The message of the murals

Belfast's famous wall paintings provide a snapshot of relations between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. More than 25 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, Drew Forrest saw them on a trip to the city

- Drew Forrest

On 11 July, Protestant loyalists in Northern Ireland burnt, in effigy, a boatload of immigrants on a giant bonfire.

It was a redirection of the anti-Catholic hatred traditionally vented during “marching season”, with its 300-odd bonfires lit across the north. Defended as part of loyalist culture, the unspoken purpose is to intimidate and provoke.

In 2023, a photo of the Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Leo Varadkar, was torched in the same village, Moygashel. Unrest, in which more than 60 police officers were injured, also broke out recently in Ballymena and elsewhere in the Protestant north.

On occasions, racist agitation has brought together far-right hooligans from the north and south in a once-unthinkable alliance, flying the Union Jack and the Irish tricolour in the same upheavals; Northern Catholics appeared to stand back.

Now the numerical majority, and increasingly prosperous and well educated, they seem largely to have moved beyond the sectarian passions of the “Troubles”.

Apart from some minuscule Marxist splinter groups, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has withered away. But the structures of far-right Protestant loyalist groups, like the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer force, with their military machismo and adoration of the British Crown, remain in place.

This is the message conveyed by the huge murals at the junction of Catholic Falls Road and Protestant Shankill in Belfast, where historical antagonisms have left the scar of a 14m steel fence, known as the “peace wall”, between the communities.

As monstrous street art, often two storeys high, the paintings are brilliantly executed. Frequently repainted, they are also a barometer of inter-group relations.

Of all the images created by Irish nationalists/Republicans, none that we saw glorified violence or portrayed heavily armed IRA paramilitaries in a heroic light.