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Digitizing the Murals of Northern Ireland (1979-2013)

Tony Crowley, Author

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Endnotes

  1.  For a semi-fictional account of British Army activity in Belfast in the late 1970s, in which the purpose of British Army foot patrols in republican function is explained as “presence, deterrence and intel,” see A.F.N Clarke, Contact (London: Pan, 1984), 7.
  2. The two most prominent examples in the area in which I was brought up were “All coppers are bastards,” a reflection on relations between the local population and the police, and “God Bless Our Popeye 1967.” The latter began as a commemoration of the opening of the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in 1967. The area, however, was divided along sectarian lines and “God Bless Our Pope” was soon amended.
  3. The phrase “Protestant State” was used by Lord Craigavon, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, in 1934; see Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast: Blackstaff, 2005), 539.  To be fair to Craigavon, he was contrasting the “Protestant State” of Northern Ireland with the “Catholic State” of the Irish Free State.
  4. For an account of the history of loyalist murals, see “Triumph and Confusion: Loyalist Wall Murals,” in Bill Rolston, Politics and Painting: Murals and Conflict in Northern Ireland (London: Associated University Presses, 1991), 15-49. 
  5. Evidently, the space afforded by a short article is insufficient to attempt a complete history of the murals from 1979 to the present; that will require an in-depth analytical study, to be undertaken once the archive is complete (there are presently some nine thousand images still to be entered in the collection). And of course it is hoped that readers will access the materials as they stand (images are added on a regular basis). The sheer amount of material is both the reason for, and the greatest challenge facing, this project, and this article is one step towards  giving the project a narrative.
  6. The image of the Warrenpoint mural is highly unusual in that it figures muralists at work. Painting murals was a dangerous business during the conflict and muralists tended to be extremely reluctant to be photographed; it was not until awhile after the first ceasefire that muralists began consistently to put their names to their work.
  7. “Lámh Dearg Abú” means “Victory to the Red Hand,” or “The Red Hand Forever”; the ancient Gaelic symbol for Ulster wasa red hand, an image now incorporated into the Northern Ireland flag and indeed reproduced widely in unionist and loyalist iconography.
  8. Mark Ervine, in discussion with the author, July 2013. Ervine, the son of the influential loyalist political leader David Ervine, is a prolific and accomplished muralist.   
  9. In fact, this is a misquotation. Thatcher’s actual words, in a Commons speech on November 10th, 1981, were: “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom; as much as my constituency is,” Thatcher’s constituency being Finchley. 
  10. The fact that the IRA targeted Manchester in June 1996 with the largest bomb that Britain has experienced in peacetimemay not have helped my quest for funding.
  11. One such primary source is the excellent material gathered in the four volumes of Bill Rolston’s Drawing Support, the impact of which is limited by dint of its publication in print format. Rolston’s work includes the aforementioned Politics and Painting,as well as Drawing Support: Murals in the North of Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1992); Drawing Support 2: Murals of War and Peace (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1995); Drawing Support 3: Murals and Transition in the North of Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications 2003); and Drawing Support 4: Murals and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Beyondthe Pale Publications 2013). Another important archive, featuring the work of Jonathan McCormick, is included amongst the resources at the Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) website (though the images span only the period 1996-2006); McCormick’s materials can be viewed specifically at CAIN’s page entitled “Political Wall Murals in Northern Ireland.” And another, very recent addition is Google’s “Extramural Activity,” a blog dedicated to hosting images of, and commentary on, contemporary (from 2012 on) murals.  Yet notwithstanding the appearance of this important documentary work, there are still relatively few critical or theoretical studies on the murals. And such neglect is exacerbated by the dominant attitude of the cultural establishment, which veers between hostility—the novelist Glenn Patterson has dismissed the murals as distasteful “kitsch”; see Patterson, Lapsed Protestant (Dublin: New Island Books, 2006), 60—and studious indifference. Thus the collection of twelve pamphlets, Troubles Archive Essays, published by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland as a companion to the “Troubles Archive” exhibition at the Ulster Museum, claims to be “reflective of the relevant work of all parts of the arts community,” and yet despite the inclusion of essays on topics such as “The impact of the conflict on public space and architecture,” “Prison art and the Conflict in Northern Ireland,” and “A fusillade of question marks: some reflections on the art of the Troubles,” there is no mention of the thousands of murals that have been painted in public spaces since the late 1970s; see Art Council, Troubles Archive Essays (Belfast: Art Council of Northern Ireland, 2009), 1. It is a curious and perplexing response to a form that has not only combined art and politics over an extended period, but has also garnered significant popular-cultural interest over the past decade or so (evinced not least by the “heritage” tourists mentioned earlier). See also my “The Art of Memory: The Murals of Northern Ireland and the Management of History,” in Field Day Review 7 (2011): 23-50, of which the current article is in conversation. For the most up-to-date bibliographical references relating to the murals, see Bill Rolston’s site and the CAIN website.
  12. As articulated by Kelley Bachli, Allegra Gonzalez, Judy Moser and Pat Vince, “Claremont Colleges Digital Library Dublin Core Metadata Elements Best Practices, Version 2, January 2008,” 5-6, accessed January 1st 2014, www.scelc.org/files/ccdl-dc-metadata-best-practices.pdf.
  13. And which is fully searchable through the CCDLinterface as well as through search engines such as Google. I had a limited role in compiling the structural metadata (the information used to display and navigate the resource together with its internal organization and the details of the viewer or reader plug-in needed to open it), and the administrative metadata (the information needed to manage the resource over time, mostly technical information such as the resolution of the image, file size, file format, hardware, and software used to produce the digital resource, among other things). Definitions taken from Bachli, et. al., “Claremont Colleges Digital Library Dublin Core Metadata Elements,” 5-6.
  14. David Beresford, Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike (London: Harper Collins, 1987), 7.
  15. Gonzalez, “A run in with a controlled vocabulary,” accessed January 13, 2014, https://jwernimont.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/a-run-in-with-a-controlled-vocabulary/.
  16. UDA is the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist paramilitary group; INLA is the Irish National Liberation Army, a republican, socialist paramilitary group. The UVF, mentioned immediately below is the Ulster Volunteer Force, another loyalist paramilitary group.
  17. Suzanne Breen, “Decommissioned Provos Thrown on the Scrapheap of History,” Sunday Tribune, April 16, 2006.
  18. Ibid. For a discussion of the recent use of the term “dissident,” see Tony Crowley, “‘Dissident’: a brief note,” in Critical Quarterly 53, no. 2 (July 2011): 1–11.
  19. In fact, this eventuality had been pre-empted by Hughes himself who forbade it; see Ed Moloney, Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 297.
  20. The controversy was provoked by the successful attempt by the Police Service of Northern Ireland to gain access to some of the confidential materials in the Boston College archive, even after all participants had been assured that their testimony would remain inaccessible until after their death. For an account of the whole problematic episode from the point of view of the compilers of the archive, see Anthony McIntyre’s blog, “The Pensive Quill,” accessed March 11, 2015, http://thepensivequill.am/search?q=boston+college&x=6&y=8#.
  21. The accusation that someone is a “tout” is grave since the republican punishment for informing has traditionally been death. Several contributors to the Boston College archive have expressed fears about their personal safety following the bitter controversy that accompanied its debacle. See, for one, Kevin Cullen, “BC exercise in idealism reopened old wounds,” Boston Globe July 6, 2014, accessed March 11, 2015, http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2014/07/05/belfast-the-shadows-and-gunmen/D5yv4DdNIxaBXMl2Tlr6PL/story.html.   
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