Introduction

David Lowenthal (1986:250) once stated that “[t]he Irish do not ‘live in the past’; rather, Ireland’s history ‘lives in the present.’” While this assessment is an oversimplification—Guy Beiner (2018) has convincingly revealed that “forgetful remembrance” is central to the communal identity of Northern Irish Presbyterians—political concerns continue to shape all investigations of the past in Northern Ireland. This is especially the case when working with aspects and legacies of the so-called Northern Irish Troubles (ca. 1968–ca. 1998), a low-level civil war that spanned a generation and resulted in the deaths of over 3,400 people (McKittrick et al. 2004). The conflict was officially designated over with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998 (United Nations Peacemaker 1998), although the legacies of this “dirty war” (Dillon 1991) continue to intrude on and shape the ongoing peace process. Violent sectarian conflict is not a finished and contained part of the past; it is an aspect of lived experience and evolving memory that is contested, politically loaded, and constantly being reformulated and reconfigured to meet various contradictory needs in the present. As identity politics is further heightened due to the divisions of the 2016 Brexit referendum—with the border again an issue and national identity publicly debated (Doyle and Connolly 2018)—“history” is complicated, and this is precisely why archaeological approaches to understanding the past can play an important role. This article will argue that, by engaging with the materiality of official place-making and how it is countered on the city streets, relationships between the past and the present as they exist and shape everyday experience can be dissected.

Archaeological Understandings of Belfast

As a contemporary archaeologist, I am especially interested in how the past entangles with the present as lived experience of cities and how this can provide insights that differ from traditional document-based perspectives for places as contested as Northern Ireland. Rather than navigating the different epistemological understandings of Unionist or Nationalist perspectives on “the past,” creative, material-based, and spatially specific approaches to exploring the enduring nature of conflict and its relationship with experience and memory can be employed. In bringing together auto-ethnography, walking methodologies, photography, historical maps, and newspapers, I seek to entangle the personal with the material dissonances of the post-conflict city. This will be through one main case study—McGurk’s Bar in Belfast, which was “destroyed” in a bombing in December 1971—to explore the subtle interplay between official strategies of “absencing” and grassroots counterstrategies of “presencing” the past.

Belfast has been the capital city of Northern Ireland since the formation of the state, which occurred through the process of partitioning the island over a number of years from 1921 onward (Kent 2021). Before then it was considered a significant mercantile city on the island of Ireland, developed through cycles of plantation and industrialization that officially began in the early 17th century and reached their zenith in the 19th century, before steadily declining from the early 20th century to present day. It is in many ways unexceptional, and its peaks and troughs mirror the recent experience of many traditional Global North industrial cities (McAtackney and Ryzewski 2017:11–12). But where Belfast differs from other comparatives is in the enduring sectarian divisions—Protestant Unionist Loyalist (PUL) associated with British identity and Catholic Nationalist Republican (CNR) associated with Irish identityFootnote 1—that were built into and structured it as a “polarized city” (Boal 1994:31). Belfast developed against a backdrop of unequal access to power, place, and employment, with PUL communities promoted and favored over CNR communities. Cyclical violence and division were built into the city, but the only enduring material connections of contemporary Belfast with its 1613 official establishment are parts of its street plan (Horning 2013:255). While Belfast was granted city status by royal charter in 1613—the date that most historians use as its foundation (Connolly 2012)—it first became a historically recorded nucleated settlement within the Anglo-Norman earldom of Ulster in the 13th century (Macdonald 2012). Philip Macdonald (2012:91) has argued that the lack of attention paid to Belfast’s pre-1613 history dates to the 19th century and is a purposeful product of “Elizabethan colonial myth” fused with the Victorian obsession with modernity and progress that painted pre-plantation Ulster as a depopulated and backward place requiring modernization. Extending this analysis, Audrey Horning (2013:255) has argued that “contemporary political concerns” shape understandings of Belfast as an essentially postmedieval settlement that ties into the enduring influence of Scottish Presbyterians, who first made their mark on the city in the late 17th century. Throughout its 400-year “history,” Belfast has been made and remade in ways that have officially proclaimed its newness, while enduring material traces of significant pasts have shaped how the city is experienced on the ground.

