‘Trying to reach the future through the past’: murals and commemoration in Northern Ireland

‘Memory is more likely to be activated by contestation and amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation’ (Kammen 1991: 13).

Introduction

If, as they say, the devil has all the best songs, then Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady must have made a Faustian pact in the mid-1980s when he wrote his haunting ballad about the Northern Ireland conflict, ‘The Island’. Unashamedly escapist in its sentiments, it juxtaposes the pleasures of making love on a sandy beach with images of political violence taken directly from the conflict which then raged in Northern Ireland. Cynical and sarcastic in its lyrics about heroes and their armed struggles,1 the song finds resonances of Northern Ireland’s experience in that of Lebanon. Thus Brady begins:

‘They say the skies of Lebanon are burning,Those mighty cedars bleeding in the heat’.

The focus then switches to Ireland: ‘And we’re still at it in our own place,Still trying to reach the future through the past,Still trying to carve tomorrow from a tombstone’.

The culprit in the drama is clearly the Irish fixation on the past. The Irish are said to have an unnatural obsession with remembering, in effect wallowing in the past, constantly resurrecting it through various symbols which fan the flames of hatred, thus perpetuating a seemingly endless struggle.

‘They're raising banners over by the market,Whitewashing slogans on the shipyard walls.’

In this view, material artefacts – banners, slogans – are not simply cultural, harmless, an innocent expression of identity, but a major part of the problem of continuing violence. Imagery becomes a form of recruitment for conflict.

The reference to Lebanon is particularly apposite – another sectarian society caught in a seemingly endless cycle of violence. And, as in Northern Ireland, fuel for the fire is provided in the form of material culture, in this case political posters which ‘help promote three very insidious features of the Lebanese political culture: sectarianism, clientelism and the cult of

1 And rejected by, among others, Brady’s former collaborator Christy Moore, who wrote about ‘The Other side’ – a real island, Ireland, replete with repression and religious hypocrisy, where women had to go to England to avail of abortion services. Moore contrasts the fantasy of open-air love-making with the plight of political prisoners in the North deprived of any opportunities for love-making.

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personality’ (Schmitt (2009: 4). Schmitt’s conclusion about Lebanon is no less pessimistic than that expressed in Brady’s ballad:

‘History keeps repeating itself, and if anything, precisely because the compulsory remembrance makes revenge a goal to be still pursued several generations after the insult. This trauma, relived and re-experienced under the excuse of being tribute, keeps not only history alive, but the wounds too, eternally reincarnating the bitterness of the old victim into the vengeance of the new perpetrator’ (Schmitt 2009: 186).

Such tributes exist in Northern Ireland too, especially in the form of parades and murals. If Schmitt’s conclusion can transfer, then such public expressions of political sentiments in Northern Ireland are a major part of the problem. Specifically, murals which commemorate dead warriors, celebrate past battles, lost or won, are tantamount to carving tombstones, a sign of political hopelessness, anathema in a society seeking political transformation. Certainly, that is one way to read a recent social experiment whereby the Arts Council of Northern Ireland headed up a £3.3 million scheme to encourage the painting out of the most offensive murals, in particular those in loyalist areas depicting hooded and armed warriors – the Reimaging Communities Programme.2 What could be wrong with seeking to break the apparently endless cycle of violence in this way? Who in their right minds could object to an initiative to counter the negative politics of those who ‘reproduce past anxieties in the present through the process of commemoration...?’ (McDowell 2007: 729).

History and Mythology

In the 1980s and 1990s there emerged an attempt to refashion the writing of Irish history. Known as revisionism, this school of thought rested on the belief that the Irish were cursed with a surfeit of what they called history, but which was little more than disguised popular prejudice. The trend began with Shaw’s (1972) attack on what he termed the ‘canon’ of Irish history, which stood accused of ‘glorifying bloodshed, sectarian in its treatment of unionism, and pseudo-religious in its vision of the unending struggle of the native Irish over seven or more centuries against British oppression’ (Shaw, 1972: 262). By the 1990s, politicians were joining in the chorus. Tanaiste Dick Spring opined that the Irish were ‘prisoners of history’ (Irish Times 17 March 1993), while former government minister Conor Cruise O’Brien (1994) noted that ‘ancestral voices’ were goading the Irish into repetitive violence. One historian concluded: ‘Most societies use the past and myths about the past to a certain extent but some, including Ireland, seem to do so more than others’ (Walker 1996: 60). According to another historian, if there was one place where the effects of this distorted view of history were most evident it was in the North, and if there was one group which could be said to most personify this approach to history it was the republican movement.

