Belfast Political Murals: Memory, Community and the City’s Changing Walls

Walk up the Falls Road from Belfast city centre, or along the Shankill a few hundred metres to the north, and the gable ends of terraced houses begin to speak: a hunger striker smiles down from the side of a political office, soldiers of the 36th (Ulster) Division climb out of a trench at the Somme, and a long row of panels takes up causes on the far side of the world. Belfast political murals are among the most photographed public art in Europe, yet they were never painted for visitors – they are the record that working-class neighbourhoods have kept of themselves, in their own words, for more than a century. On Odyssey’s Treasures of Ireland small-group tour we see them on our final full day, with a local expert’s lecture in the morning and a black taxi tour of the West Belfast murals in the afternoon, explained by local people who know these streets from the inside.

Walls as public records

The mural tradition in Belfast is older than the Troubles and older than Northern Ireland itself. The first gable painting in the city is usually credited to John McLean, a shipyard painter, who in 1908 put King William III on his white horse at the Battle of the Boyne onto a wall on the Beersbridge Road in east Belfast. It was painted for the Twelfth of July, the annual commemoration of William’s victory over the Catholic King James II in 1690, and for the next six decades “King Billy” was the dominant image of the unionist walls. Painters, many of them tradesmen, refreshed the same murals each summer, and some survived in one form or another for fifty years or more. The Ulster Museum describes Northern Ireland’s political mural painting, begun in 1908, as the longest continuous tradition of its kind anywhere in the world.

For most of the twentieth century there was no equivalent on the other side of the city. Nationalist and republican culture was very much alive, but, as the sociologist Bill Rolston has argued, it was kept to private spaces: church halls, Gaelic Athletic Association grounds and clubs. Painting on the public face of a street was, in practice, not an option for a community that did not control the state around it.

That changed in 1981. Republican prisoners in the Maze prison went on hunger strike over the withdrawal of their political status, and ten of them died between May and August – the first being Bobby Sands, who had been elected to Westminster as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone a few weeks before his death. The protests that spread through nationalist districts that year took to the walls, and the republican mural tradition was born almost overnight. Its first images were portraits of the hunger strikers and slogans in support of their demands; within a few years its painters had widened their range to Irish history and mythology, the Famine, the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish language and the legendary hero Cúchulainn.

On the unionist side the walls changed too. King William murals faded through the 1970s, and from the mid-1980s many loyalist walls came under the control of paramilitary groups, whose crests, flags and masked gunmen replaced the older historical scenes. From the 1980s onwards, then, both traditions were painting in public, often a few streets apart, each addressing its own community first and the other second.

Do I need to know the history of the Troubles before visiting the murals?

No. The morning lecture on Day 17 is there to give the group the background it needs, and your driver explains each mural as you go. If you would like to read ahead, David McKittrick’s Making Sense of the Troubles, on the reading list for this tour, is a clear and even-handed place to start, and our history of Ireland covers the longer story from the Plantation of Ulster to partition.

Murals, neighbourhoods and memory

The single most important thing to understand about the murals is that they belong to particular streets. A mural is painted with the consent, and usually at the instigation, of the people who live beside it, and it speaks about who those people are, whom they mourn and what they remember. That is why the murals cluster in working-class districts such as the Falls, the Shankill, the Short Strand and the Newtownards Road rather than in the leafier south of the city.

On the Falls Road, the best-known mural in Belfast covers the gable of Sinn Féin’s office at the corner of Sevastopol Street. Bobby Sands has been remembered on that wall since around 1990; the familiar version, with Sands smiling and a lark breaking free of its chains, was painted in 2000 by Danny Devenny and Marty Lyons when the building was rebuilt, and it has been repainted and modified several times since. Nearby, memorial gardens and painted walls name local people who died during the conflict, many of them civilians. Closer to the city, where Divis Street meets Northumberland Street, the International Wall is given over to solidarity with struggles in other countries, and over the years its panels have changed more often than any others in Belfast.

Across the peace wall, the Shankill is a loyalist and unionist heartland, and its murals draw on a different store of memory. The Battle of the Somme is central: on 1 July 1916 the 36th (Ulster) Division, many of its men drawn from these streets, suffered terrible losses on the first day of the battle, and their sacrifice is painted, and mourned, on walls across the area. Other loyalist murals, here and across the city, record the Belfast Blitz of 1941, the royal family, local victims of IRA bombings, and the paramilitary groups that grew up in these districts during the Troubles. In east Belfast, closer to the shipyard, the subjects range from shipbuilding and the women who worked in the city’s wartime factories to two famous sons of the area, the writer C.S. Lewis and the footballer George Best.

Between the Falls and the Shankill runs the most visible landmark of all. On 10 September 1969, after weeks of rioting in which streets off the Falls were burned, British Army engineers strung barbed wire along the interface at Cupar Street. It was meant to last a matter of months. Today the barrier at Cupar Way is the tallest of Belfast’s peace walls, a towering screen of concrete and steel that the Belfast Interface Project counted in 2017 as one of 97 separate walls, fences and barriers across the city. Its Shankill side is covered in visitors’ signatures and messages of peace, and for decades some of the gates in the city’s walls have been closed overnight.

Change, interpretation and local voices

A mural is not a monument. Paint fades in the Belfast rain, and walls are repainted when a community’s priorities shift, which is why the murals are best read as a running conversation rather than a fixed statement. After the ceasefires of 1994 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, that conversation turned increasingly to whether some images still belonged on the walls at all.

