Murals of New Lodge Road

In the new Rihanna video that I posted over a month ago, the New Lodge Road was the focus of "finding love in a hopeless place". An apartment building like the one above was the setting of a relationship doomed to fail due to drug addictions and violence.

The New Lodge Road is a low-income, primarily Catholic area that surrounds numerous towers like the one above, all of which are topped with a mural of a volunteer IRA member who died during the hunger strikes in 1981. On the walls of the surrounding gable ends of social housing complexes are murals telling the history and evolution of New Lodge.

In addition there are a number pleas for equal civil rights in an area that has felt underprivileged throughout their existence in the area.

Interface wall in East Belfast

Similar to the interface wall between the Catholic-Falls Road and the Protestant-Shankill Road in West Belfast, there is a tall fence separating the Catholic-Short Strand and the Protestant-Newtownards Road in East Belfast. However, this wall has no graffiti from international artists and is undoubtedly not a common stop for tourists in an open-top bus or black taxi.

This area was the site of a flare up in violence over the summer which was particularly noteworthy for the use of firearms. Usually these riots are limited to rocks and homemade missiles like Molotov cocktails, but a reporter was shot while filming the violence. Both sides pointed blame and claimed injury in this altercation that continued for a few nights.

End of Segregation?

Two recent Belfast Telegraph articles (1, and 2) have highlighted an effort by the "Democratic Unionist Party", which was originally founded in 1971 as the "Protestant Unionist Party", to encourage the end of division and segregation. One of the most concerning and surprising carry-overs from the Troubles in Belfast is the continuation of a segregated education system where Catholic and Protestant schools educated students of the same religious background.