‘Nowhere else in the European, North American or antipodean democracies does the writing of twentieth century history demand so constant a confrontation with

2 Arts Council

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mythologies designed to legitimate violence as a political weapon to overthrow the state’ (Fanning 1994: 156).

There was an element of ‘a curse on both your houses’ in this approach. Republicans and loyalists in the North were ‘scorpions in a bottle’ (Darby 1998), condemned to relive the past because they are locked in it.

There were numerous gaps in this portrait. Where, for example, in this account was the British state and its history, myths and cultural expressions? The revisionists in effect shared that state’s view of itself as a neutral arbiter between the warring Irish factions. And, like the state, the revisionists displayed an almost complete lack of attention to what one of the ‘scorpions’, loyalism, was up to; the main thrust of the revisionist offensive was against republicans. Conor Cruise O’Brien put it succinctly: ‘... a prevalent romantic interpretation of history long favoured recruitment for the IRA. To challenge that interpretation of history was therefore a significant part of the struggle against the IRA...’ (O’Brien 1978: 80). Republicans idolised the Easter Rising and sanctified its heroes; they ritualistically marched, sang songs and painted murals about these events and heroes. Theirs was less a political ideology than a ‘condition’ (O’Brien 1978: 47). Yet there was no equal dismissal of the 3000-plus marches each year by the Orange Order or unionism’s increasing fixation on the Battle of the Somme. In fact, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s contradictory stand on unionism and republicanism was most obviously revealed in his decision in 1996 to join the United Kingdom Unionist Party and to represent that party in the Northern Ireland Forum. There may have been two sides (rather than three), but it was the ideology and practices of only one of them that was said to be at the core of the North’s political problems.

Republicans may have prided themselves on a knowledge of Irish history, and especially Irish nationalist history, but for revisionist critics they subscribed to ‘myth’ rather than ‘history’. For some commentators, so deep was the malady that the Irish were left only with myth. ‘Ireland is almost a land without history because the troubles of the past are relived as contemporary events’ (Rose 1971: 75). The doyen of Irish revisionist historiography, Roy Foster, concluded that ‘the depressing lesson is that history as conceived by scholars is different to what it is understood to be at large, where “myth” is probably the correct if over-used anthropological term’ (Foster 1994: 144). Ultimately, the Irish, and especially republicans, could not win; either they were manipulating and distorting historical memory for their own ideological ends, or they were trapped in myths which drove them to violence (Dawson 2007: 38).

The revisionists, on the other hand, saw themselves as falling into neither trap; history, as practiced by historians, is privileged. What academic elites remember is permissible memory; for the rest of us, only distorted memory is available. We therefore need the saving hand of the elite historian to rescue us from this entrapment, whereby we are caught in an endless loop of repetitive memory, marching the same roads year after year, singing the same dirges to dead heroes and painting the same offensive images on our respective walls.

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Collective memory

Entrapment, endless loops, repetition – these are terms which could just as easily be used in relation to the individual experience of trauma. It is thus tempting to take an analytical leap and see collective behaviour in the same light. In this sense, then, repeated social rituals or stirring songs of heroes are simply the collective acting out of trauma. To see how tenable that leap is, it is necessary first to consider the issue of individual trauma and memory.

Psychologists who have written about the Holocaust and other instances of severe political violence argue that at the individual level trauma means that ‘the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction’ (Laub 1991: 57). As such, traumatic memory is radically different from normal memory which is by definition about events that are past, finished, distant. ‘The person who experiences a traumatic event is still inside the event, present at it... The original traumatic event has not yet been transformed into a mediated, distanced account ... Trauma is failed experience’ (Van Alphen 2002: 211). It is not simply that the trauma survivor cannot remember or cannot articulate the memory; ‘not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal, an erasure; a destruction of form and of structure’. It causes the victim ‘to avert one’s eyes from the center of the traumatic experience, to overlook details, to misperceive, and most of all, to fail to comprehend’ (Laub 2002: 64). In the end, the survivor experiences a reversal of the everyday chronological experience of past and present: ‘The images from the past – the unprocessed imprints – are more vivid and intense than what he sees in the present’ (Van Alphen 2002: 209). In trauma the past is characterised by immediacy while the survivor is dissociated from the present. This is a psychological disorder from which it is difficult to escape. In the abstract, what is required is that the individual move beyond repetition to a stage of detachment, able to distance oneself from the original traumatic event and thereby interpret and judge it. But many of the obvious solutions – for example, articulating the past horror and therefore exorcising it – are precisely actions whose absence is central to the condition itself. The trauma survivor is unable to tell her or his story, or is trapped in ‘ceaseless repetitions and reenactments’ (Laub 1991: 69). The story does not develop, is not embellished or diminished by the passing of time or the onset of new experiences. Rather it is locked in an eternal now.

