More than 45 years after they were put in as a ‘temporary’ measure, Belfast’s ‘peace walls’ announce a political achievement of sorts. The murals that today adorn the International Peace Wall that runs along Falls Road turn to defiantly political themes. This comes after a decade or so of aesthetically ‘lightening’ the heavy burden of Northern Ireland’s troubled and divided past, and present, as it was emblazoned on the walls, with non-political graffiti.The ‘peace walls’ or ‘peace lines’, established after 1969, when Northern Ireland’s infamous ‘Troubles’ broke out, turned barricades into barriers between embattled Catholic and Protestant communities. The purpose was to keep them ‘safe’ – from each other. But they soon became public claims on memory, of ethnic boundaries that memorialised history in either anger or in sorrow, depending on which side of the struggle you had a stake in. A public aesthetic asserted itself – exhorting, instructing, warning, remembering or grieving – to become today a site that has (also) succumbed to the seductive allure of tourism.Today, the republican murals also commemorate the heroic dead, by equating the unfolding genocide at Gaza with the noble cause of freedom fought by the Irish. Bobby Sands’ 66-day hunger strike ended in his death in 1981 in Northern Ireland’s infamous Long Kesh prison, just outside Belfast. Sands’ hunger strike, begun to demand the restoration of the Special Category Status for Irish Republican Army prisoners, ended tragically, but not before he was dramatically elected to the British Parliament despite his fading life behind bars. (Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister who allowed him to die rather than concede his demands, soon changed the Representation of the People Act in 1981, disallowing nominations of those behind bars to electoral contests). Sands inspired hunger strikers across the world – South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, Russia and possibly the longest running hunger striker in history, Iron Sharmila.Murals for Gaza on Belfast’s International Peace Wall. Photo: Janaki NairOn the peace wall, he is ranged alongside Khader Adnan, of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who died in an Israeli prison after an 87-day hunger strike in May 2023, protesting being held without trial. Khader had used the hunger strike several times during his long stints in Israeli prisons. And Sands had an enduring, and endearing, impact on rebels in politics worldwide. Indeed, Sands’ death was even mourned in the Indian Parliament, when the Opposition members – not joined by the then ruling Congress Party – observed a minute of silence, while the Hindustan Times raised its voice against a prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who “allowed a member of the House of Commons, a colleague in fact, to die of starvation. Never had such an incident occurred in a civilised country.”What is to be commemorated in Belfast – anger or sorrow? Hope of change or holding fast to privilege? Northern Ireland’s peculiar status – where the ‘colonised’ and ‘coloniser’ have rubbed uneasy shoulders – marks the city in a number of ways, long after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that brought the Sinn Fein (the political wing of the Provisional IRA) to share power with their arch enemies (the Unionists). Belfast is uniquely marked by these imperial links and republican struggles, from place and road names to historical recall and linguistic nationalism. So the Catholics have their ‘Garden of Remembrance’ on Bombay Street, a lasting reminder of the imperial connection in a city that boasted some of the greatest shipyards. (The Titanic and the Brittannic are among the better known of those ships that were rolled out).The Garden of Remembrance at Bombay Street. Photo: Janaki NairYet, working class solidarities at Harland and Wolff did little to prevent the Protestants from brutally attacking their Catholic counterparts in 1922, and once more during the Troubles in 1970, when the Protestant closed shop union expelled 500 Catholic workers. In his searing poem, ‘The Belfast Pogrom: Some Observations’, Paul Muldoon recalls the bitter 1922 struggle: ‘The shipyard workers/never lighter on their feet/when they are driven back by the heat/of the house they have torched’.The Garden of Remembrance is a poem in itself, a tender memorial to those of the Provisional IRA who lost their lives to British bullets, or in British Prisons. It invokes religion lightly, in the form of the Celtic Cross, focusing instead on those who had died in the struggle for freedom and union with the Republic, and for an end to army occupation. Two neat stone cairns