UDA/UFF/UYM

Simply The Best

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These  UDA 2nd battalion D company boards are in the lower Kilcooley estate, Bangor. As with  pieces in Newtownards they are co-branded as “North Down/West Belfast”, even though this is only metres away from a (North Down/East Belfast) North Down Defenders board. See Ulster Defence Unions for more.
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text: X06091 Ganaway Avenue

Dee Street Remembers

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A new series of UDA “memorial” murals has been painted along Island Street, in east Belfast. Poppies are featured throughout, as we have increasingly seen over the last few years. New to this series, however, are the use of Lawrence Binyon’s poem For The Fallen in the third panel (see below) and in the image above – the left-most of the four – modern UDA volunteers stand in reflection upon an above-ground grave, also symbolic of the fallen of World War I.
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Welcome To The Jungle

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Dee Stitt resigned last week as chair of Charter NI citing the strain on his family caused by negative media attention (BBC-NI | Irish News). At the end of 2016, Stitt was criticised for remarks describing his North Down Defenders (tw | Fb) as the “homeland security” of the area and describing working-class estates as “jungles” in which there is always a “big guy” (Guardian video 8 min mark ff.| BelTel | ITV) . The mural above does not directly indicate ties to the UDA/UFF, except for the red fist. For a more explicit NDD board further down the estate, with UDA, UFF, UYM, and LPA flags, see North Down Defenders.
For the recent tension between UDA factions in north Down, see Ulster Defence Unions.
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text: X06076

Loyalist Prisoners’ Aid

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Flying in a stiff breeze above the Glen estate, Newtownards, are an Ulster Banner and the flag of Loyalist Prisoners[‘] Aid, welfare group for loyalist prisoners. The fundraising album of 15 UDA songs was removed from Spotify and iTunes in 2017 (Irish News) but is still available on Amazon.
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text: X06059

Resurfacing

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The Blair Mayne mural in Queen Street, Newtownards, which dates back to 2008, has fallen down, revealing the remnants of mural it replaced, a UVF firing party (J1754). A UDA flag, however, has been placed on the mounts.
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text: X06064 [X06063]

Heaven When I Die

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The poppy was used exclusively by the UVF (because of their shared named with the Ulster Volunteers, which became the 36th Division, which served on the western front in WWI, but in the last few years (2016-2018) it has been used frequently by the UDA in memorial murals (e.g. one | two | three), indicated here by the lowered flags and absence of weapons. (The first UDA poppy, however, dates back to the 2012 (if not earlier) tribute to Benson Kingsberry.) For background on the inclusion of “West Belfast” alongside “North Down” in a Newtownards mural, see Ulster Defence Unions, which also contains poppies (and which in turn links to information about the Ulster Defence Union of 1893). “UDU” seems to be used here to represent a desire for greater unity among (at least some parts) of the UDA.
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text: X06046 X06047 Glenburn Rd

Ulster Defence Unions

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The UDA/UFF in North Down is divided into two factions, led by Dicky Barry in Newtownards and Dee Stitt in Bangor. Barry’s group is affiliated with the Shankill (west Belfast) UDA and Stitt’s with the East Belfast UDA. According to this BelTel article, their respective numbers are 600 to 150, respectively. The Peter Moloney Collection of murals has a 2007 image of a ‘west Belfast’ board in Bangor. For the UDU reference see UDA-UFF-UDF.
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text: X06044 X06045 Glenbrook Rd

Digital Eddie

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As a zombie skeleton, Eddie The Head (here in his guise as a Light Brigade ‘Trooper’) lived long enough to enter the digital age of muraling, with a cartoon-style version added at the site of the original Eddie mural – Bond’s Place, London-/Derry, which can be seen on Eddie’s own Visual History page – in 2016. The mural, however, started falling apart immediately and is now entirely removed.
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text: X05365 X05364 [X05366] X03800

Pride Of Ballymacash

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The Pride Of Ballymacash flute band, formed in 2011 from the Pride Of Prince William (bottom left) and Ballymacash Young Conquerors (bottom right), uses the emblem of the 36th (Ulster) Division, in the centre of the mural. In the background on the left is the Thiepval Memorial and, on the right, the UDR memorial statue in Market Square, Lisburn. To the left (in the second image) is a UDA plaque “In memory of fallen comrades Ballymacash B coy D battaltion, South Belfast Brigade. Quis separabit.” For a close-up of the memorial on the ground, see Death & Life.
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Negative Space

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This was presumably to be a UDA mural in the Bangor estate of Kilcooley (there used to be a UFF mural on this wall), but the mural was started in May 2016 and the image above taken in April 2017. If you have any information about why the painting stopped, please get in touch.
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