Troubled images: analysing the republican use of visual metaphors in wall paintings and pictures in Northern Ireland

Antonio Piga

2022-01-01

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Abstract

The republican movement in Northern Ireland was visually manifested in images drawn on walls and on the gable ends of houses in the towns of Belfast and (London) Derry. As well as being an iconographic expression of the social injustice they suffered (Rapp & Rhomberg, 2013; Goalwin, 2013), these wall paintings were employed by the republicans to convey political and ideological messages in order to heighten awareness and to mobilize people. Blank spaces on walls were increasingly exploited by republican groups and were converted into a visual medium sui generis for their political and ideological claims and demands. Over the years republicans developed this novel communication strategy geared to expressing highly emotional content that served to reflect and influence the sentiments of the communities involved in the conflict. It also served to channel collective memory, recording key events and contributing to the formation of an identity. Intense political disagreements and armed conflict between the Catholic and Protestant communities from 1968 to 1998 led to violent clashes during the period known as “the Troubles”. This complicated time frame has been metaphorically represented in various ways in wall paintings and posters in Northern Ireland. The aim of this paper is to analyze the political and ideological use of visual metaphors in the images of the republican movement during the “Troubles”. More specifically, by applying the most recent methodological tool derived from a socio-cognitive model of discourse analysis, namely Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the purpose is to analyse, both from a qualitative and quantitative point of view, the three different types of Conceptual Metaphorical Schemas: Propositional, Image and Event Schema (Soares da Silva, 2016).