Undoubtedly one may speak metaphorically of trauma, dissociation, closure, etc. at the collective level (Bell 2006: 7); however, the suspicion must be that the collective is not merely not an individual but that it is also more than the sum of its individual parts. Is it possible to move beyond metaphor to judge collective memory and behaviour by these same insights that apply to the individual? More fundamentally, how is it possible at all to talk of a collective memory of such events?

The field of social memory studies has its beginnings in the work of authors such as Maurice Halbwachs (Social Frameworks of Memory, Univ of Chicago Press 1992[1925]. For Halbwachs, all memory is social.

‘There is no point in seeking where ... [memories] are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled by me

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externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them...’ (Halbwachs 1992: 38; here 109).

The very words we have to articulate memory even to ourselves come from our society. Studying memory therefore is ‘not a matter of reflecting philosophically on inherent properties of the subjective mind; memory is a matter of how minds work together in society, how their operations are not simply mediated but are structured by social arrangements’ (Halbwachs 1992: 38; here 109). Jelin concludes likewise, explaining that the labour necessary to construct memory, memory work, is ultimately social labour:

‘Individual memories are always socially framed… This entails that the social is always present, even in the most “individual” moments… all memories are more reconstructions than recollections... Memory is not an object that is simply there to be extracted, but rather it is produced by active subjects that share a culture and an ethos’ (Jelin 11 and 68).

The social construction of meaning and memory is ‘always anchored in the present’ (Jelin 2003: 66). While it carries the weight of the meaning of the past, collective memory is an interpretation which is constructed in and determined by the present. The present determines how the past is interpreted.

‘The past is gone, it is already de-termin(at)ed; it cannot be changed... What can change about the past is its meaning, which is subject to reinterpretations, anchored in intentions and expectations toward the future. That meaning of the past is dynamic and is conveyed by social agents engaged in confrontations with opposite interpretations, other meanings...’ (Jelin 26).

Crucial to the development of collective meaning is the role of ‘memory entrepreneurs’, those who interpret or reinterpret memory to suit the times. Some analysts, instrumentalists, ‘see memory entrepreneurship as a manipulation of the past for particular purposes’ (Olick and Robbins: 128). Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) are key proponents of this view, seeing traditions as ‘disingenuous efforts to secure political power’ (Dawson 108). Other analysts prefer to ‘see selective memory as an inevitable consequence of the fact that we interpret the world – including the past – on the basis of our own experience and within cultural frameworks’ (Olick and Robbins 128). Interpretation, and indeed reinterpretation, of memory are inevitable and natural consequences of social interaction. ‘Rather than viewing nostalgia as an illness, as did Freud, recent scholars have tended to see the desire to connect self with history as understandable, even natural’ (Bartel 1996: 362).

The end result of this memory work is a sense of collective identity. Acting together, people construct ‘imagined communities of memory whose members share a sense of a common past and a set of remembered reference points encapsulating their key values’ (Dawson 2007: 12). Cultural memory is a central element in the group identity; it ‘articulates its sense of a lived connection between past and present ... its narratives and images forming an indispensible part of the cultural maps of meaning that enable people to live in a particular environment and make sense of their personal and social experience’ (Dawson 2007: 12).

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It is not enough for collectives to have an identity; it is also necessary for them to express it. ‘Announcing one’s identity at regular intervals via symbols, myths and practices serves to reinforce and strengthen in-group attachment and out-group differentiation’ (Conway 2010: 10). And partly as a result of such displays, collective memory comes to relate not only to events which occurred within the lifetime of members of the group, but can also become part of the identity of those who did not personally share the experience, those in the next and subsequent generations. This is what Hirsch (2008), among others, refers to as ‘postmemory’, an experience which preceded the birth of the person concerned but which has been transmitted so powerfully in the community that it comes to constitute a personal memory in its own right. A prime example in the Northern Ireland context is the experience of Bloody Sunday in Derry, when 14 men from the nationalist community were shot dead by British paratroopers during a civil rights march in January 1972. Twenty five years later, two 21 year olds from Derry, Killian Mullan and Sharon Meehan, wrote the following poem (An Phoblacht/Republican News, 6 February 1997):

