“Loyalist Ballysillan says NO! to Irish Sea border.” The Ulster Banner merges with the Union Flag, and a Northern Ireland floating free of the south is cradled by Britain. (Compare with Give And Take from last week.)
“A new Ireland will work for you”, whoever you are. The recent Sinn Féin advertising campaign features generic figures straight from central casting, perhaps designed to offend absolutely no one. The locations are in north and west Belfast.
“The battles we refuse to fight today becomes the hardships our children must endure tomorrow.” We have amassed here five additional graffiti from “lower north Belfast” saying “No to an Irish Sea border”. Some operations at Larne and Belfast docks were suspended for over a week after reports – which police eventually did not deem credible – of threats made against employees and number plates being recorded (BBC timeline of events).
Lower north Belfast is the residential areas between the Antrim Road and the motorway/docks – York Road and Shore Road from Tigers Bay to Mount Vernon and north into Loughside and Graymount.
Noah Donahoe, whose body was found on June 27th after six days missing, is drawn as an angel at the bottom of the Serpentine Road, north Belfast. The current line of enquiry in the search for an explanation for how he ended up in a storm drain involves a possible assault in the city centre, somewhere between the art college and Yorkgate (Belfast Live).
The long-term extent of disruption to goods entering Northern Ireland, caused by Brexit, remains unclear: some fresh veg and cheeses are missing from supermarkets and Amazon has stopped shipping alcohol. The problem of businesses no longer shipping at all seems to be more troublesome than delays in goods shipped. DUP leader Arlene Foster caused confusion and satirical comment on twitter yesterday for her remarks that nationalists were suffering delayed parcels along with unionists (Irish Times), though graffiti such as is shown here – calling for the scrapping of the “Northern Ireland Protocol” – has so far been painted only in PUL areas.
Máirtín Ó Dochartaigh, one of the founders of Club Óige Mhachaire Botháin in 2001, died in 2011. The club was renamed in his honour in ?2020? as Cumann Óige Uí Dhochartaigh (Fb | ig) (An Phoblacht). The mural, bearing the original name of the club, dates back to 2012.
Two more images connected to the ongoing search for answers in the death of Noah Donohoe. Above, a large tarp in Corporation Street; below, an additional banner in Carrick Hill, alongside Carrick Hill Supports Fiona.
Hearts are painted on the ground outside Seaview Primary School, 2 metres apart, so that children can maintain physical distance from one another when lining up.
Mairéad Farrell (on the right of the image above) was arrested for planting a bomb at a hotel in Dunmurry in April 1976, one month after Special Category Status for republican prisoners had been revoked. Kieran Nugent (on the left) began the “blanket” protest in September that year and Farrell was the first person to join the protest, when she arrived in Armagh women’s prison to begin her fourteen year sentence. She later took up a dirty protest and joined the 1980 hunger strike. She stood for election in 1981 (in Cork), but, unlike “Óglach Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone”, was not successful. (WP)
“I am oppressed as a woman and I am oppressed as an Irish person. Everyone in this country is oppressed and yet we can only end our oppression as women if we end the oppression of our nation as a whole.” Máiread [sic] Farrell