Go out of your way to check the state of the most colourful walls in west Belfast, and behind you a serious camera-wielding Scandinavian or two is sure to spill out of a black taxi. The years march on and so do murals, now the stuff of academic research, books, photographic exhibitions and the brightest links in new-found "tourist trails," writes Fionnuala O Connor
Murals, "black taxis", even "west Belfast" - none of them existed pre-Troubles, or at least not so tidily. So West Belfast the electoral constituency became the "republican heartland" of west Belfast. The demands of foreign audiences on television and in print meant specifying and re-christening, a business begun so long ago that many have forgotten it was an innovation.
Once King Billy on his white horse adorned gable walls and was refreshed each July when Orange arches went up. Occasionally a visitor asks now why Catholics came so late to the mass display of wall literature. In part of course the politics of republicanism is the explanation: rallying to war, fingering enemies without and within, and more recently the shift from paramilitarism to parliamentarianism still evolving in front of our eyes.
Earlier times are lost in mist. One of the most jargon-free academics in a crowded field, Neil Jarman, does a crisp version of pre-history in an essay called Painting Landscapes.
While each summer unionist ministers in the old Stormont presided at the unveiling of arches and gleaming white horses "the law and the police were utilised to ensure that the nationalist population did not develop a similar tradition within a British Northern Ireland . . . No area could be regarded as beyond the actual or symbolic remit of the Orange state. Loyalist parades were allowed to pass through Catholic areas but attempts by nationalists to parade or erect visual displays were often highly restricted or banned outright."
Now post-Troubles Belfast is sliced and diced for consumer convenience.
A young tourist official this week outlined to the Irish News the perfect mother and daughter outing: weekend in a luxury hotel, and between shopping sprees and facials, perhaps a whizz around the murals of west Belfast?
Meanwhile, a piece of academic research discovered that long-term deprivation and the legacy of the Troubles are the root causes of trauma in the same part of the city.
To be fair, the study was commissioned to measure mental health needs by a community group in Whiterock, between Falls and Springfield. Neither they nor the authors were responsible for reports homing in on an incidental - the finding that half the households questioned thought community bonds were weaker than at the height of violence. "Life since Troubles worse," said the headlines.
Most reports noted some sentences later that many thought peace had indeed brought benefits.
Since the very walls are being marketed, it seems no more than decent to think about the people who look out at them or pass them every day. In different parts of the city, as in other towns, shifts in politics are visible in new imagery. Paid for by government grants, portraits of the young and flowing-haired George Best and less flamboyant depictions of the Northern Ireland team's star striker, David Healy, are turning up on walls to replace grim loyalist paramilitary messages. In east Belfast - formerly known in this case as the Albertbridge Road - Healy's goal that beat England two years ago is now glorified on a gable wall with the superscription "Northern Ireland 1, England 0" and a solemn and uplifting slogan under the footballers' feet: "Pride. Passion. Belief."
The footballers have been drafted to distract from the seedy aftermath of loyalist paramilitary disintegration and to fill the gap between old and new unionist politics, between No Surrender Paisleyism and today's First Ministership.
There is awkwardness enough for new-style republicans, but re-working images comes easily. Belfast's showpiece is the "international wall" in the Lower Falls, "Hands Off Cuba" and an evil Bush side by side with images of Basqueland, a rendering of Picasso's Guernica with an ad on top for search engine Gasta.com. Farther up the Falls the walls of Beechmount Avenue - nom de guerre RPG Avenue still in place alongside the street's official name - is a capsule history of today's mainstream republicanism.
The first wall in sight hymns 1916 in Irish and English, and "History is written by the winners" is the first message at the other end.
In between there are fading denunciations of hunger-strike vintage "Maggie Thatcher", anti-glue-sniffing messages, the sad statistics of Northern Ireland suicide, and a recent installation of photographs and text headed An Fhirinne, listing murders allegedly committed by loyalists in collusion with British agencies. Check up at random, and evidence for army, police or double-agent involvement is often missing.
Propaganda, not "The Truth".
The teenage messages and scrawled names on the wall below "History is written by the winners" may be a truer voice of the post-Troubles people.