Abstract
This article examines the purpose behind, and rhetorical content of, political wall murals produced during the troubles in Northern Ireland. I utilize a semiotic approach to analyze the ways that the symbolic content and physical placement of Northern Irish murals was used by actors on both sides of the conflict. I examine the major thematic traditions utilized by muralists on each side and situate them within the historical and political contexts of the conflict in Northern Ireland. This approach highlights the ways that murals did more than simply champion ideological causes, as earlier scholarship has argued, but served an active role in efforts to catalyze cultural support for organizations’ political goals. I argue that murals played a key role for organizations on both sides of the conflict, as they each struggled to craft a communal self-identification and legitimizing central narrative that furthered their ideological goals. Organizations on both sides used murals to mobilize cultural support for their political and military struggles. In this regard, murals functioned as a form of mythic speech, attempting to depoliticize highly political ideologies and make the rhetoric used by the competing groups seem natural and pure. The grassroots nature of the mural traditions is particularly telling in this regard, exposing the deep-seated insecurity of organizations on both sides. This insecurity is further reflected by, and served as a catalyst for, the paramilitary violence that was a defining characteristic of Northern Ireland for so long.
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Notes
The terminology used to describe the two sides in the Northern Ireland conflict is often confusing and terms are often used without precision or clarity. This paper follows others in using “Nationalist” and “Unionist” to describe the overarching, and often peaceful, political movements of the two sides. “Republican” and “Loyalist” are used, respectively, to describe the radical paramilitarized and violent elements within these two political ideologies. The religious terms “Catholic” and “Protestant,” although often used as stand-ins for these more political terms, are here used only when referring to religion.
Often known simply as the IRA and sometimes referred to as “the Provos.”
In fact, one mural argues, “There is no such thing as a nationalist area of Ulster only areas temporarily occupied by nationalists” (Rolston, 1998, p. 12).
PIRA soldiers were known as volunteers, a reference to the organization’s official Irish title Óglaigh na hÉireann (translated as volunteers, or warriors, of Ireland) established in 1913 before the Irish War of Independence and retained thereafter.
Sands was elected to Parliament as a member of Sinn Féin while on the hunger strike that resulted in his death.
However, there was significant effort to do just that. Many murals were vandalized with scrawled graffiti or paint bombs and there is some indication that there was an official British military policy ordering troops to destroy murals and other examples of republican propaganda.
Most notably, Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, demanded that police remove an Irish Tricolour from the head office of Sinn Féin, a confrontation that led to rioting and confrontations between republicans and police forces. Paisley protested that the display was provocative and was a deliberate insult to the unionist community. In practice, however, the demand came in the midst of a highly contested election campaign for the British House of Commons, and the confrontation over the flag galvanized unionist supporters and secured electoral victory.
Eighteen members of the British army’s Parachute Regiment were killed in this battle (Rolston, 1992).
This mural was created by The Bogside Artists, a group whose work is nonsectarian in origin and aims to achieve peace through cross-community discourse. Nevertheless, the striking imagery of this mural commemorates and exposes the brutality of the violence of the conflict and the juxtaposition of child and petrol bomb provides pointed criticism of the social turmoil, created by the British and unionist inability to fairly govern Northern Ireland, which brought the violence to this level.
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Goalwin, G. The Art of War: Instability, Insecurity, and Ideological Imagery in Northern Ireland’s Political Murals, 1979–1998. Int J Polit Cult Soc 26, 189–215 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-013-9142-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-013-9142-y