I remember people happy and the confidence of that morning. The Creggan Shops. I remember the banner that was carried. The gathered message. I remember live fire. A pool of blood on the pavement. I remember Hugh Gilmour and Patrick Doherty. I remember running. The Flats. I remember Jim Wray and Micheal McDaid. I remember screaming. English accents. I remember William Nash and Gerald McKinney. I remember a crazed army. A white hanky. I remember Micheal Kelly and John Young. I remember it black and white. But blood is always red. I remember Jackie Duddy and Bernard McGuigan. I remember looking for my friend from the confusion and then through the quiet. I remember Gerald Donaghy and Kevin McElhinney. I remember hearing the news. I remember John Johnston and William McKinney. I remember thirteen coffins. Black flags. I remember a young woman with an old face. The funerals. I remember my father crying hot angry tears. I remember the lies. And I wasn't even born.

Cultural practices of identity can appear timeless and immutable, but, as Jelin (2003: 66) argues, symbols are often simply the ‘pre-text’ upon which the group hangs its meaning and

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around which it creates its memories. It is the need for current meaning and identity which creates the symbol or the ritual, not the symbol or ritual which of itself automatically engenders meaning. Thus, despite their apparent rigidity, the symbols which represent the past can be interpreted in different ways by different groups, or reinterpreted differently by the same group at different times.

The social construction of collective memory is not carried out by a group in a vacuum. No less than at the level of the individual, memory requires work, labour; more, because others too are working at their interpretations of the past, collective memory involves struggle. The battle over the past is a battle in the present. Various interpretations of the past, each determined by its own current political needs, vie for legitimacy. In that sense, then, the struggle is not merely of memory against oblivion,3 but of memory against other memories. ‘Asymmetries of power in society mean that some groups in society are better positioned than others to articulate and impose their preferred interpretation of the past’ (Conway 2010: 15). Agents of the state, in particular ‘have a central role and special weight because of their power in relation to establishing and developing an “official history/memory”’ (Jelin 2003: 27). Given that, history is merely one more interpretation, albeit with power on its side. ‘The distinction between history and memory ... is a matter of disciplinary power rather than epistemological privilege’ (Olick and Robbins 1998: 110).

To first appearances, the domination of the official interpretation of the past, history, seems to hold the centre stage of memory unchallenged. However, although this may be more true in some instances than others – for example, at the height of political repression and censorship – the hegemony of the official interpretation of the past is never guaranteed. ‘... there will always be other stories, other memories, and alternative interpretations. These endure in spaces of resistance, in the private sphere, in the “catacombs” of history’ (Jelin 2003: xviii). What is involved is a dialectical struggle between those official memories of the powerful which seek to be hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic interpretations of other groups in society, especially those who have been marginalised and oppressed.

When conflicts end there is a window of opportunity for these subaltern views to find a social and political space that they did not easily have before: ‘previously censored narratives and stories can be incorporated and new ones can be generated’ (Jelin 2003: 29). But this does not mean that the dialectic is ended. If anything, the ending of political conflict can simultaneously mean increased struggle over the meaning of the past. Jelin, writing in the South American context, understands the significance and intensity of such battles in societies coming out of dictatorship and repression.

‘There is an active political struggle not only over the meaning of what took place in the past but the meaning of memory itself. The space of memory is thus an arena of political struggle that is frequently conceived in terms of a struggle “against oblivion”: remember so as not to repeat’ (Jelin 2003: xviii).

3 In Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Mirek comes associate his personal quest to recover his lost letters with his country’s struggle to reclaim its history. As he concludes: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion.’

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She could add that those who ‘remember so as not to repeat’ are often those with the least power, those at the receiving end of the repression and torture inflicted by the more powerful. For, clichéd as it sounds, it is no less true that: ‘Normally, the dominant story will be the one told by the winners of historical conflicts and battles.’ (Jelin 2003: xviii). In the case of outright victories, the powerful can tell their story in bombastic, hyper-heroic ways. But often victories are less clear cut, especially in cases of highly internalised or localised conflict. Then the winners write a history which shows them in the best light; just as their propaganda during the conflict was self-serving, so their post-conflict story can be that they are blameless.

The end of conflict is an opportunity for less powerful groups to fashion their memories too. They do so in the face of powerful forces which deny or marginalise their interpretation of history. In the face of that denial, the less powerful are reluctant to abandon their old beliefs and symbols; these, after all, were part of the resource that they drew on in order to survive psychologically during the conflict.

