay.
“Over the last 15 years, with the Good Friday Agreement, murals have mirrored the development of the country,” he tells me. “Thankfully, nationalists now have elected representatives, so issues which would have been dealt with in the past by murals are now dealt with democratically within the Assembly. There is less need for murals on these issues, but murals still have a role to play in publicising other matters which need addressing, such as collusion.”
Devenney’s counterpart on the opposing side of the ideological divide is Mark Ervine, son of the late Progressive Unionist Party leader, David Ervine. Ervine senior was generally considered one of Northern Ireland’s most forward-thinking unionists, an eloquent, staunch Belfast Agreement advocate who was committed to conflict resolution.
David Ervine’s name does not come up during our conversation, but it is clear that Mark Ervine has inherited not only his father’s eloquence, but also his commitment to a progressive approach to sectarianism in the North. He also shares Devenney’s faith in the future of Belfast murals.
“I believe, and hope, they will always be present,” he says. “They are part of our tradition, which is unique to Belfast. Because of that, it should be preserved and encouraged.
“Rather than showing who’s in control or for propaganda purposes, they’re used for heralding heroes like George Best. Murals have diversified a great deal. This started happening in my community from 1998, when I personally painted a St Patrick mural in the loyalist heartland on the Woodstock Road. It opens people’s eyes as to what history is, it gets them to look at their history again. The imagery is much more positive than it has been in the past. The subject matter has changed.”
Devenney, who says he hasn’t stopped working on murals since last summer, agrees. “It’s an art medium created in Belfast. Young people in Belfast need them,” he says. “These days other issues should be shown on the walls. The mortgage crisis should be shown. They are a reflection of what is going on. They should deal with things like the economic crisis, unemployment issues, be used to raise suicide awareness. I want to see young people working on these themes.”
It should come as no surprise that Devenney and Ervine agree so readily, as the two are, by their own admission, “very good friends”. They have worked on several projects together, including a reworking of Picasso’s Guernica on the international wall on Falls Road, and a John Lennon mural in Liverpool.
However, when it comes to the government intervention alluded to earlier by taxi driver Alan Heasley, their opinions start to diverge. Devenney feels that “the authorities now appreciate the worth of murals” and considers the funding of murals by public bodies, such as Belfast City Council, a positive step. Ervine, meanwhile, remains highly suspicious of projects such as the Re-Imaging Communities Programme, which pumped more than £3 million (€3.34 million) of government money into orchestrating the replacement of aggressive murals with more positive ones.
“This is a case of outsiders trying to dictate how a community is,” he says. “It looks to me like censorship, denying that the past ever happened, telling people how to think. You need to clean the wound before you cover it up, or, in this case, whitewash it off the wall.
“The schemes are dreamt up by civil servants at Stormont who probably live miles away from the nearest mural. They’re in complete control as they hold the purse strings, and I’m not sure that the community dialogue is in place. Painters are not informed before the Arts Council makes a decision. They are removing a tradition from the community which bore it.”
DUNCAN MORROW IS chief executive officer of the Community Relations Council, an independent company and registered charity which is heavily involved in the Re-Imaging Communities Programme. He insists the scheme is wholly reliant on interaction with the communities it involves.
“There are two specific objectives,” he explains. “A negative one, which was taking down aggressive displays, but the more important one was actually engaging with communities to talk and to work through how they would like to see their own image portrayed, how they could promote their community.”
Morrow disagrees with Ervine’s claim that the project is dictatorial, but concedes that it does amount, to a certain extent, to using murals as a social engineering tool.
“Since the advent of murals, there have always been very few votes involved, very few methods by which they appeared by choice,” he says. “If you believe that these things are tools which set social tone – and that’s what we mean by social engineering in this case – then I’m in favour of things which engineer a less aggressive and more inclusive and ultimately law-abiding community. I’m not sure that the choice is between no social engineering and social engineering, I think the choice is: what are you engineering towards?”
When I ask for his view on the future of Belfast’s murals, Morrow admits he would rather see all of them come down. He concludes, however, that murals are a symptom rather than a cause of any lingering Northern Irish malaise.
“If they are taken down but the reality is the hatred remains the same, that would be a failure,” he says. “If you’re still in as much danger if you move from one place to the other, but in fact now you’ve no mark to know which area you’re in, we might be in danger of having created a greater risk.
“But I don’t think the issue is the extinction of murals. The question is: can we concentrate on whether there is real safety and a real welcome for people across the city?”
Alan Heasley, however, is more reluctant to underestimate the influence of Belfast’s tribal paintings. As he turns out of Sandy Row on to the more affluent Great Victoria Street at the end of our tour, he throws a parting anecdote my way.
“Murals are a constant reminder for kids,” he says. “They’re seeing this stuff every day and picking bits out for themselves. If they don’t get the whole story, it ends up not being what it’s really about at all. Three years ago I did a cross-community tour for Protestant and Catholic kids together, put them in taxis and took them on a tour. After 20 minutes we had to take them back. They were going to kill each other in the back. Some of the stuff they were coming off with was totally wrong.”
See David Sleator’s audio slideshow of Belfast’s new murals at irishtimes.com/slideshows