Archaeological excavations in recent decades have revealed that people were living on the surrounding hills and close to the rivers that now constitute Belfast for 9,000 years (Ó Baoill 2011:11). But even with this wider timescale, knowledge of the premodern antecedents of the city have been hampered until relatively recently by a lack of excavation in the city. Ó Baoill (2011:11) has noted that the first licensed excavation in Belfast city took place under Nick Brannon in 1983, and only after 1999 were archaeological excavations routinely funded by developers due to the introduction of “Planning Policy Statement 6” (Planning Service 1999). Added to the lack of excavation is the dominance of developer-funded archaeology, which means the majority of excavations are conducted as part of urban development with no coordinated research agenda underpinning them, and their findings are often relegated to gray-literature reports. Indeed, only eight excavations from within the confines of the city had been fully published by 2011 (Ó Baoill 2011). The effect of this relative archaeological neglect of Belfast is that it is a city whose deep past is largely unknown and there remains little archaeological attention paid to its material nature (although see John Ó Néill’s (2021) blog entries on lost burial grounds in Belfast).

Understanding Contemporary Belfast

The mythologizing of Belfast as a “planter” city—with no recognizable “history” before 17th-century English plantation—has had a number of consequences. First, urbanization has been implicitly accepted as a positive modernizing tool that has brought order, structure, and prosperity to an otherwise undeveloped and wild terrain. Second, there is an underlying assumption that the city has continually developed and replenished without recognizing the meaningful nature of its preexisting material base. Audrey Horning (2013) has argued that, at its inception as a plantation city, Belfast existed merely as an aspiration, and to make it a reality there was a need to create a material world that referenced the preexisting place even as it was being officially denied. For example, in the early years of the plantation, Chichester funded the construction of a manor house that would act as the center point for this newly imagined Belfast (Horning 2013:252). In constructing the manor house he materially referenced the latest English fashions in design and construction, but also incorporated the ruins of the preexisting medieval Clandeboye O’Neill castle (Horning 2013:52–53). This combining of the old and the new on the ground was an attempt to reinforce authority by incorporating the legitimacy of the past as a material entity, while it was being simultaneously denied through royal charter. Focusing on materials can allow the dissonance between official proclaimed states of being and the realities on the ground to be seen.

In Northern Ireland, hybrids, dichotomies, and contradictions between the material world and official proclamations of power abound and run deep because they relate to ownership, belonging, and in/exclusion. This is especially notable in the way space and place is understood and presented. Geographer Bryonie Reid (2005) has argued that the PUL focus on “plantation” cities—such as Belfast and Derry—as their creations and strongholds relates to an anxiety of dislocation from rurality that was traditionally viewed as belonging to the CNR community as inheritors of pre-plantation Irish Ulster (Reid 2005:285). Identity, belonging, and ownership in both rural and urban areas are about claiming something as “ours,” not “theirs,” and denying the entangled complexity on the ground (Reid 2005:486). This is especially the case in Belfast. In contrast to Derry—which officially dates to a documented 6th-century monastic settlement with substantial material remains that unambiguously contradict an official “founding” of the city of Londonderry in 1613 (Ó Baoill 2013)—the lack of time depth associated with Belfast is facilitated by a lack of prominent material remains. There are few significant old structures that remain in the city, including no intact buildings dating before 1769 (Ó Baoill 2013). Rather, the city’s material presence has been largely shaped by periods of great change that have continually made and remade it: the 17th-century plantation, the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, 20th-century deindustrialization, and then the long duration of the Troubles. The lack of monumental material evidence of historicity can allow it to be presented as a modern place apart—detached from senses of “pastness”—but the materiality of its street plan, enduring remnants of conflict, and the interplay between presence and absence reveal a different experience on the ground.