Community and Imagination

Anderson’s (1991) well-known insight is that the nation does not emerge fully formed but is rather constructed through the imagination of those who come to constitute the nation. They have myths of origin, epic tales, heroes, all building into an ideology which provides them with a collective identity. Nationalism is of course Janus-faced (Nairn 1997); on the one hand it encapsulates pride and community, inclusion and solidarity, while on the other it personifies difference and exclusion. The latter is often emphasised, especially where nationalism has shown its most ugly side in genocide and ethnic cleansing. In the Irish context, this is the view of nationalism which revisionists emphasise. But the other face of nationalism should not be ignored, that which engenders ethnic pride and community solidarity.

This solidarity can be at its strongest, and is most necessary for the group, during conflict. Community becomes a source of collective organisation and survival. Collective memory is a crucial element in this process. The community has its sites of trauma, its places of resistance, its heroes and victims, and its stories of selfishness or sheer survival, all part of the living memory which sustains the community.

The community is not just the nation writ small, a mini-me, mimicking the rituals and symbols of the state in robotic fashion. Even if the symbols and rituals are those of the wider state, they are infused with local knowledge and memory. The nation or ethnic group may be ultimately the framework of collective memory, but collective memory is experienced at a much more intimate level. Take Ardoyne, a small Belfast enclave, surrounded by and under attack from loyalists, and yet a springboard for republican attack on the state throughout the conflict. The fewer than two dozen streets in the area witnessed 99 deaths between 1969 and 1998 (Ardoyne Commemoration Project 2002). Today there are memorials to the dead which may appear predictable and stereotyped: a Celtic cross, tricolours and other republican

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symbolism. It would be easy to dismiss this as a sort of supermarket memorialisation, selecting a few symbols from the limited range on offer, but that would be to miss their significance. Local people are not merely going through the motions of acknowledgement. Here, as in memorials in other areas, the symbols are accompanied by a list of the names of the dead. This immediately locates the memorial as being redolent of emotion that is close to home; these are sons, daughters, parents, neighbours. The struggle against oblivion is intimate in these tightly packed working class streets.

A similar phenomenon can be found on the loyalist side. Take the Fountain area of Derry, a small working class area which has seen a major haemorrhaging of its people during the conflict. The population declined 64 percent between 1971 and 1991, with fewer than 500 people in the area by the end of that period (Collins, Moore and Smyth 1996). Throughout the half dozen streets which make up the area British symbols are on display in a number of murals: Union, Scottish and Welsh flags, the British crown. These are not displays of a semi-remote, a la carte Britishness, but symbols which speak to the community about what they have experienced. The displays tell the world as well as the community itself that although it is, in the words of one mural, ‘under siege’, it is defiant and determined to remain true to its British identity.

These symbols are part of the warp and weft of the community. They cannot be left behind by a simple act of will. To suggest that the people of Ardoyne remove all the tricolours and Celtic crosses or that the people of the Fountain remove all their Union flags and crowns would be not merely to call into question the identity of the living but would also be seen as an insult to the memory of their dead and a denial of the suffering experienced by those in these communities over three decades of conflict. ‘To forget is to betray both the victims of injustice and to endanger the future’ (Bell 2006: 23). The forcible removal of symbols before the community is ready to have them removed is an act of violence against the memory and identity of the community and a potential source of trauma to that community. It is a fact that to remember can be to attempt to build a bulwark against progress: ‘Bobby Sands did not die so that Sinn Féin could take their seats at Stormont’; ‘loyalists did not suffer and die just to allow terrorists into government’; neither of these emotionally-charged accusations offer any support for the compromises necessary in a peace process. And for some outside commentators, such sentiments reveal the dead weight of memory, where the symbolism which may have been functional in the past is now archaic, anachronistic, harking back to a time of conflict and irrelevant to the needs of the new Northern Ireland, ‘an extension of the tribal politics that continue to exist in Northern Ireland’ and the continuation of ‘war by other means’ (McDowell 2008: 338 and 340). From this point of view, the sooner such symbols go the better.

To reach this conclusion is to miss the dynamic nature of symbolism. Collective memory of the past is not necessarily a sign of communal disorder or trauma. On the contrary: ‘In memory, in contrast to traumatic repetition, the past does not invade the present, it informs it’ (Jelin 2003: 51).That a traditional symbol remains is not to say that it fails to undergo reinterpretation.

