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Walls of War: Murals Record Belfast's Troubles
| Article
# : |
11849 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
2,457 Words |
| Author
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Mathias Tugores
Mathias Tugores is a freelance writer and photographer based
in France. |
Twenty-five years after the beginning of "the troubles," Belfast remains under siege. Today, 12,000 policemen and 16,000 soldiers are bogged down in a conflict that has left 3,000 dead and 35,000 injured. Belfast is a town under strain, and no week goes by without an outburst of sectarian violence. More than 13,000 bomb attacks have occurred since the start of "the troubles," and every year damages run to the tens of millions of pounds.
The police and the army constantly patrol the most trouble-prone areas. Numerous measures attempt to thwart the secretive activities of the province's paramilitary gangs: Roadblocks and car searches, miradors and barbed wire, blocked-up streets and no-man's-lands, infrared cameras and directional listening devices, and, most recently, blimps fitted with a battery of surveillance systems (if trials prove successful, four of them will soon be cruising the Northern Ireland sky). Big Brother is all ears and eyes.
Tensions are so acute, the risks of a flare-up so great, that the boundaries of most of these antagonistic ghettoes are marked by "peace lines." With the exception of the most daunting one, at Cupar Street, which recalls the Berlin Wall and separates Catholic West Belfast from Protestant Shankill, these lines of demarcation are often decorated with murals. For many families, these "peace lines" and their associated social and economic pressures represent a constant shadow over everyday life. In the working-class neighborhoods, these walls and their murals endorse each community's dialectic. They are an accurate barometer of the area's political atmosphere.
Strained relations
A century ago, Belfast was one of the most beautiful cities of the British Empire and one of the most prosperous as well. Its shipyards launched some of the world's biggest vessels (the Titanic, among others), and its linen mills, ropeworks, and engineering industries helped make Belfast one of the fastest-growing cities in Great Britain. It came to be dubbed "the Irish Liverpool."
Fleeing the appalling squalor of the famine years, Catholics from the southern provinces flocked to this land of plenty. They crammed into sordid suburbs while the Protestant majority dwelled in the plusher quarters. The disparity paved the way for the resentment and antagonism that still fester today.
The independence of Ireland and its partition in 1920
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