Needless to say, given its historical starting point, the Murals of Northern Ireland did not start as a digital humanities project—for although early digital technology had been developed by 1979, if the idea had been articulated at that point that within the next fifteen years or so, a revolution in communication would occur that would transform the everyday reality of billions of people (to say nothing of research possibilities in the humanities), it would have been greeted with polite skepticism at best. It might have met with much the same reception as the idea that one day, the murals of Northern Ireland, which were beginning to appear in an organized way at just that point, would become the central focus of a form of conflict-related tourism that would bring tens of thousands of visitors to the Falls, the Shankill, the Bogside, and numerous other locations of history found across Northern Ireland. In truth, in 1979 there were probably about the same number of people who had any conception of what the digital revolution would look like as there were tourist buses on the Falls; which is to say, very few. And yet, some thirty-five years later, the possibilities for communication have changed in hitherto unimaginable ways: peace, of a sort, has broken out in Northern Ireland, and the murals are the focal point of a heritage industry which now has its own infrastructure and institutional basis [image 1].  

It wasn’t quite like that in 1979, when I worked as a community volunteer in Antrim and Belfast during my first summer vacation from university. The violence of the conflict was a daily reality that came in a variety of forms—from paramilitary bombings and shootings to the repressive apparatus of the “security state” and all its paraphernalia—and it structured the lived experience of anyone and everyone in Northern Ireland. The place was, to coin a phrase, “full of wrong places and wrong times,” and it was necessary to pay attention to cultural and political semiotics in order to avoid them. Belfast in particular—Derry was much more segregated by dint of its geography—was a place in which it was very easy to cross the boundaries that separated specific socio-cultural areas without realizing it. And that could be a dangerous thing to do. Locals and British soldiers knew not to cross from one place to another directly, not to be seen to be moving from one locale to another by a particular route, not to transgress communally recognized spatial and cultural limits, since doing so might indicate to someone that you “belonged” to a particular identity—you were where you walked. And that could entail horrible consequences, as was the case with the numerous victims of loyalist assassination squads who were bundled into cars on “Catholic” or “nationalist” streets late at night and discovered, tortured and brutally murdered, in an alley the next morning. The fact that some of the victims of these atrocities were in actuality Protestant simply proves the point: space and identity—whereness and whatness—were aligned in the most simple and brutal ways. 

Northern Ireland then was a dangerous place and, in consequence, people became extremely adept at reading the signs: constantly on the lookout for indications of trouble; aware of overt and subtle changes in spatial demarcation; always alert to any disturbance in the patterns of significance that counted as “normal” in the conflict areas in particular. One result of this tendency was a form of what might be described as “semiotic paranoia,” which is to say, a propensity to interpret—and over-interpret, though this was a hard line to draw—signs for the fearful meanings that they might contain. The exemplars of this practice were British soldiers, since one of the functions of their regular foot patrols in the war zones was precisely to monitor and record for the purposes of analysis[1].  “Intel,” as they called it, was nothing but the gathering of information in the form of signs, or, more accurately, “clues”: a new car at a particular house, the disruption of regular activity in an area, the disappearance of a specific person, the sudden emptiness of a street—all such phenomena needed to be decoded for their hidden significance, with the soldiers being but the most obvious players of an interpretation game which in reality involved everyone. 

