“No extradition! Don’t play England’s game” – after years of legal wrangling, Liam Campbell was extradited to Lithuania on charges of procuring weapons for the Real IRA (BBC | Saoradh). See previously: Silence Is Complicity. Cıarán Maguire was handed over to the PSNI by Gardaí in April 2021 (Donegal Daily).
The boards shown above and at bottom are in Braemar Street (Falls) and Brompton Park (Ardoyne). The small diamond version (also in Ardoyne) is mounted above one of the “Slow – Go mall” signs from Sınn Féın that were described as “intimidatory” by local DUP Assembly member and are perhaps also illegal under the Roads Order (NI) 1993 (Belfast Live).
Here is a selection of anti-Protocol placards from the Caw, Londonderry and Newbuildings. Above: a PSNI officer with a Sinn Féin badge – “PSNI – destroying the loyalist community since 4th Nov. 2001. In the pocket of Sinn Féin.” (November 4th, 2001 is the date the PSNI was created.) For the farmer’s wife protecting the farm, see Deserted, Well I Can Stand Alone. Below: “Newbuildings says No to Irish Sea border”, “Loyalist Newbuildings will never accept a border in the Irish Sea”, “The Belfast Agreement has been broken – the deal’s off”, and “Our forefathers fought for our freedom and rights/No border in the sea or we continue the fight”.
Orange Order Victims day is an annual commemoration (on September 1st) of the 339 members who were killed during the Troubles. The stained glass window reproduced in a board on the Newbuildings memorial garden is in the Museum of Orange Heritage in Schomberg House, south Belfast.
Compared with the garden in 2020 (see Newbuildings Victoria), there is a new NI Centenary board, and on the outside (replacing the tarps giving thanks for the NHS and commemorating the 75th anniversary of VE day) there is a celebration of the platinum jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. On the electrical box, there is a stencil in support of Bloody Sunday’s “Soldier F”, who continues to face murder charges (for the killings of William McKinney and James Wray) and five attempted murder charges after the PPS’s decision to discontinue prosecution was quashed in March (Guardian); the PPS has appealed (News Letter).
339 Orange Order members killed during the Troubles.
The only references to TYG appear to be flags and graffiti in this street (Upper Riga Street) going back to 2012, though the stencils shown here claim the group was established in 2007. Please get in touch if you have more information.
There is a mural version of the speeding sign on the Shankill – see Kill Your Speed.
“Murdered for their political beliefs: Tom Berry, Robert Elliman, Robert Millen, John Browne”. All four had a connection Markets or Ormeau area of south Belfast. Millen, from the Ormeau area, was shot in 1973 by the UVF; he played on the same soccer team (Bankmore Star) as Thomas Berry, who was shot in a Short Strand GAA club; Elliman was shot in a Markets pub; John Brown (without the “e”) was shot in his Cooke Street home in front of his family. The first three were all Protestants; the latter three were among 11 people who died in the 1975 feud between the Officials and the Provisionals. (Lost Lives)
“The war they wage is not a war of bigotry or greed, their struggle is a workers one, so everyone may lead a life with rights and liberty, in a land where they can say “Up the Army of the people, the Official IRA”.” “Erected by the Official Republican Movement.”
After serving in the IRA in the War Of Independence, Liam Mellows was elected to the First Dáil and as a member of the second Dáil voted against the Treaty in January 1922 (his speech is recorded in Oireachtas.ie under the name “Liam Mellowes”). In the Civil War that followed, he served as IRA quartermaster in the force in the Four Courts that surrendered to Free State forces on June 30th, 1922. He was imprisoned in Mountjoy and executed in December, in reprisal for the killing of Seán Hayes (see Executed). (WP | An Phoblacht) His proposals for government were published posthumously as ‘Mellows Testament’ (NLI) and include state ownership of heavy industry, large estates, the transport system, and the banks. The sticker below quotes from that document: “Ireland, if her industries and banks were controlled by foreign capital, would be at the mercy of every breeze that ruffled the surface of the world’s money-markets.”
Here are a pair of large boards in the Ulster Museum on the theme of Cú Chulainn, one from each sect.
In the left-hand painting – the CNR piece, by Marty Lyons and a Short Strand artist – Francis Hughes of the IRA – in what we think is a unique break with tradition – takes the place of Cú Chulaınn, who became a symbol of the 1916 Easter Rising when Oliver Sheppard’s statue of Cú Chulaınn’s death was placed in the re-built GPO. Hughes has a tourniquet on his right leg, an assault rifle dangling from his wrist, and instead of the raven that signified Cú Chulaınn’s death there is the symbol of republican political prisoner, the lark, which appears in the apex of many other republican murals.
In the second of the pieces – the PUL piece, painted by Dee Craig – the raven sits on the shoulder of a Cú Chulainn who has a red cloak and carries a Northern Ireland shield. “Down through the years, his shadow has cast a new breed of Ulster defender”: a (loyalist) hooded gunman. Thus while Cú Chulaınn is the (surprising) “Ancient defender of Ulster!”, the UVF and UDA are its modern defenders, now that the B Specials and UDR are gone.
The dripping red hand in the top left is the ‘red hand of Ulster’; one version of the origin-story for the red hand is that the man who avenged Cú Chulaınn’s death made a bloody hand-print to indicate his completion of the deed. Most people, however, will think of the legend that in a race to be first to touch the land of Ulster one contestant (perhaps Érımón Uí Néıll) cut off his hand and threw it ahead of the others. (This legend was depicted in a lower Shankill mural and narrated in an east Belfast mural: The Strangest Victory In All History.)
The Black Pig’s Dyke is the collective name for a number of ditches built around 400 BCE, perhaps to prevent cattle-raiding. They share a common mythology: that they were created by huge black boar; they are on the Ulster-Connacht border, rather than the Ulster-Leinster border as shown in the painting, though there are similar earthworks in Down, Armagh (and Cork) (WP).
Here are in-progress shots of “Freedom Corner” from mid June (images 1, 2), early July (images 4, 5) and early August (image 6), plus the info board that was posted to give people an idea of how the gables would look when complete (using the Tommy Herron mural in Bangor).
The phrase “your silence will not protect you” comes from the essay “The Transformation Of Silence Into Language And Action” (pdf), in which US feminist and civil rights activist Audrey Lorde describes the damage to the self wrought by silence in response to fear and encourages us to find a perspective on fear that gives us strength: “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.”
A week of speaking out from the Museum Of Free Derry/bloodysunday50.com and ArtsEverywhere begins today (June 13th) at 6 p.m. with the launch of an art exhibition entitled ‘From Bloody Sunday To Brexit’.
A graffitist at Amelia’s on Foyle Road has also found their voice: “50 years, no justice”, as the wrangling over the prosecution of Soldier F (and others) continues (Guardian).
Seosamh Mac Coille Collection 