Remember The Hunger Strikers

Here are six images of the hunger strikers mural in Mountpottinger Road, Belfast. The ten portraits are on cut wooden boards while the rest is painted. On the far right (image 5) is a “spirit of freedom” lark and the names of the ten deceased 1981 strikers. In the centre (image 3) is blanket man Hugh Rooney.

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Copyright © 2002 Peter Moloney
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Slán Abhaıle

By 2002, the “Time for peace, time to go” mural in Beechfield Street, Belfast, painted in 1997, was beginning to show its age. The image is based on a photograph of British forces in the Falklands.

The image was also produced in Ardoyne (north Belfast), above the Sınn Féın offices/Sıopa Na hEalaíne (west Belfast), on Free Derry Corner, in Shantallow (Derry), and in Letterkenny.

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Copyright © 2002 Peter Moloney
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Pat ‘Beag’ McGeown

“Comrade, councillor, cara [friend].” Pat McGeown was a 1981 IRA hunger striker whose family intervened when he lapsed into a coma. After his release in 1985 he also worked for Sınn Féın and was elected to Belfast City Council in 1993. He died in 1996 of a heart attack. He is also remembered by a plaque on the Sınn Féın office on Falls Road.

Ballymurphy Road, west Belfast

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Copyright © 2002 Peter Moloney
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Unbowed, Unbroken

Bobby Sands takes centre place, while Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg are added to the cross-bar (on either side of Joe McDonnell, who lived in Lenadoon) in a 20th anniversary “H” on Stewartstown Road, Belfast. In the top right is a lark in a circle and the words “The spirit of freedom”.

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Copyright © 2002 Peter Moloney
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Our Laughter Will Be The Joy Of Victory

“Our laughter will be the joy of our victory + [the] joy of the people; our revenge will be the liberation of all.” This is perhaps the only appearance of this quote from Bobby Sands’s hunger strike diary, from Thursday March 12th. In the background are the towers of Long Kesh; in the foreground is Sands’s funeral procession.

Gardenmore Road, Dunmurry/Belfast

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Copyright © 2002 Peter Moloney
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