Research

Murals as political propaganda in Northern Ireland

Assessing the relationship between graphic elements and their political affiliations

Dissertation

This dissertation is an analysis of the visual languages used in modern Republican and Loyalist murals in West Belfast. It discusses how cultural visual languages are used to signal the political ideologies of partisan communities. Through visual analysis, it debates whether these visual languages serve to deter integration and divide territory, as well as if they reveal different phases in the relationship between the communities. The scope of this dissertation focusses on two distinctively oppositional and sectarian roads, which provides for an effective comparative analysis. It begins with a summarised history of the mural tradition in Northern Ireland, followed by an examination of the murals on the Falls Road and the Shankill Road, categorised into key themes. This methodology has resulted in the identification of patterns within these respective localised visual languages.

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