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Facing the Future

The end of conflict can have a contradictory effect on collective memory. On the one hand, it is an opportunity to refashion memories for a new era which needs new interpretations. At the same time, there is a desire not to abandon the traditional interpretations and symbols which served the community well in the darkest days of conflict. The trick is ultimately in moving on while staying anchored in the past, not forgetting the suffering which happened and not denying the sacrifices that have been made. One way to do that is to be even more emphatic in displaying the symbols of identity, while at the same time reinterpreting them for a new era.

In the context of Northern Ireland, the peace process which gathered pace through the 1990s placed differential burdens on the republican and loyalist communities and required different levels of memory work. As opponents of the state, republicans had the advantage of vision, and as a result change could appear to them as opportunity. At the same time, the path of change was bound to be strewn with obstacles and republicans had to mobilise their communities to accept the difficult transformation. Each step away from their political comfort zone led inevitably to an even more distant step: ceasefire, election to and holding ministerial office in partitionist institutions, decommissioning of weapons, disbanding their guerrilla army, the IRA, and eventually accepting the reformed police service and taking seats on the Policing Board. Along the way sections of the republican movement veered away, but the bulk of the movement took these obstacles in their stride over a decade and a half.

Loyalists frequently represented their violent activities during the conflict as an extension of the work of the British army and police; loyalist paramilitary groups were able to take on republican terrorism unencumbered by the legal niceties which bound the security forces. In this scenario, the IRA ceasefire could be seen as resulting from loyalist military pressure and therefore a victory. But there were obstacles facing loyalists too: the reforming of what they viewed as their police force, the departure of all but a garrison strength of the British army, a devolved government with former IRA members holding political office, and eventually their own acts of decommissioning, all of this done without the kind of direct political support which the IRA enjoyed in its relationship with the political party Sinn Féin. Working class loyalists may never have had the power and privilege that their middle class fellow unionists had, but that did not prevent them judging much of the transformation as a diminution of that ideal. For loyalists change was judged more often a threat than an opportunity, and many of them were at best wary of the peace process.

This differential relationship to change was evident at the level of political symbolism. From the time that all-party talks produced the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, republican muralists made a firm decision to remove all hooded gunmen from their murals. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, republican mural painting had a wide palette, with representations of history, mythology, current political issues and identification with other struggles elsewhere in the world. So, at the level of available themes, removing the gunmen was not as drastic a

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move as might first appear. At the same time, it was a radical step in self-reimaging. From this point on, the only republican murals to contain guns have been historical murals or memorial murals, and in the latter, the dead comrades pictured are real people, not hooded and anonymous. Loyalists could not so easily remove their gunmen from their murals. For a start, their ambivalence about the peace process meant that there was little inclination to represent so definitively that the war was over and that politics was now in command. Additionally, for a decade before their ceasefire loyalists had painted little other than hooded gunmen. Whichever loyalist paramilitary group was in control of a loyalist working class area had a monopoly of what was painted on the walls, with the consequence that the vast bulk of loyalist murals were in effect advertisements for local paramilitary groups. Taking the gunmen out of the picture was, symbolically as well as in reality, a difficult and traumatic move for loyalists.

As a result, a decade and more after the ceasefires, loyalist mural painting continued to be dominated by representations of hooded, armed men. The anachronism of this situation was commented on by many outsiders, and increasing pressure was exerted on loyalists to change their image. Some resisted this pressure, while the most sympathetic of insiders had a difficult time imagining what loyalists could paint if they were not painting armed men. Eventually, the external pressure led in 2006 to the Reimaging Communities Programme, a £3.3 million pound government scheme which enabled the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to work alongside community representatives to remove the most offensive murals. As republican muralists had by this stage reimaged of their own accord, the programme, although necessarily directed equally at both republican and loyalist areas, was destined to have its most obvious effects in the latter.

The Reimaging Communities Programme has had, at best, mixed effects in the communities which it has touched (Romens 2007). There are some surprising and imaginative developments – such as the appearance of murals advocating human rights and children’s rights in the former bastion of UDA warlord Johnny Adair in the Lower Shankill area of Belfast. The fact that, one year after their appearance, they remain pristine and unvandalised speaks volumes of their legitimacy in that community. On the other hand, the Programme has also spawned a spate of nostalgia murals, where old photographs of pubs, street scenes, dance halls, etc. are Photoshopped, printed on aluminium and attached to walls. These say nothing about the issues facing these often impoverished working class areas in the present or the future, and their view of the past is a romantic one which scrupulously avoids mentioning the war. The artist involved in producing one such mural in the Markets area of Belfast stated this clearly when he said that ‘his plan was to re-establish a sense of history – history predating the Troubles...’ (Bridgman 2009). This is a denial of a central experience of this and similar working class communities.