If some of the signs that needed to be read were nuanced and hard to identify (to say nothing of the difficulty of understanding them), there were others that stared you in the face since they were written in ten-foot high letters on the walls. Indeed, if there is a starting point for the murals project, it lies in a personal fascination with the fact that the walls of the working-class areas of Belfast in 1979 were covered in political and war-related graffiti—bold, challenging, funny, brutal, crude, incomprehensible, sardonic, pleading, and surreal, among other things. Having been raised in working-class Liverpool, graffiti, including political graffiti, was hardly unfamiliar to me, but the sheer volume of material in Belfast was remarkable and puzzling[2].  Why was there so much of it? Who did it and how (given that many of the streets were under constant surveillance)? Was it organized and controlled? By local people? By the paramilitaries? By local people who were the paramilitaries? To whom was it addressed? The other side? Crown forces? Local residents? The media? Why did it appear and disappear so rapidly, and who had the power to change it? Why was it placed in particular locations? And, of course, the central question: what did it signify as a historically specific genre? Many of these questions would recur when I began thinking about the murals project, but initially I was just interested enough in the walls to take pictures—with a small, poor quality camera—as a personal record [images 2, 3, 4]. As the images show, the graffiti was often supportive of paramilitary groups (“Provos are the People and the People are the Provos”); violently antagonistic (“Death to Thatcher and the R.U.C.”); and ephemeral (“Boycott E.E.C”—the European Economic Community—a reference to the  Sinn Féin policy in the 1979 European Elections). But while taking photos of this material, my attention was drawn to murals—some well-established, others just starting to appear. Ironically, given the development of republican murals that occurred shortly after I began my work, the first mural I photographed was a loyalist work in South Belfast [image 5]. It invoked loyalist prisoners, commemorated the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, and featured a variety of symbols, the significance of some of which was lost on me at the time: the Crown, the object of loyalty; the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack, the expression of political unity; the flags of Northern Ireland and Scotland, the postulation of a common Protestant heritage; and the motto of one of the loyalist paramilitary organizations—the Ulster Defence Association— “Quis Separabit?” (“Who will separate us?”) which functioned as an assertion of local control. 

In fact, as I later discovered, the history of mural painting in Northern Ireland had been predominantly loyalist and was one of a set of triumphalist aesthetic practices that celebrated the “Protestant State.”[3]   These ranged from civic statuary to the arches erected over working-class streets in loyalist areas in the run-up to the Twelfth of July, the enormous bonfires on the “Eleventh Night,” and of course the Orange Order marches on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The historical provenance of the early murals was a surprise to me, since although there were (relatively few) loyalist murals of the traditional kind in the late 1970s and very early 1980s, the real development—and one that marks the beginning of modern muralism in Northern Ireland—was the appearance of republican murals in 1980 and 1981[4].  Of course this is not to claim that there were no republican murals before that period, since there were a few [image 6]. But at just that historical conjuncture, republican murals started to appear in large numbers; striking and often powerful, they were in many cases semiotically complex and more figuratively skillful than previous examples [image 7] (though that wasn’t always true [image 8]). This phenomenon prompts two questions: 1) what provoked this activity? and 2) why did murals begin to adorn the walls of republican communities in the way, and in the numbers, that they did? 

Though there were other factors involved, I think the short answer to both questions is that the murals were used as part of the political campaign around the prison issue in republican areas, specifically with regard to the Hunger Strikes of 1980 and 1981. Their role in that struggle was manifold: they were a medium for conveying a message that was otherwise difficult to express (in this regard, it is important to remember the formal and informal censorship of republican views that existed at the time); they were a way of constructing hegemonic support in nationalist and republican areas; they acted as a convenient visual backdrop for the international media when reporting on the second Hunger Strike in particular. And the success of the murals in this respect led to a gradual recognition that the walls were a vital site for political articulation—a fact evinced by the sheer number of murals that have appeared in Northern Ireland over the past thirty years or so (my own calculation is that the figure is not less than 15,000). What is interesting about the earliest republican murals, however, is the fact that, as at other times during the war (and peace), their form and content revealed not simply a historical meaning, but also an intended audience. The appeal to Catholic nationalism for support, for example, in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Irish America, explains in part the religious symbolism of many of the first murals that figured the Hunger Strike [images 9, 10, 11, 12]. In these examples, the reference to the Hunger Strikers (or indeed Ireland itself) as Christ-like in their suffering is explicit, although interestingly such allusions did not on the whole survive the Hunger Strike period, a fact explained in part by the tensions between the Catholic Church and republicanism, not least over the funerals of IRA volunteers. 

