Introduction

In the long history of the Troubles in Ireland, the year 1983 saw the sectarian conflict begin to pivot away from violence and toward a political détente that led, ultimately, to peace. For most of my several weeks’ visit in the autumn of that year, I had steered clear of the ancient blood feud, preferring instead to explore the galleries, quaint bookshops, performing arts spaces, and in particular the Guinness-soaked pubs of the south, often accompanied by my American writer friend and host Christina Bauman.

I was in Ireland on a photo-documentary project looking at experimental artists in Europe. As a Fellow of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, I was essentially a tourist, and while I had never read a story more hypnotic than James Joyce’s “The Dead” or imagined a history richer than Ireland’s golden age before the Viking invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries, far be it for me, a 22-year-old American interloper, to stick my nose into the family business of the Emerald Isle. No siree Bob. Leave the Troubles to the Brits and the Irish, the Protestants and the Catholics, the unionists and the nationalists, the colonists and the colonized.

But the Troubles got me anyway.

Christina lived in a semi-picturesque former roadhouse she shared with the journalist Mary Hunt in Shankill, south of Dublin. Shanganagh Cottage had thick stucco walls and a peat-burning fireplace. Every day I’d steer my old Mercedes, bought from a taxi driver in Munich, away from the cottage toward the city for appointments with artists and writers. Some days I’d bring a camera and return with portraits on film to be developed in a makeshift darkroom off of the rustic kitchen.

During one of those commutes I met a young woman named Geraldine O’Reilly, who had written a thesis on the street murals in Belfast for her bachelor’s degree in fine art from the National College of Art and Design. Geraldine was determined that I should see the murals, but I was skeptical—and trepidatious. A neighbor­hood-improvement project in a sketchy part of wartime Belfast didn’t seem to fall within the avant-garde focus of my project. But Geraldine was insistent, made arrangements to meet some of her friends, and found me a place to crash.

Visiting a conflict zone is generally unpleasant. Throughout the Eastern Bloc I had been detained at frontier-crossings by guards who, after scrutin­izing my American passport and the undercarriage of my car, would proceed to remove the backseat and spare tire, searching for drugs (on entry) and stowaways (on exit). Passing check­points on the roads into Ulster and Belfast, while creepy, didn’t require any automotive disassembly, although the pointed interrogations were clearly a source of anxiety for my Irish passengers—Geraldine and two of her anarchist friends.

The blight of our destination started to sink in as the Merc turned onto Falls Road in West Belfast, where the only other passenger vehicles were taxicabs and the occasional military patrol. Foot traffic was light, and graffiti covered the buildings and boarded-up shops. Overhead, oppressively low clouds cast vague shadows, and I began to wonder what I had gotten myself into.

Most of what I knew about the murals had come through conver­sations with Geraldine and the anarchists, including Geraldine’s social worker friend Mary Flanagan, who met up with us after our arrival. Geraldine had also pointed me to Circa, a Belfast magazine focused on contempor­ary art in a socio-political context. Starting with its founding issue in 1981, Circa had pub­lished several articles touching on the murals from both sides of the conflict.

Outside Ireland, the murals were hardly known, and I hadn’t formed any ideas about them beyond a wariness for community art projects, which in my experience had meant corralling a bunch of kids to pep up the wall of a school—not exactly bleeding-edge art. My main worry was seeing my low expectations borne out by the murals—and my inability to keep my judgment to myself. To ensure that the trip wasn’t a total loss, I made plans to visit several contem­porary art venues and bought tickets for an evening of performance art near the City Centre. My ambivalence didn’t square well with my traveling companions, who had strong Republican sym­pathies and pressed me to take sides.

The rainy weather turned out to be an inspiration, with diffuse light like the endless overcast of the great Pacific Northwest, where I had come up as a photo­grapher. (I think gray climates inspire excessively strong opinions, and Belfast and its environs that November were remarkably monotone.) Since I knew little about the history and hadn’t yet formed a view of the Troubles, capturing the stark grayness of the place became my photo­graphic objective. I also thought to pull back a bit and shoot the murals in context of their neighborhoods.

