The message of the murals

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. 

These must once have existed but they have been replaced by images of dead hunger strikers and freedom fighters from distant conflicts, including Tamils and Palestinians.

The so-called “international wall” acclaims such figures as the 19th-century black American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass and Nelson Mandela, quoted as saying: “In my country we go to prison first and then become president.”

The martyrology includes a instantly recognisable, house-high portrait of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. 

Protestant Shankill Road presents a contrast. Twenty-seven years after the Good Friday Agreement “decommissioned” weapons, and provided for a power-sharing executive, a huge mural, shocking in its brazen warlikeness, confronts the visitor. 

It shows five paramilitaries of the Ulster Defence Association’s (UDA’s) C company, 1st Battalion, under the legend, “Forever honour their sacrifice”, armed to the teeth with pistols, Armalite rifles and a sub-machine gun.

The only outward-looking political sympathy proclaimed on Shankill is a flag marrying the Cross of St George and the Red Hand of Ulster with Israel’s blue-on-white Star of David. 

Loyalism lives in the past. Its seminal event, repeatedly pictured, is the victory of Protestant “King Billy” (William III) over the deposed Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne. The 11 July bonfires mark the event — 335 years later.

Virulent anti-Catholicism is also projected through a mural of time-honoured Protestant icon Oliver Cromwell, reviled by Catholics for the “effusion of blood” during his conquest of Ireland. 

Beside a graphic image of Cromwell’s “Ironsides” putting to the sword a downed Irish rebel, he is quoted as saying: “Catholicism is more than a religion, it is a political power. Therefore I’m led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic church is crushed.”

In our day, who proclaims, “God save the King!”? Shankill does, in capitals a meter high. During our visit on 2 July, the road is awash with red, white and blue bunting. After Queen Elizabeth’s death, it was a swollen river of bouquets. 

The cult of the royal family embraces even the late Queen Mother, whose image is emblazoned with the English and Scottish flags — loyalists identify strongly with the Protestant Scots forcibly inserted in Gaelic Ireland — and the words: “No rebel hate will harm this state, the Bible and the Crown.”

The Bible is not the main issue: a Protestant church on Shankill closed recently, we were told, for lack of attendance. With its ancestral conjurations and war dances, loyalism is best understood as a tribal, not religious, identity.

Underpinning it is the siege mentality born of native Irish resistance to “the Ulster plantations” — England’s seizure of half a million acres of arable land in the early 1600s, which ignited a bloody uprising. But it is also driven by an explosive cocktail of feelings of entitlement and loss of power.

Northern Ireland is the UK’s poorest region and one of the poorest in Europe. This flows in large part from the collapse of ship building and heavy engineering, Belfast’s traditional mainstays. 

Decimated by political turbulence and Far Eastern competition, the workforce of Harland & Wolff (constructors of the Titanic) fell from 35 000 at peak to 3 000 in the late Eighties. Its shipyard finally closed in 2019. Ship building, long a Protestant closed shop, is no longer a perpetually flowing font of jobs for Protestant youth.

A 2015 survey by Queen’s University in Canada drove home the wide disparities within the school system, which is still largely segregated. It found, for example, that 76% of better-off Catholic girls left school with two or more A-levels, against 66% of their Protestant counterparts.

The least successful were working-class Protestant boys — the shock troopers of the far right — who faced barriers including “intergenerational distrust and negativity towards the benefits of education”.

One consequence has been the virtual disappearance of the religious incomes gap, formerly cemented by Protestant job reservation. 

The dream of a permanent Protestant state, entrenched by partition and enwombed in the UK, seems beset on many sides. 

Propelled by a higher birthrate and Protestant drift to the British mainland, Catholics have become the most populous group, by 45.7% to 43.5%, according to the 2021 census. 

This might partly account for the shifting political balance — unionism has lost ground to both republican Sinn Fein and the non-sectarian Alliance party in recent elections.

Sinn Fein won most seats in the 2022 Northern Irish assembly poll, breaking the long-standing electoral sway of the “moderate” unionists of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). 

Two years later, the DUP lost seats in the British elections, including that of Ian Paisley Jr — a dizzying symbolic blow given the 50-year hold of the Paisley dynasty — as Sinn Fein became the largest Northern Irish party in Westminster (it refuses to take its seats).

The DUP strongly denies any links with the paramilitaries, but down the years, its most diehard elements have manifested an instinctive solidarity with the loyalist ultras. 

The cause of unionism has almost certainly been damaged by the survival into the modern era of loyalist groups, not as self-defence units, but as mafiosi in a depressed region, accused of drug trafficking, money-laundering and extortion, who have murdered each other in lethal turf battles.

One Shankill mural memorialises the murder in 2000 of Lieutenant Jackie Coulter of the UDA’s Belfast brigade — not by the IRA, but by loyalist rivals.

For two years, the unionist DUP paralysed the new power-sharing administration over claims that the post-Brexit trade protocol threatened its bond with the UK. 

The irony is that mainland Britons do not seem overly interested in a region torn by divisions and incessant infighting. In a 2020 YouGov poll, 54% of Britons said they would not care one way or the other if it left the UK. 

Thirty-six percent favoured a vote on Irish unification now; 25% were against, while a majority — 39% — professed ignorance. 

Loyalist leader Jackie McDonald has few illusions about the British government, telling The Irish Times it would “dump us in the morning”. 

The continuation of Northern Ireland as one of Britain’s first colonies is a great historical wrong. Unification is the stated policy of Sinn Fein and the major parties of the south. 

But loyalist insecurities, highlighted by the Shankill murals, and the rise of the ultra-right, suggest the need for caution on the facile belief that radical change is at hand. Unity would require referendums on both sides of the border, and it is unclear whether the south would shoulder the security and fiscal burdens it would entail.

Then there is the Moygashel factor. Pointing to the flight to the right among alienated loyalist youths, Ulster Defence Association leader McDonald spoke of his persistent efforts to head off trouble.

Too many young loyalists “think they missed out on the conflict”, he says. “They’re saying: ‘We’ll not be told what to do by grey-haired old men. We’ll do a better job than you.’”

Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.