DRAWN TO TROUBLE
NEIGHBOURHOODS bear religious labels in Belfast, a city at war with itself. It is easy to tell. It is writ large on gable walls and bricked-up windows in big, bold colours that can be absorbed at a glance. Dramatic wall murals are one of the first impressions a visitor gets of the working-class quarters of the Northern Irish capital.
Most are up-front, no-nonsense parochial political statements; full-blown propagandist art. Many are militaristic and hardly cheery. Huge, colourful and dynamic, they act as territorial markers, glorify dead 'heroes' and 'martyrs', capture local sentiments and metaphorically express aspirations, hopes, dreams and fears. They marry the politics of a centuries-old civil war to street art. Other apolitical images attempt notes of humour amid the turmoil and boredom.
Tight up against the terraced houses of Woodvale, on three gable-end walls, are large murals depicting children, the older generation and the working man. The murals - financed by the Community Services Department of Belfast City Council and designed and painted in 1977 by students from the College of Art and Design - were a bureaucrat's attempt at brightening an 'unbrightenable' location.
The bottom end of Ormeau Road, crumbling under the power of the redeveloper, was given Disneyland characters to contemplate. Springfield Road got Humpty Dumpty. Shankhill has had everyone from John Travolta to Jack and the Beanstalk and Henry VIII and hiswives. And the outside of Ava Children's Hospital was splashed with a Muppet mural, suitably lacking any of the anarchic spirit of the original characters.
Between 1976 and 1981, 42 non-aligned murals were sponsored in an attempt to spruce up a city that had become battered. Only a few still exist. One by one, the government-sponsored murals were vandalised, neglected and ignored. Shortly after being finished, the 'working-man' mural in Woodvale was deliberately and carefully obliterated. Residents of Newhill blotted out the images of Dracula, the Incredible Hulk and Frankenstein. And the 60-metre long jungle mural along Springhill Avenue was defaced, leavingthe area as much an eyesore now as before it was painted.
Such fantasy characters are 'from an international plastic Walt Disney-type culture that in no way reflects the cultures of the local community,' says Joe Coyle, a Catholic republican who paints murals with direct political statements. 'We don't live in anything approaching Futuropolis,' he says of the Spiderman mural in Kingswood Street.