Credo / Mark Oliver

Belfast peace walls

photo from flickr, georgeclarke107

Listening to radio coverage of the return of power-sharing in Northern Ireland earlier this year I was struck by a line on the report about how there were no plans to pull down the dozens of peace walls that snake through various 'interface' estates in Belfast and Derry.

I thought it would be interesting to hear what people who lived there thought of how the peace process was going and what prospects there were of them coming down. Obviously peace walls are also nteresting at the moment because of their adoption in Iraq.

I thought a trip to Belfast would work well as a multimedia project with pictures of the walls and voices.

In the end, it was trickier than I thought to get people to talk and very hard to get people to agree to be photographed. But with then Guardian Ireland corr Owen Bowcott and freelance photographer Paul McErlane we created a slideshow. Owen had a good angle on the story as there was a school where there were plans to build a new wall after a house in a Nationalist estate was firebombed late last year.

Anyway, this was the resulting slideshow and Society Guardian piece.

photo from flickr, a11sus

We didn't really get a chance to look at the graffiti on the walls, which I thought was interesting. Looking at this Belfast peace wall flickr group  there is a lot of graffiti on parts of the walls. A lot seems to be pro-peace but not all. I also spotted a "f*** the Queen".

Murals in Belfast

  George Best Mural 
  Originally uploaded by jazza5629.

There are moves to try and replace some of the paramilitary murals in Belfast with slightly less scary images, and this is one of them, showing George "Simply the" Best. Funding of aroud £3.3m has been found.

When I worked for five months as a reporter for the Mirror in Belfast in 1998, I was both horrified and electrified by the paramilitary murals. I think it is unlikely all of them will go (while the peace process goes on there is still, of course, sectarian hatred which will take many generations to fade), and arguably they are a part of the history of the Troubles. And a lucrative tourist draw. Turner Prize winning pot maker Grayson Perry, who admits he has never been to Belfast, argues in a piece for the Times, that their "dark history" should be saved.

I remember being on the back of a colleague's motorbike when he showed me around some of the livelier areas; fittingly, for the autheticity of the experience, a child threw a stone at us at one point.

It would be good, however, if  some of the more objectionable murals went and were replaced with images like this great one of Best.
_______

PS Thank you to Rosa for the correction - I was in Belfast in 98 not 99 as previously posted. I hate to think I had been adding to the fund of inaccuracies already in the blogosphere.