Ample evidence of an economy in crisis indicated that the region faced many problems, apart from the Troubles, as it was in the transition away from an industrial past, and I wondered to what extent sectarianism was ever a scapegoat for underlying strains like unemployment, poverty, domestic abuse, and alcoholism.

The contem­porary spectacle of the Troubles in the media—especially in tabloids packed with grainy high-contrast shots of violence and destruction—bordered on the pornographic, and I felt that a more everyday portrayal might take the mickey out of that journalistic cliché. Several hours with the poet Macdara Woods in Dublin over tea and whiskey had left a strong impression on me, not least for his brandishing of the sword he kept under his bed, but also for his regard of Ireland and the Troubles as a “state of mind” that carries beyond the threshold of the Irish frontier to other places of the world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the American photo­grapher Darius Kinsey of Sedro-Woolley, Washington packed a processing lab and a special backpack holding 11 x 14” glass plates to document the “harvest” of virgin timber, including thousand-year-old Western red cedar giants sacred to North American indigenous peoples, in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. The process Kinsey used required sensitizing the plates with chemicals in a lightproof tent at the scene, then exposing them in a camera fitted with a massive telescopic lens. The resulting optical effect has a focal depth of a few inches and an infinity point of a hundred yards or more, creating a portrait that feels like a classic Hollywood headshot, but at a monumental scale. That’s what I was going for in Belfast with my large-but-not-too-large-format Speed Graphic camera, Luna-Pro hand-held light meter, Leitz Tiltall tripod, dark cloth, and a dozen film holders, each one loaded with two sheets of Kodak Tri-X 4 x 5” film.

For itinerant photo­graphy, the large camera had the additional advantages of slowing down the process, throttling the number of possible exposures, drawing spectators, and leveling the relationship between the photo­grapher and the portrait subjects.

My project interest in creative subcultures led me naturally to focus on the murals of the Catholic minority, without any particular prejudice against those of the Protestant majority. The loyalist murals—most of which depicted King Billy, William of Orange, who later became King William III, Protestant conqueror of Ireland, triumphantly astride a white horse branded a neighborhood as British and seemed like a completely different phenomenon from the issue-driven messaging of the murals in the Falls Road district.

Photo­graphically, the proof prints of the Belfast series, printed at the Central School of Art and Design in London, exceeded my expectations. But personally, my expectations were largely undefined, a conundrum that led me to question my intrusions as a documentary photo­grapher—working without a writer, editor, client, or cause other than my own vague curiosity. My decision to shoot first and ask questions later put the images in a state of suspense, waiting for the expert who could ground them with words. It wasn’t until decades later that it occurred to me that the only commentary missing from the photos was mine.

Writing about the Falls Road series today is straightforward, as the evidence offered by the images has a clear place in the larger history of the Troubles. Beyond their specific historical context, my hope looking ahead is that the photo­graphs, inspired as they were by Macdara Woods’s poetry, carry beyond Ireland to other places scarred by sectarian violence where young people dream of creating peace.

The murals would eventually draw inter­national interest and have since become a major tourist attraction. I was only one of many outsiders brought to witness them, albeit one of the first. When I reconnected with Geraldine in 2018, she replied with delight that she was “gobsmacked” at hearing from me, remarking about the murals that, “Only youth and naïveté acts as a protection.” Her email recalled our anarchist friends and the places we had visited, including a creative arts center, an adjacent cozy cafe, a performance space, and the Good Vibrations record shop run by Terry Hooley, a punk impresario who at the height of the Troubles brought young people from all sides of the conflict together on the dance floor. (The film Good Vibrations celebrates Hooley vividly.)

In the years immediately following my visit, Sinn Féin and its newly-elected leader Gerry Adams struggled to separate their agenda from that of the Irish Republican Army, and the 1980s saw hundreds of casualties in the war. A short-lived ceasefire in 1994 broken by both sides drew the attention of US President Bill Clinton, who in 1995 appointed George J. Mitchell as the United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland. A second ceasefire reinstated in 1997 led to fragmentation, with most of the subsequent violence occurring within factions on both sides. Talks between the main political parties led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and a divided peace ever since.

