Valuing Freedom More Than Life

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Anyone know these artists? A mural in progress in Drumleck Gardens, Derry. Bobby Sands’s use of the lark as the “spirit of freedom” is combined with a James Connolly quote: “There is no power on Earth [or: There is no outside force] capable of enforcing slavery on a people really resolved to be free, [and] valuing freedom more than life.”

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Copyright © 1990 Peter Moloney
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To The End

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Lines from Bobby Sands’s poem Rhythm Of Time, alongside portraits of the ten deceased 1981 hunger strikers and a lark in barbed wire. “There’s an inner thing in every man/Do you know this thing my friend?/It has withstood the blows of a million years/And will do so to the end.”

Fountain Street, Strabane.

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Copyright © 1990 Peter Moloney
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Bobby Sands

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A smiling Bobby Sands on the side of the Sınn Féın offices on the Falls Road, (also the west Belfast office of An Phoblacht/Republican News), with his famous statement that “Everyone, republican or otherwise, has his [here: “his/her”] own [particular] part to play” [Diary, March 14th, 1981] (and the lark with its “spirit of freedom“).

This version was painted by Mo Chara in 1989, and an image of Sands has been on the wall continuously since then.

Sevastopol Street, west Belfast

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Copyright © 1990 Peter Moloney
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Liberty

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A mural (unfinished) by Mo Chara on the Falls Road, Belfast, at the old Linden Street, with a barefoot woman carrying a large Tricolour and a lark overhead. Probably based on the Women’s Day (“Frauen Tag”) poster shown below, from 1914. “Heraus mit dem Frauenwahlrecht” – “Forward with women’s suffrage”. German women were given the right to vote in 1918. (The image was also used in Toronto in 1982 for International Women’s Day.)

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Copyright © 1990 Peter Moloney
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