ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the roles murals as ephemera play in the evolving narrative of martyrdom in Northern Ireland. It will study the depiction of the Manchester Martyrs of 1867, the Easter 1916 martyrs, 1981 Hunger strikes martyrs and the Gibraltar Martyrs of 1988 in the murals on the opposing sides of the peace walls along the streets in Northern Ireland that separate predominantly Republican and Nationalist neighbourhoods from predominantly Loyalist and Unionist neighbourhoods, especially in Belfast and Derry/Londonderry. The mode and the medium of murals as ephemera present the martyrs of Ireland with varied religious, political, global sympathies and the tropes of constructivist memories that represent their present existence. In the twenty-first century, these murals are being whitewashed at various sites. This chapter focuses on the presence of the murals, the erasure of the murals, the liminal space between the two, the replacement with other murals and the evolving space in which the murals acquire new spaces in other artefacts like photographs, cards and sites of grief tourism. Firstly, murals and its related ephemera will be analysed as artefacts shaping martyr mural literature. Secondly, the nature of martyr murals will be probed in terms of the nature of the ephemera – the pious, political, perceptual, popular, printed and packaged. Thirdly, martyr murals as commemorative spaces will traverse the methodological trajectory from ‘prememory’ to ‘postmemory’. Murals as ephemera create a new narrative of martyrdom and people’s history in arising from definite political memorialization and religious emblematizing but becoming subject to the contingencies of everyday living, thereby creating a metanarrative of people’s ‘martyrology’ through the contours of paint-bombing, solidarity stances and slogans.
