SAOIRSE32

**I dun much like the derisive tone of this article, but I am including it for the information.

By Simon Kuper
Financial Times
November 29 2008

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in Protestant Belfast, and a former Loyalist terrorist is showing us around his neighbourhood. We admire the monuments to victims of Republican murders, and the retired terrorist tells us about dragging a dead man out of a bombed shop, but just as you visit Venice for the canals, you come to Belfast for murals. Here on the Protestant side, most glorify British soldiers of world war one and Loyalist killers, often in the same picture.

But suddenly, on a street corner, looms a piece of excellent unintentional camp: a wall-sized mural of the late Queen Mother (Loyalists revere the British royal family), complete with the phrase, “She had a soldier’s heart”. Her 101-year-old face beams at passing tour buses.

You feel you have wandered into the lost chapter of PJ O’Rourke in Holidays in Hell, though even O’Rourke didn’t imagine a tourism joint venture between Republican and Loyalist ex-murderers. Yet “hell” isn’t the word for this afternoon. You leave the Shankill Road and its Catholic twin, the Falls Road, feeling strangely envious.

Everyone these days reveres “folk art” and “community”. These neighbourhoods have it. And they’ve worked out how to cash in on it.

In 1998 the Good Friday Agreement largely ended the 30 years of “Troubles” between Northern Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants. The Falls and Shankill Roads went from intermittent civil war to being merely drab working-class streets in Britain’s poorest region. Released prisoners on both sides were sitting around unemployed, with no more people to bomb. Quickly, they found their unique selling point. Michael Culbert, a friendly grey-haired Republican tour guide in suit and tie, says: “We noticed quite a lot of tourists walking up and down the Falls Road looking at murals etcetera.” The murals were giant propaganda cartoons painted during the Troubles. Typically they glorified either today’s killers or their forebears. Horrendous as they are, they are also a quintessentially Northern Irish form of folk art. And so ex-prisoners such as Culbert – who politely explains that he spent nearly 16 years in prison “charged with killing members of the British armed forces” – set up tours.

Academics came, backpackers, Japanese tour groups who had never heard of Northern Ireland, as well as earnest NGO-types who wanted to learn how to end conflicts. “We have a niche. We see there is a market,” says William “Plum” Smith, a Loyalist tour guide who admits to having served 10 years in prison for “attempted murder”. The tours might seem odd, Smith admits, but, “You have the ovens at the death camps, tourists at Robben Island. Tourism has the future.”

It turned out that tourists wanted to see both Republican and Loyalist areas. So ex-prisoners on both sides teamed up. Smith, who once went into a Catholic neighbourhood intending to murder somebody, now visits the Falls Road regularly to discuss tours. He says, “We have plans for training together, for evaluation together. The ground rules are set: we tell our story, they tell their story. The benefits are for both communities.”

When I asked Culbert about this, he chuckled: “We employ, on a part-time basis, Loyalist ex-prisoners. And why not? They’re entitled to employment.” Does Culbert still detest them now they are colleagues? “When you get to know more about people, and get to know their story, you start to empathise. I still think their political analysis isn’t correct. I think they’ve been totally conned by the British government. They want to be British, but the British don’t want them.”

From the Boyne to Best

The first mural in Belfast is thought to have gone up in 1908, a Loyalist painting of William of Orange’s defeat of the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 (which in this province, where history never fades, feels like five minutes ago).

From the late 1970s, murals began appearing as part of the Troubles. “If literacy isn’t your forte – working-class areas in Belfast have always thrown up mural artists,” says the Republican tour guide Michael Culbert.

Now the murals are becoming an international fashion. Last year, the Bogside Artists of Derry got themselves invited to the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival in Washington, where they painted a mural of Martin Luther King by the Washington Mall. Legions of academics study Northern Ireland’s muralists.

Recently some have been trying to get the muralists to paint pretty things instead of killers. There are subsidies for those who oblige. Murals of the late Northern Irish footballer George Best have duly gone up on both sides. And in the Shankill Road there is a decidedly non-violent mural of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The book’s author, CS Lewis, was a Belfast boy.

Our tour this Sunday starts beside a tattoo parlour on the Loyalist Shankill Road. The little two-storey houses are interspersed with Protestant churches. Above our heads are murals of gunmen in balaclavas. Yet the effect is not gloomy. Most locals who walk past greet our tour guide, partly because ex-prisoners are as famous as pop stars in these neighbourhoods, but partly because everyone here knows each other. In Shankill people leave their back doors open, says our guide. The street is a sort of shared living-room, which the “community” – for once a meaningful word – has decorated itself, with murals.

Shankill once had about 75,000 inhabitants. Now only about a third that number remain, as slums have been cleared and some people who became middle-class during Northern Ireland’s newly ended economic boom have moved out. There is the telltale spaciousness of a place where few newcomers want to move in. But the people who have stayed have made this a home.

Our guide walks us to the “peace wall” that separates the Shankill and Falls neighbourhoods. It is as ugly as the Berlin Wall, but quite a bit higher. “What we could do with,” says the guide, “is a Banksy to paint this.”

It’s true: walking through these neighbourhoods you are constantly reminded of the British graffiti artist. Banksy, whose murals often go up secretly overnight, has become an international superstar and something of a role model for Northern Ireland’s muralists. Some of them are now getting paid, “and quite right too”, says Culbert. Who had ever thought there would be money in Troubles propaganda?

Our Loyalist guide leaves us by a crossing next to the wall and walks off. Suddenly a Republican guide materialises beside us. We have changed hands. The Republican walks us past the Catholic terraced houses that border the peace wall. Meshes cover their back windows, just in case anyone chucks something over the wall, but in the back yards are signs of domesticity: a trampoline, a child’s car seat.

Walking into the Falls neighbourhood, the first thing that strikes you is that it’s exactly the same as Shankill: murals, memorials, churches, poor people in football shirts. “Oh yeah, one place is a mirror image of the other,” agrees Smith. As in Shankill, some smart new homes have gone up lately.

Just like our Loyalist guide, the Republican one veers between angry propaganda – it’s all the other side’s fault – and pious wishes for peace. On these tours, explains Culbert later, “we never indicate that we are neutral”. A British ambassador in our group listens impassively to the Republican line. Not long ago someone in his job could have been killed here.

There is one thing the Falls Road has that Shankill doesn’t: the Solidarity Wall, a row of murals that celebrate various foreign groups that Republicans identify with. The Cubans are there, beside a mocking caricature of George Bush, and a repainting of Picasso’s Guernica to cheer on the Basque separatists.

A short walk away is the Republican answer to the Queen Mum: a mural of Bobby Sands, the Republican hunger-striker who died in a British prison in 1981. The painting, on the side of the Sinn Fein office, depicts Sands with the long hair and soulful face of a Romantic poet. He is saying, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” Our guide tells us lovingly about “Bobby”. In fact, both guides we had could recite from memory paeans to every martyr on their side, even ordinary people killed in 1920.

Maddening as the guides are, you can ask them anything, and their tour is the most memorable I’ve been on anywhere. If only they had realised 40 years ago that the Troubles work much better as tourism.

Simon Kuper is the FT’s sports columnist

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Details

On the Republican side: Coiste Belfast Political Tours, 10 Beechmount Avenue, Belfast, BT12 7NA. Tel: +44 (0)28 9020 0770

On the Loyalist side: Ex Prisoners Interpretative Centre, 33a Woodvale Road, Belfast, BT13 3BN. Tel: +44 (0)28 9074 8922