Arguably the purpose of the Programme is not just the replacement of the most offensive murals with other murals but the removal of politics from the murals altogether. If that is so, then, at least to date, the Programme has failed. For example, the murals spoken of above in the Lower Shankill area sit alongside others which are memorials to dead UDA activists and

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one which, complete with hooded gunmen, explains the origin of the UDA. The old symbols remain; the antidote has not worked.

There is another way to view this ‘mixed economy’ of murals. At very least one must conclude that the community will change its symbolism at its own pace and has every right to do so. A well-meaning financial incentive may help speed up the process, but no outside organisation can strike at the heart of the community’s identity by requiring changes which it cannot, or cannot yet, make. But a genuine aspiration towards reimaging can only be judged a failure if the continuation of the old symbols is taken as prima facie proof of the continuation of old attitudes. There is evidence that that is not always the case. On the contrary, reiterating one’s commitment to established symbols can be one way of preparing the ground for a leap into the unknown future. The old and trusted symbols provide an imprimatur for change. ‘Paradoxically, the past remains the most useful analytical tool for coping with constant change’ (Olick and Robbins 1998: 116). Symbols can be the bridge between the past and the future which makes the present tolerable.

For example, the image of republican hunger striker Bobby Sands continues to loom large in Sinn Féin literature and representations. He appears in recruitment posters and larger than life on a mural on the side of the Sinn Féin headquarters in Belfast. The party which portrays this image is a very different one from that which he knew at the point of his death in 1981. In fact, his success in being elected a Westminster MP at the height of his hunger strike was one key event which led to the transformation of the party. It was further transformed for and by the peace process to the point where its members came to hold ministerial office and where its former ally in the republican movement, the IRA, was disbanded. Some may see the use of Sands’ image as opportunistic, a betrayal of the ideals for which he struggled and died. ‘Would Bobby Sands have taken a seat in a devolved parliament?’ is the rhetorical question. On the one hand, there is absolutely no way to know what he would have done had he lived. But, if some interpretations of his key role as an activist and ideologue are correct (O’Hearn 2006), then there is every reason to believe that, along with a number of his contemporaries, he would have been an architect of the remarkable changes which led the movement from war to peace. But there is no point trying to outfox history. The fact is that, in the present, reference to Bobby Sands allows the republican movement to represent its political stance as consonant with its past actions. ‘Trust us’, the symbolism reassures followers. ‘We are still republicans. Stay with us through these challenging times.’

On the loyalist side an equally interesting phenomenon has been the shift in interpretation of images of the First World War. Unionists in the early 20th century organised against the possibility of Home Rule for Ireland by forming an illegal army, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). At the outbreak of the First World War, the UVF enlisted as a Division in the British army, the 36th Ulster Division, and proceeded to be decimated at the Somme and other catastrophic battles. Despite a gap of over four decades between the two organisations, the current UVF (formed in 1966) sees itself as the direct continuation of the previous UVF (disbanded in 1921). It therefore has managed to expropriate symbolism about the First World War for itself. During the conflict, this allowed the organisation to represent its members as having a legitimacy as soldiers, a claim which matched its view of itself as an

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extension of the current British army fighting against IRA terrorism. With the end of the conflict, two attempts have been made to refashion the historical connection. One uses images of the 36th Ulster Division going over the top at the Somme as a racist rallying call in a Northern Ireland which has seen an increase in minority ethnic populations since the ceasefires: ‘They didn’t die for a multi-racial Ulster’ (Bradley 2004).

The other rebranding involves the proliferation of Somme Associations in the last decade (Graham and Shirlow 2002). As part of the same process of self-reimaging in UVF areas in places such as the Shankill Road, the majority of murals and memorials now make direct reference to the 36th Ulster Division and the Somme. The portrayal of poppies and soldiers with bowed heads and down-turned rifles would not be out of place on an official cenotaph. The effect is enhanced by the frequent quotation of lines and phrases from poems about the first World War: ‘Lest We Forget’ from the refrain of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional’; ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them’ from Laurence Binyon’s ‘The Fallen’; Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Suicide in the Trenches’:

‘You smug-faced crowds with kindling eyeWho cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never knowThe hell where youth and laughter go’

and John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Field’:

‘We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.’