hark back to an archaic Irish tradition of memorialising, but in its map of the Divis area, it recalls the British ‘occupation’ as much as the bravery and courage of the women and children, and of course the men, in resisting this occupation. The high wall and mesh fence looming right behind form the borrowed landscape of the city that forms a part of the memorial, as ‘A walled back yard, the dust-bins high and silent’ (to steal some words from Northern Ireland’s poet Seamus Heaney) that is separated from the Protestant areas of Shankill. That is, in just one of nearly 21 miles of walls that appear like scars across the face of the city.The map at the Garden of Remembrance. Photo: Janaki NairPhoto: Janaki NairThis neatly built garden is in striking contrast to the rugged, almost makeshift, H-shaped memorial of earlier times, that remembers the 10 hunger strikers who invited death inside the prison at Long Kesh camp, ‘Which must, incidentally, be literally the brightest spot in Ulster’ said Seamus Heaney, ‘bright as an airport… Another of our military decorations.’ Its shape mimics the infamous H Blocks where paramilitaries were lodged, though it did nothing to prevent novel, if self-aggrandising protests, including the blanket protest, the ‘dirty’ protest and the final decision to starve to death. But the murals on the walls behind summon another future that was entwined in the republican struggle, a socialist future that promised equality, for what is peace and justice in an inherently unequal society?The H-Shaped memorial. Photo: Janaki NairMurals behind the H-shaped memorial. Photo: Janaki NairIt is of course up to the Protestants, such as the Ulster Defence Association, Ulster Freedom Fighters and Ulster Volunteer Force – also paramilitary forces that defend Ulster’s right to cleave to Britain – to recall the grisly details of Provisional IRA brutalities. These memorials invoke a completely different aesthetic, dwelling entirely on the killings of Protestants in bombings and attacks, as in the bombing of the Boyardo Bar. What then of the blood on their hands, the innumerable killings of Catholics, by the UDA and UVF? Which is the righteous killing, which one revolutionary violence?Memorials built by the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Freedom Fighters. Photo: Janaki NairHistory, when invoked at all on the Shankill side, declares Protestant loyalty to the United Kingdom. One such interesting motif is the invocation of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, in which the Ulster Volunteer Force, (formed to prevent the ‘mutilation of the nation’ i.e. Irish Home Rule) and Irish Republicans both took part, ironically to defend ‘king and crown’. The Irish poet Thomas Kettle was profoundly disturbed by how he would be remembered after his certain death: “…Know that we fools/now with the foolish dead/ died not for flag, nor king, nor emperor/But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed/And for the secret scripture of the poor.” The Somme is a convenient moment to recall war heroism, but it also serves to ‘balance the history books’ since 1916 is the year of the famed Easter Rising against the British Government and for a Republican Irish state. The struggle to maintain an independent memory of the past in the present calls for a vigilance that is enjoined on all the Irish. No wonder Seamus Heaney, when included in an anthology of British Poets, protested in verse: ‘Be advised, my passport’s green/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen.’The emphasis of the Shankill murals is not on calling out the state’s power to divide and rule, but to preserve the power and advantage of that division. There is a lavish use of heraldic crests, and of course of sacrifices made by the soldiers at the Somme. There is plentiful use of the phrase ‘No Surrender’. No concession will be made to being Irish.And of course it is language that invokes the fiercest sense of pride. The ‘occupation’ of space/identity by a language that is more remembered than actively used, is more than just symbolic. Flann O’Brien’s early work, (1941) The Poor Mouth famously satirised both the comical imposition of English, and the fervent efforts of the Gaels to preserve their language. The Gaeligores, as he had named those intent on protecting their tongue, knew English perfectly well ‘but they never practiced this noble tongue in front of the Gaels, lest, it seemed, the Gaels might pick up an odd word of it as a protection against the difficulties of life.’ The Irish capacity for self-deprecation has not diminished, though the murals would leave you seriously guessing.Shankill murals. Photo: Janaki NairOn previous visits to Belfast, the Protestant areas proclaimed their loyalty with red, white and blue edged kerbs; green white and orange marked the nationalist areas. Today, those colours have faded, giving way to the flags, which, like the marches and parades, especially on July 12, still fly triumphantly. No doubt, the Catholics draw on a wider range of solidarities worldwide, which is why the Palestinian flag can flutter alongside that of the Irish Nation. Even at a memorial for the paramilitary brothers.A fragile truce exists, an acceptance that neither Britishness nor Irishness can be denied or displaced. (After all, the struggle was never really between religious affiliations so much as between the right to self-determination, and the implacable refusal of the state to admit that. Disused churches today have been turned into lecture halls, performance spaces, art galleries and…given to smaller denominations of true believers such as St Ignatius Elias Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church!) If the British Army could raise its guns against even the unwitting tourist (myself) who took pictures of the Gated City Centre in 1979, no such invasive presence exists any longer. If they could stream through a Valentine’s Day party in a public hall in Newry, 1979, guns cocked, while teeny boppers cheerfully ignored that intrusion, there is certainly no such schizophrenia in public life any more. A sign of the truce is again in the use of careful language in public display: the Ulster Museum, which has a whole section devoted to the Troubles, and the history of Ireland in the 20th century, is careful to use the doubled Derry/Londonderry throughout. Also included are the voices of the Protestant poor, who hold up their end of being as oppressed and just as discriminated against as the long suffering Catholics.But the ‘balance sheet’ accounting of history has its limits. The linguistic topos of the contemporary city now bears the marks of new ‘occupations’. Ciaran Carson’s poem ‘Belfast Confetti’ (1989) evoked a known labyrinth of streets from which escape is difficult, because of the full stops, dead ends of a barricaded city punctuated by unexpected blasts: ‘nuts, bolts, nails, and car keys—to fall through the air, like a cascade of exclamation marks.’ Today in a much quieter and settled city, ‘English’ street names are followed by Irish ones – but only in (no marks for guessing) the Catholic areas. Salespeople, will sport their name Irish names, Padraigin for instance, without the slightest unease. But despite the dismantling of walls, gates, and other obstacles to a freer exchange, sectarian divisions persist, in unsubtle ways. Schools remain strictly ‘sectarian’, as do sporting clubs and even play grounds, (even when they are the sites of British Army camps from yesteryear) lest they turn into battlefields again. The young know exactly who their friends and mates can be.Belfast has changed, dramatically since the times I had visited in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. But despite the morphing of a more political and more reconciliatory message on the walls into plain and recognisable ‘urban graffiti’ as has dramatically happened on one wall, the political is not quite whitewashed. Why else would an artwork that was no more than a plaintive plea for reflection on the fear, the terror and the lack of trust in divided cities such as Belfast, be painted over to become a site where tourists can scribble their names? And triumphantly place a US flag where it says Baghdad?Artwork has been painted over to make space where tourists can scribble. Photo: Janaki NairTerry Eagleton, in his marvellous send-up of a book called All About The Irish, rightly notes that The Troubles put Ireland on the international map…but it also brought both parts of the island into closer contact with the USA, for better or worse. The richer ethnic mixing that has drawn Northern Ireland closer to, say, India, has brought perhaps some unwelcome distractions from the usual sectarian hostilities, but they have only been suppressed rather than made to disappear. In 1979, I attended a very serious workshop in Derry, a painful moment of ‘self criticism’ and shaming, that chastised two very young people who had left Northern Ireland for England, and possible opportunity. They had clearly betrayed the Republican cause. Such a severe and judgemental indictment would be laughable today, as traffic with not just the ‘mainland’ but the rest of the world has become routine. But ‘difference’ remains like a stubborn stain that will not be so easily removed. And the murals and memorials of Belfast ensure that.Janaki Nair is Professor (retired), Jawaharlal Nehru University.