Rory Gallagher

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Planning for a statue in honour of blues guitarist Rory Gallagher goes back to 2016 (BBC) and the project finally came to fruition this month, January 2025. The sculpture repays the devotion that Gallagher showed Belfast during the Troubles, playing there at least once a year. The sculpture is entitled “On the boards” after the second album by the band Taste, released in 1970, the same year in which Gallagher left the band to pursue a solo career. The photograph that inspired the sculpture – of Gallagher on stage at the Ulster Hall – appeared on the cover of Melody Maker in 1972. (WP)

The statue was produced by Anto Brennan (web), Jessica Checkley (web) and David O’Brien (web) and can be seen in Bedford Street, outside the Ulster Hall. There is also a statue of Gallagher in Ballyshannon, where he was born.

See also: Brennan’s statue of QEII and corgis in Antrim.

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335th Anniversary

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This pair of Sandy Row murals will this year celebrate their 35th anniversary, being two of the three painted in the street in 1990 for the 300th anniversary of the Battle Of The Boyne. For the murals in the year of their creation, see M00823 and M00826.

Above is the crest of the city of Londonderry – the siege ended in 1690; below is the crest of the Young Citizen Volunteers, the part-time territorial force for young adults established in 1912, which became the 14th Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles and part of the 36th (Ulster) Division in WWI.

Rowland Way, Sandy Row, south Belfast

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Ulster First Flute

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The Ulster First Flute mural in Linfield Road will be twenty-eight years old this year (2025). There is an image in the Collection from 1998 and images in the other collections from 1997, 2009, and 2018. The band formed in 1996, according to its Fb page, though at the bottom the text reads “Est. 1997”.

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Cuidich’N Righ

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The festive atmosphere depicted along the bottom of the Pride Of Ballybeen flute band’s new mural, with people clapping and waving and doing cartwheels as the parade passes by, is in contrast with the regimental emblems in the upper part of the mural: we see (on the left-hand side; first close-up below) the Highlanders (“Cuidich’n Righ” is Scots Gaelic for “Help the king”) and the Irish Guards (motto “quis separabit”; 1783 is the year the Order Of St Patrick was created), and (right-hand side, second close-up below), the Royal Irish Regiment and the Logistics Corp (motto “Honi soit qui mal y pense“). These are perhaps regiments in which band-members serve or have served; the band does not have a (public) internet presence.

For the previous mural, see Pride Of Ballybeen.

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Masker Aid

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This entry updates (with close-ups) the image seen in 2022’s Luminaries And Legends Of Eastside which showed (from afar) the ‘famous faces’ mural at Connswater/CS Lewis Square in east Belfast with a large “smiley” face over DJ David Holmes – a (presumably) unauthorised addition to the 2017 original. Word is that Holmes’s image was painted over because he is not from east Belfast. It’s not clear (from on-line sources) where exactly in Belfast Holmes is from; he lived in Los Angeles, California, for a time before returning c. 2014 (Irish Times).

(MaskerAid is an app that allows one to cover faces in photos with smiley-faces and other emoji.)

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Prepared For Space, Ready For Wall

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Storm Darragh originally took only the top third off the UVF “Prepared for peace, ready for war” mural in Mount Vernon (see Taken By Storm) but the entire wall was subsequently demolished – as shown in these images – due to concerns about its safety. The Sunday World reports that residents in the estate do not want the mural to be repainted; the wall is/was NIHE property (pdf).

See also: When It Blows Full Blast for the damage done in Northumberland Street.

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