This has dovetailed neatly with the purposes of the Reimaging Communities Programme. In Donegall Pass, Belfast, for example, a state-funded mural displays poppies, the Thiepval Tower in Belgium and other images that would have been found previously on straightforward UVF paramilitary murals. Then these symbols were used to legitimate the illegal UVF’s activities; now the historical interpretation is foregrounded. However, in Donegall Pass, as with at least one other such mural in Dundonald, the UVF has subsequently added a plaque with the names of its colleagues from the area who died during the recent conflict.4 The UVF now hitches a ride, as it were, with the historical representation, in effect telling the world, ‘we were soldiers too’.

4 In passing, it is worth pointing out that, as a traditionally oppositionalist movement, republicanism cannot so easily graft its message onto that of the state. Thus, when a Reimaging Communities Programme mural was painted in Ardoyne, Belfast, depicting the Flight of the Earls in 1603, the Arts Council demanded the removal of a sword from the hand of Red Hugh O’Neill – this at the same time as its First World War murals in UVF areas have been replete with unionist guns.

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As with the image of Bobby Sands on the republican side, the display of such tried and tested images on the loyalist side plays a key role in times of threatening change. As Brown (2007: 709) aptly puts it:

‘Loyalist commemoration and memorialisation ... attempts to play a significant instrumental role in steadying Loyalist progression through the twists and turns of the Northern Ireland peace process, allowing an effective mediation of changing political messages and the maintenance of group cohesion.’

These traditional symbols help steady nerves; they say to the community, ‘trust us; we have not given up on our loyalist ideals and aspirations despite this peace process’.

Conclusion: Collective Memory and the New Face of Belfast

Belfast in the post-conflict era is in many ways a transformed city and has aspirations to transform itself even further. The question that faces it, however, is how to deal with its recent conflict-ridden past. This is a question which dominates debates about victims and the legacy of the past in general (Consultative Group 2009), about whether a new Northern Ireland sports stadium should be located at the site of the prison where ten republican hungers strikers died in 1981 (Neill 2006: 116-118), about whether there should be civic memorials and whether the names of all the dead – perpetrators as well as victims – should be included (Bloomfield 1998: 47). Violence and sectarianism continue to feature in the city, but they are seen as ‘postules still breaking through despite the intensive work of urban beauticians’ in a situation where much of the marketing of the ‘new Belfast’ seeks to ‘distance itself from disturbing reality’ (Neill 2006: 112). Those designing and marketing Belfast as a tourist product in particular seem to feel that ‘much of local culture ... simply remains too hot to handle’ (Neill 2006: 113). And although the city centre of Belfast witnessed an estimated 70-plus conflict-related deaths, no permanent memorials have been erected that refer to the recent conflict (Switzer and McDowell 2009: 344).

The conflict-free city, sterile as regards memorialisation, is in stark contrast to the situation in working class loyalist and republican areas, leading two authors to conclude as follows:

‘There is something almost schizophrenic about a city that wipes virtually all evidence of the Troubles from its newly polished centre, even as it finds that tours of the murals, monuments and painted kerbstones of some of its residential suburbs are among its most popular and distinctive tourist attractions’ (Switzer and McDowell 2009: 350).

In peace as in conflict it seems that mental health metaphors are never far away when it comes to describing Belfast.

If the sentiments at the heart of the Reimaging Communities Programme ever reach fruition that state of contrast between residential suburbs and city centre will disappear as ‘the emollient hand of the heritage industry transforms it into something altogether more

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soothing’ (Bartel 1996: 359). Yet the future does not have to consist of a tsunami of enforced forgetting swamping everything in its path. There is rich collective memory in loyalist and republican working class areas and vivid and authentic symbolic representation of collective identities to be seen on the walls. It may be that some of the symbols appear anachronistic and unchanged, but that is not to say that they do not speak to identities that have changed or are changing in the transition from conflict to post-conflict. The way to encourage such transformation is not to attack the sacred symbols of each community but to encourage the communities to reimagine themselves, to envision a future that is different from the past and to represent that vision on its walls. Such progress may or may not be aided by reimaging funding, but it goes far beyond merely displaying different images in the community, especially if these images do not speak to the soul of the community.

In short, the way to the future is through remembering rather than enforced forgetting, through display rather than whitewashing, through mature contestation rather than bland reconciliation. In ways that Paul Brady never envisaged, ‘trying to reach the future through the past’ is neither as contradictory nor as infantile as it might first appear.

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