In 2006 the Arts Council of Northern Ireland launched the Re-imaging Communities programme, which offered funding to neighbourhood groups that wanted to replace paramilitary murals and emblems with new artwork made in consultation with residents. Many hooded gunmen gave way to local history, sporting heroes, First World War soldiers and portraits of the area’s own past. The programme was welcomed in some streets and resented in others. Some critics argued that removing murals in the name of a shared future was itself a political act, and that people should decide for themselves what went on their walls, whether or not visitors found it comfortable. Both arguments are still heard, and a good guide will put them to you rather than settle them.

The peace walls tell a similar story of slow and uneven change. In 2013 the Northern Ireland Executive set a target of removing all of them, by agreement with local residents, by 2023. That target was not met. Some gates now open for longer, a few barriers have been lowered, removed or reimagined with artwork, but surveys of people who live beside them have repeatedly found that many want the walls to stay until they feel safe without them. The decision, rightly, is theirs.

Meanwhile the walls have become a subject of serious study. Bill Rolston has photographed Northern Ireland’s murals since 1981 and published five volumes of his Drawing Support series between 1991 and 2022, and in 2024 the Ulster Museum mounted an exhibition of almost fifty of the murals he documented, setting loyalist and republican images in the same room. Ulster University’s CAIN archive holds thousands more photographs. For a traveller, these collections are a reminder that what you see on any given afternoon is one frame in a long sequence, and that the walls of 1990 or 2005 looked very different.

Are the Belfast murals the same every year?

No, and that is part of their interest. Some murals, such as the Bobby Sands portrait, are kept close to a familiar design, while others are repainted for anniversaries, replaced through community re-imaging projects or changed in response to events elsewhere in the world. The International Wall changes most often of all, so no two visits see quite the same city.

A guided encounter with difficult history

It matters a great deal how you see these streets. On the Treasures of Ireland tour, Day 17 begins with a lecture from a local expert, so that by the time we set out in the afternoon the group already has the outline of the story and the vocabulary to follow it. The black taxi tour that follows is a Belfast institution in its own right. When bus services into the Falls and other districts were repeatedly withdrawn during the unrest of the early 1970s, local drivers began running shared black taxis along fixed routes, and for years they were how many families got to work, school and hospital. After the peace process, drivers began taking visitors around the murals, and their tours remain among the most direct ways to hear the city’s recent history from people who lived through it.

Black taxis carry only a handful of passengers, so the group divides between several cabs, and each driver tells the story in his or her own way. That is the point. A Belfast guide does not pretend to be neutral about events that shaped their family, but the good ones are careful to explain how the other community sees the same history, and are happy to answer questions. Travellers often say afterwards that the most memorable part of the afternoon was not a particular mural but a conversation at the roadside.

Is the black taxi tour included in the tour price?

Yes. The black taxi tour of the West Belfast murals is part of the Day 17 itinerary, and all excursions, entrance fees and local guides are included in the Treasures of Ireland tour price, as is the visit to the Titanic Quarter the same day. The only Belfast costs you will meet are personal ones, such as lunch during the morning’s free time.

How physically demanding is the black taxi tour?

It is one of the gentler afternoons of the tour: most of the distance is covered by taxi, with short stops on foot at murals, memorial gardens and the peace wall. Getting in and out of a black taxi involves a step up, and pavements in older streets can be uneven, but travellers comfortable with the tour’s Level 2 activity rating – three to five hours of activity a day – will manage it well.

Can I take photographs of the murals?

Yes. The murals are painted to be seen, and photographing them is entirely normal. Take more care at memorial gardens, avoid photographing residents or children without asking, and follow your driver’s lead if you are unsure. These are residential streets and the families who live here have heard many visitors’ views over the years, so opinions offered at the roadside are usually best met with listening rather than debate.

Belfast beyond a single narrative

It would be easy to leave Belfast thinking that the walls are the whole city. They are not, and the shape of the tour is a useful corrective. The same day we visit the Titanic Quarter, where the slipways of Harland & Wolff once built the largest ships in the world – a story of skill, labour and global trade that drew on both communities, even if its workforce was far from equal, and one we tell in full in our article on the Harland & Wolff shipyard and Belfast’s industrial heritage. The day before, on the way into the city, we stand on the hexagonal basalt of the Giant’s Causeway, a reminder that Northern Ireland’s oldest stories are written in rock rather than paint; our guide to Giant’s Causeway geology explains how those columns formed.

The murals also connect Belfast to the rest of the journey. The Battle of the Boyne was fought in County Meath, north of Dublin; the Easter Rising that appears on so many Falls Road walls was proclaimed outside the General Post Office on what is now O’Connell Street, a short walk from where we begin the tour in Dublin. Derry, where we walk the seventeenth-century walls on Day 15, has celebrated murals of its own in the Bogside. And for many Australian travellers the story is personal, because the same loyalties and divisions travelled with Irish emigrants to the other side of the world, as we explore in our article on the Irish diaspora in Australia. For how Belfast fits into the full route from Dublin, see our 18-day Ireland and Northern Ireland itinerary.

Why Belfast political murals matter

Belfast’s murals are sometimes treated as a shorthand for the Troubles, and some of them were painted to be exactly that. Seen slowly and with a good guide, they turn out to be something richer: a century-long, still unfinished conversation in which neighbouring communities have recorded their losses, their loyalties, their humour and their hopes, often within a few streets of one another. To read the walls well is to understand why peace in Northern Ireland was hard-won, and why it is still being built street by street.

The Treasures of Ireland tour ends in Belfast after eighteen days and a full circle of the island, travelling in a small group of 6–14 people, solo travellers welcome, with local guides who live the history they explain. Departures run in April and September; check dates and request the full day-by-day itinerary on the tour page.