But if republicans readily came to understand the potential of the murals as weapons in a war that was about politics and propaganda as well as militarism, the same lesson was not lost on loyalists. And so from the early to mid-1980s, loyalist areas also began to feature murals that presented their own views of the conflict and all that went with it. While these texts often contained some traditional motifs like King William triumphant at the Battle of the Boyne  [image 13], they were also novel in terms of their symbolic composition [images 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]. What was perhaps most striking about the new loyalist work, however, was the sheer number of murals that appeared in very specific locations—such as Percy Place in the Lower Shankill [image 19]—and the fact that they frequently made explicit reference to paramilitary organizations [images 20, 21]. Again, it is worth considering why so many loyalist murals were produced at just this point, and though there were other factors, there appear to have been two principal motivations. First, there was a felt need to respond to the perceived success of the republican muralists, who were, by 1984, extending their repertoire politically and in terms of form [images 22, 23, 24]. And second, it needs to be remembered that just as republican views were censored, likewise in the loyalist working-class heartlands, there was a strong sense that their own political concerns were not being voiced, or heard. In that respect, the constant references to loyalist paramilitary organizations were a way of signaling a distance from unionist political parties which, though they represented the political allegiance of loyalists, were often held to be unconcerned with the daily realities of everyday life in working-class areas such as the Shankill or Sandy Row.     

When considered in their entirety rather than as individual pieces, the murals in their entirety constitute a complex, changing, fascinating body of public art that brings an added element to the understanding of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the “peace” that has followed [5].  The range of the work is striking. There are of course brutally monologic interventions in the war, such as the republican commemoration of the attack at Warrenpoint in 1979 in which eighteen British soldiers were killed [image 25], or the loyalist salute to Michael Stone, the perpetrator of a gun and grenade attack on an IRA funeral in which three were killed and sixty injured [image 26][6].  But there are also dialogical examples, as, for example, the use of Patrick Galvin’s poem “Letter to a British soldier on Irish soil” (1972) [image 27], or the competing graffiti of the IRA and British Army on one site [image 28]. There are, moreover, some surprising articulations. In relation to language politics, for example, there are predictable claims and counterclaims, with Gaelic featuring from the early 1980s as the vehicle of Irish nationalism and republicanism [image 29], and Ulster-Scots as that of unionism and loyalism from the early 1990s [image 30]. And yet on a loyalist paramilitary mural dedicated to the Red Hand Commando, the slogan “Lamh Dearg Abu” appears, along with the (loose) translation “Ulster to Victory” [image 31][7].  Likewise Cú Chulainn, traditionally a mythological hero of Irish nationalism (his statue, of course, stands in the Dublin G.P.O.), features, as might be expected, in republican areas [image 32]. But, on the basis of his role in the defense of Ulster in Táin Bó Cúailnge—one of the central myths of the Ulster Cycle of Gaelic myths—he now also stands as a heroic figure of the loyalist re-making of history [image 33]. Such revisionism even appears, somewhat self-reflexively, as a topic for the walls. Thus challenging the debates within Irish historiography, one mural depicts the figure of “Truth” in front of the book of Irish history, while the “Mask of Revisionism” rests nearby. The image is framed above by a quote from the socialist republican Miriam Daly, who was executed by a loyalist assassination squad: “History is written by the winner” [image 34]. In fact, there is a lot of re-historicizing about in Northern Ireland these days, some of it on the walls. There are republican murals, for example, that make it appear that the war against the British State was fought with the aim of delivering equal status for Northern Irish nationalists (as opposed to the often-articulated goal of destroying Northern Ireland and forcing the British to concede Irish unity) [image 35]. And there are loyalist murals that depict their community as the victims of history. Thus the events of the summer of 1969—usually conceived in terms of State repression and State-facilitated loyalist intimidation of nationalists—are recast as bringing devastation to the loyalists of the Shankill [image 36]. And loyalism itself is depicted as being on the receiving end of a one-sided sectarian campaign of injustice and violence over some thirty years [image 37]. 

Yet perhaps the greatest mythologizing force—though there would be competition for the prize—is that of the State itself, and again the murals bear witness. The recent “Re-imaging Communities” program, underpinned by millions from the State’s coffers, has sought to eradicate images of the conflict and its related paraphernalia from the walls of loyalist and republican communities [images 38, 39, 40, 41]. The overall effect, however, is somewhat undermined by the fact that in most cases, the new “re-images,” which depict scenes from communal or local history, are surrounded by other representations of the past: murals that salute dead paramilitaries, celebrate acts of violence, and articulate forcefully the still unreconciled cultural and political divisions [image 42, 43]. One muralist, in conversation with the author, somewhat wryly passed comment on this phenomenon in the summer of 2013. Noting that “the Re-imaging program cost millions and lasted a couple of years,” he observed that “all you need for a new paramilitary mural is a few tins of paint, a bit of scaffolding, and a couple of days.”[8]