The Post-Conflict City

The contemporary city of Belfast has been radically altered by the actuality and threat of violent conflict associated with the Troubles. This is not simply through the making and remaking of the city necessitated by acts of violence such as bombings (Belfast Urban Area was the target of 70% of Troubles-era bombings [Bollens 1999]), but also through more mundane means. Plöger (2007:14–17) has highlighted the underlying societal repercussions of violence, including forced mass population movement, net emigration, and suburbanization. He notes that, while these changes to some degree mirror postindustrial depopulation norms in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, Belfast is an extreme example due to the accelerant of civil conflict (Plöger 2007:15). Due to the Troubles, the city was changed in structural ways through planning policies that responded to the threat and realization of violence over an extended period by altering its layout and the ability of (some) people to move around the city. Primarily, planning has focused on controlling CNR communities living in social housing who, alongside working-class PUL communities, were often categorized as the “inheritors of sectarianism and bigotry” (O’Neill 2018:177). Essentially, the urban working classes were blamed for the cyclical violence that mostly afflicted their communities, and they were punished through ever more-oppressive housing arrangements instead of addressing structural and systemic failures that maintained divisions and facilitated violence.

During the course of the Troubles there was systemic destruction of inner-city working-class communities under the guise of “regeneration,” resulting in their fractured relocation to out-of-town estates (O’Neill 2018). Simultaneously, there has been an abandonment of mixed-identity housing estates with an overreliance on creating and maintaining single-identity areas (Doherty and Poole 1997). The latter was initially due to mass population movements because of ethnic violence, but reinforcing single-identity areas in social housing has become the norm to the extent the working classes of the “two communities” live almost completely separately. The best-known materializations of Belfast as a segregated city are the so-called peace walls, which are separation barriers erected at interfaces between the two main communities (Fig. 1). They have not only continued, but have grown into the peace process and remain largely absent from maps and official accounts of the city (McAtackney 2011). Their continuation into “peace” is not accidental, as the segregation of working-class communities, especially in areas with high-density social housing, has been viewed as a means of preventing a resurgence of violence. One of the consequences of maintaining these walls over many decades is that they take on unintended roles and have unforeseen consequences. First, they are often highly securitized in a way that communicates the ongoing nature of the conflict; many take the form of high walls covered with barbed wire and other militarized crossing deterrents. Second, they reinforce a relationship between segregation and deprivation through facilitating derelict and ruinous interface spaces alongside the walls. Third, many of these interfaces have become spaces where unofficial, grassroots memorials have been situated and allowed to flourish. These memorials take various forms—from small plaques to large memorial gardens—and over the decades have extended in many areas into extensive memorial landscapes (Fig. 2) that skew and flatten the complicated history of conflict by focusing on the victimhood of each walled-in micro-community (McAtackney 2020).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Peace wall that separates the Falls and Shankill roads in West Belfast. This picture is from the Shankill Road side. (Photo by author, 2010.)

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Fig. 2
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The Bombay Street Martyrs Memorial, Bombay Street (off the Falls Road) in Belfast. (Photo by author, 2021.)

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Other, less noticeable, materializations of the conflict city also persist in the post-conflict context. Reminiscent of Paul Mullins (2017)—who approached the displaced inner-city African American neighborhoods of postwar Indianapolis by asking “why specific landscapes are now voids” (2017:248)—it is important to examine what is absent as well as present in the cityscape. Stephen O’Neill (2018) has written on the “planned violence” of the Belfast Urban Motorway, which was built from the 1960s to 1980s. In particular, he has shown how inner-city working-class communities were considered expendable as the Belfast Urban Motorway acted as part of a wider slum-clearance policy that facilitated greater car access for the middle classes to the CBD (O’Neill 2018:179–81). David Coyles (2017:1054) has highlighted what he has called “the hidden barriers” planned into public housing redevelopments between 1978 and 1985 in the seemingly benign everyday architecture of cul-de-sac housing, dead-end roads, and landscaping. Coyles (2017) has argued that the design principles imbued in social-housing policy from that time, while following trends that were relatively prevalent elsewhere in the UK, took on a heightened character in Belfast. In utilizing roadblocks to deter easy vehicular movement around the streets and creating private courtyards to demarcate houses from the street and prevent easy pedestrian access, design elements have created intra- as well as intercommunity divisions (Coyles 2017:1070). While such experimental town planning could be viewed as ill-considered responses to violent conflict, Coyles (2017) argues that their ongoing and largely hidden nature mean they perpetuate the Troubles-era dynamics in the contemporary post-conflict city.