Painted as they were by the generation that came of age in the years leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, the murals of the early 1980s mark a transitional period and the emergence of a new mindset in the conflict. Unlike the graffitied scrawls from before the 1981 hunger strikes, these murals required planning, coordination, invest­ment, and risk. Defacing a mural with a paint bomb—a water balloon funneled up with house paint—was an unambiguous act of criticism, and the restoration of a paint-bombed mural by its creators was an equally unambiguous act of defiance. Such actions and reactions waged on brick walls began to resemble a form of political dialogue.

It seems to me now that the muralists of the Sinn Féin Youth, including the five individuals I was fortunate to meet and photo­graph, succeeded in helping their cause take a step in the right direction. Though, as they remark in the raucous interview that follows the photos, there will always be those who say, “Ah, it’s only youth.”

The 19 photos comprising the Falls Road portfolio are printed on Agfa Portriga silver chloride paper, ferrotyped for extreme gloss, in two sizes proportional to the 135mm and 90mm lenses used to take them, so the narrower portraits appear cropped from the wider landscapes. The captions are new to this edition. Symbols from Irish history and words in the Gaelic language appear in many of the murals, and I have tried to interpret these without drawing overly broad conclusions. The digit­ized images are from negative scans Photo­shopped to match the contrast and tint of the proof prints.

“Ah, It’s Only Youth.”

Interview with muralists of the Sinn Féin Youth

On November 21, 1983, Dublin artist Geraldine O’Reilly and I sat down with four muralists of the Sinn Féin Youth—Pól, Kienan, Joe, and a second Geraldine—at Sinn Féin’s office on Beechmount Avenue in the Falls Road district of West Belfast. Geraldine O’Reilly’s understanding of the murals on both sides of the conflict, including their development up to the point of this conver­sation, greatly exceeded mine. I had jotted down a few questions and got us started, asking when they started painting the murals and whether there were murals before the hunger strikes, but it was Geraldine who drove things forward, provoking them to think about how they had gotten started as part of a neighbor­hood cleanup and whether the murals had changed their attitude in relation to art. The interview rapidly morphed into a rousing conver­sation punctuated by the sounds of a ringing telephone, passing cars, taxi horns, and children squealing outside. What follows is a digest of the muralists’ words.

In 1981, December–January 1981 we started, during the first hunger strikes. We thought that we would publicize, right, showin’ ’em something, and showin’ the Brits up. Showin’ what we’re doin’, right, by itself. So we started doing the murals.

The murals aren’t art. The only way the Republican movement’s got to get through to people are the murals and the Republican News, or somethin’ strikin’ you see on the road. Most of the people wouldn’t read the Republican News because they’re not sympathetic; but see these murals? Out front there? Well that’s somethin’ strikin’ where they can see what we’re publicizing.

Yer bringin’ the war home to everybody. Everybody in this area has to pass one of these murals almost every day, okay, they can’t ignore ‘em. It’s not as if you’re shoutin’ at people who’re sayin’ “no I don’t want to,” right, and try and shut themselves off. This way they can’t. They gotta look at them. Then questions pop up in their heads, sayin’ “why did they do this wall mural?” or “who done ’em? What does it mean? Is it true?” whatever.

The only thing we were allowed before the hunger strikes was scrawls, like “Up the IRA” and “F— the Brits,” and all that caper. I don’t know who came across the idea of doin’ the “neat” slogans, using neat writing instead of scrawls. Doin’ ’em real nice and neat like we done the back wall.

Sometimes the patrols come ’round in jeeps and’ll stop, right, to see if you’re painting. And they’ll open the hatches and point their plastic bullet gun out of the hatch. It really fuckin’ unnerves ya. Then they’ll look you in the eye. “What’s your name, address, and date of birth,” right, “What are you doin’ this for?” right, “Who told you to do this on this wall?” And then, once it’s finished, they’ll come back and hurl paint bombs—throw paint all over it.

We got picked up down the way and they asked, “Do you really think it’s worth doin’ this?” he says, “because we’ll just come along afterwards and throw paint at it again.” See, every time that they come around and throw paint on them, we go back and fix it up.

