Easter marks the unofficial start of the PUL marching season, with many marches today by various Apprentice Boys bands. The season runs until the end of August, with a high point around July 12th (Parades Commission | CAIN calendar). The painting above (by Ciaran Gallagher (ig) in the Dark Horse courtyard for a nine-part series called The Friend At Hand) packs in many familiar tropes: King Billy on a banner, kerb-stones painted red-white-and-blue, the Israeli flag flying from a lamp-post, and a bottle of Buckfast lying in the gutter. Decorating the skin, however, is rare, and the use of Irish – “an cara idir lamha [lámha]” [“in aice láimhe” or “ag an láimh”] – on a Lambeg drum is unknown.
The other panels show a boxer being attended to in his corner at the King’s Hall and a masked man leaving the EU and heading for Mexico off with an ATM in the bucket of an excavator.
Images courtesy of Paddy Duffy.
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Copyright © 2022 Paddy Duffy
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Extramural Activity 
Reblogged this on seachranaidhe1.
the theme of the paintings is ‘Friend at Hand’ after the name of the whiskey shop in Hill street. So the trainer in the corner is the friend at hand, the border the friend at hand, the writing on the lambeg could be translated as friend at hand (im not a fluent irish speaker) so i think thats why its written on the drum. Another good article.
Of course! I should have remembered that. The name can be seen in the fascia of the shopfront in the Truss-Sunak post https://extramuralactivity.com/2022/10/21/broken-promises/ Thanks for commenting.