I saw this photo and story during my morning reading last week, and thought, “I know that stretch of road.” I write about it and the surrounding area in the second prose section of A Northern Spring. The flat we rented is just through this intersection, to the right—across the street from The Sunflower. This is the road I walked early every morning, before anybody else was up, to get coffee and pastries for the crew from a nearby Caffe Nero. I write about how it felt like I’d become a regular at both the Nero and The Sunflower, where we got on especially well with the guy running the pizza oven (a wood burner in the beer garden), who gave us recommendations for the next leg of our trip—to the Antrim Coast, Bushmills, and Derry—and made us bespoke pizzas with what ingredients were available (the brand-new and encroaching pandemic was already affecting supply chains).
I remember this stretch well: just behind a person holding a camera to take this shot, somebody had spray-painted, quite largely, the initials KAT, which I figured were the initials of somebody’s name. I started to see that this KAT character got around and was tagging up lots of places. Then one of our guides in Belfast, Damien, schooled us on sectarian graffiti. That KAT means “Kill All Taigs” and that “Taigs” is a derogatory term Protestants use for Catholics gave my morning walks a different tone.
On the street by the Nero is a makeshift and fading memorial, like the roadside memorials we see here where people have died in wrecks, commemorating two (maybe it was three) men killed there longish ago—during the Troubles—by an IRA bomb. A couple days later on a walking tour in Derry our guide Gleann would note that we were standing near where Lyra McKee had been murdered less than a year ago by a New IRA gunman in a flash of sectarian violence.
The public art in the North can be way-to-one-side moving or way-to-the-other-side menacing. A walk down this stretch of road would have a new and better tone and flavor with this mural there. The peace in the North is imperfect as hell, but it’s a grand imperfection. Here’s to it lasting, and spreading.
PHOTO: Screenshot from the Belfast Telegraph announcing a memorial mural for Lyra McKee.
I remember this stretch well: just behind a person holding a camera to take this shot, somebody had spray-painted, quite largely, the initials KAT, which I figured were the initials of somebody’s name. I started to see that this KAT character got around and was tagging up lots of places. Then one of our guides in Belfast, Damien, schooled us on sectarian graffiti. That KAT means “Kill All Taigs” and that “Taigs” is a derogatory term Protestants use for Catholics gave my morning walks a different tone.
On the street by the Nero is a makeshift and fading memorial, like the roadside memorials we see here where people have died in wrecks, commemorating two (maybe it was three) men killed there longish ago—during the Troubles—by an IRA bomb. A couple days later on a walking tour in Derry our guide Gleann would note that we were standing near where Lyra McKee had been murdered less than a year ago by a New IRA gunman in a flash of sectarian violence.
The public art in the North can be way-to-one-side moving or way-to-the-other-side menacing. A walk down this stretch of road would have a new and better tone and flavor with this mural there. The peace in the North is imperfect as hell, but it’s a grand imperfection. Here’s to it lasting, and spreading.
PHOTO: Screenshot from the Belfast Telegraph announcing a memorial mural for Lyra McKee.