We’re beating them psychologically, we are, ’cause they’re trying to get us to stop doin’ ’em, and we’re comin’ back and still doin’ ’em. Right? The longest that a mural stands up before the Brits come and throw paint on it would be a couple months. And after they throw the paint, that night, we make a whole stunt out of it. They’ll sneak past at night, throw the paint, and drive off. Then if we’re out the next day they’ll come by and say “ha ha ha! We done that just last night.”

Fuckers.

When the first mural went up, all you had on the wall was fuckin’ graffitti, right? Then, after, you had pictures right, which are far better than graffitti. Even people who weren’t sympathetic to Sinn Féin were sayin’, “Ah! Well it is better than graffitti!” It’s good, it’s clean paintin’ as well, right? And when we do it, no one puts their name on it; or if they do, it’s “Sinn Féin Youth,” never a personal name. That shows you how good it is. There’s a respect for it.

We think in terms of the message. That over there shows the PLO and IRA together. It came about, I think, when one article in the news, or Republican News, came out about all the guerrilla movements in the world. So we say, “fuck, we’re not the only ones fighting the war!” and that’s why that mural went up.

Most of the designs, they’re in war books. I got a book in the house showing the Nazi signs, right? And there was one showing a British soldier in a 1900s uniform with a spiral coming out of his mouth, but wearing the old uniforms We’re taking most of our designs and sayings from things like that, and there’s a fellow from Dublin PRO [Public Relations Office] who gives us some ideas. He draws up something realistic, sends it up, and we hang on to it until we have enough money to start it.

The Youth raises their own money. Discos, ballots, contributions. But we haven’t had money in a long, long time because the money it costs to do a mural-one mural—wipes us out for, like, years. That big one, the one called “Sinn Féin” 70 quid. 65 or 70 quid. Aye, and the last one we did—the guerrilla one—it’s not paid for either. That’s why it’s not finished yet. It was 28 pounds. We paid for that ourselves—we done that ourselves.

We get the money and buy the paint. Just straightforward house paint. Fuck it, you wouldn’t put specialist paint up! I wouldn’t mess with it! House paint does the job, and it stays up—it doesn’t flake off or nothin’.

We’ve got a lot of publicity from it—it’s been fantastic! The interviews that we’ve done, with people like you—Americans and people from down South and all—wanting a little background on ‘em—background on who’s been doin’ the wall murals. Millions of ’em.

Whereas before they’d never come near us!

A couple of weeks ago a fellow entered the murals—pictures them—in a photo exhibition up on Conway Street. There was a woman who took slides of the murals to America—New York—but it was funny, people didn’t read the messages; they looked at them as pieces of art and they’d talk about where we put this and how we put that, but we don’t go in for any of that. It’s political art. We just say something.

There is no art involved in it! It’s drawing on a wall! You wouldn’t paint a guy standin’ with an arm or leg there, right, because you wouldn’t see him behind that bush. It’s just whatever practically suits it. It isn’t all of this—well—color schemes and all. Mixin’ paints! It’s just, straightforward. It just goes up on the wall there.

The murals benefit Sinn Féin now, right? If in two months time somethin’ else is of more benefit, then we’ll do that. Like during the elections. We stopped doin’ the war murals because the election was more important. It’s just a matter of priorities. If it’s the most important thing of the moment, we’ll do it. If not, we’ll do something else.

The enthusiasm comes from the fucking youth. Most things the youth do, right, are enthusiastic; we’re the most enthusiastic part of the movement. Right? Because we’re all young, we don’t have “the house,” “the kids,” and all that caper. We aren’t all that tied down like the rest of the people are. We can go out all night doing posters without worrying about comin’ home to the wife for dinner, “yayayayaya.” I think that’s where we get our enthusiasm from! Yeah, and we do enjoy it, you know.

Before the Youth was formed, right, and even when it was just startin’—which was three years ago—the rest of Sinn Féin were lookin’ down on us, right? “Messy kids.” They thought we weren’t responsible, right? All we had to do was go over to the shop and get milk for the Center, or whatever, whereas when the hunger strikes started, they gave us a chance to show—to prove—what we could do. And we did, and the people—slowly—changed their opinion of us.

Now most of them look on us as a major part of the movement Sinn Féin, and we’re respected.

Though there are still some who turn and say, “Ah, it’s only youth.”