This brief background for contemporary Belfast provides context to the main case study—McGurk's Bar—which was a public house bombed in a no-warning Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)Footnote 2 attack in 1971. The near destruction of this structure could have been the end of its story, another tragic event with no enduring material trace in the ever-changing cityscape of Belfast. But this article will explore how acts of physical and structural violence can be resisted by activists and the wider community in the more open circumstance of the ongoing peace process. It will argue that resistance to forced forgetting has been sparked by a sense of enduring social injustice and has resulted in McGurk’s materially being re-presenced back into the place it had been bombed, and then planned, out of existence.

Methodologies

Considering the ways that contemporary archaeologists engage with “surface-survey” (Harrison 2011:157) mean that, rather than focus on the traditional—or “right”—way to do archaeology, how to bring together an abundance of sources to address specific questions most meaningfully can be reflected upon. Alongside the traditional apparatus of the desktop assessment—including historical photography, activist outputs, historical and contemporary newspapers, and historical Ordnance SurveyFootnote 3 maps—this research was determined by two overarching principles: first, to be conscious of the interplay between “material memory” (Olivier 2011) and the “absent present” (Buchli and Lucas 2001:12) in the contemporary cityscape and, second, to focus on the social-justice imperatives of the research. These principles came from the desire to explicitly include experience as a methodology and to explore how social injustices are re-presenced in cityscapes that were designed to eradicate them.

In the past I have utilized experimental walking methodologies—with ex-prisoners at Long Kesh/Maze prison and then reformulated with survivors and victims of Magdalene Laundries (McAtackney 2014, 2020)—that were designed to allow for memory to be directed by material environments as site-responsive oral testimonies. The aim was not to privilege materials—or personal opinions—but to bring both sources together to allow for “the human relationship with the material site to bring us closer to understanding previous connections to it” (McAtackney 2022). By walking through sites with people who had lived experience of them, I found some of the most profound, and often unexpected, insights into the role, function, and impact of the material world in informing experiences. I wished to partially replicate this in the contemporary city.

For this article I decided to be guided by my own lived experience and how it has shaped my knowledge of Belfast, its transition from conflict to peace, and my experiences of researching a city in which the material existence is often at odds with official proclamations. Using an auto-ethnographic starting point follows recent work in the social sciences in “acknowledging the researcher as an affectively and emotionally constituted subject” (Reeves 2018:103), but it was also an important foundation in how this article was conceived. I was born in Belfast in the late 1970s—some of the most murderous years of the Troubles—and my family moved around the city throughout my childhood, starting in the west, then into the north, and finally between the north and the margins between south and west. This movement around the splintered conflict city enabled me to know more parts of the city than most of my friends and acquaintances whose families usually stayed in the same areas. I started conducting active fieldwork in the city in 2006, and my natural instinct was to walk the streets to find murals and, later, peace walls, and to explore (and photograph) the ways in which they were located, materialized, and interacted with.

I revisited particular places and walls many times and noted how they changed. Such fieldwork revealed the reality of Belfast as a fragmented city with layers of ephemeral and enduring materials that could appear and as quickly disappear, or, conversely, be part of the landscape that was added to over years. I found the city materialized the realities of conflict and peace, intertwining—often contradicting—in ways that did not reflect the static logic of official maps. Bryonie Reid (2005:487) has written of what she calls “cartography’s spatial story” of Belfast being “constantly disrupted and contradicted by any physical exploration of the spaces to which they refer.” This perfectly encapsulates my experiences of walking Belfast. I constantly came across monumental presences that were not recorded or mapped, but obstructed roads, or noticed would-be barriers hidden down alleyways, receding into the background, waiting to be activated when required. I noted how walls could act as barriers, but also mirrors, and that murals designed to highlight a perceived injustice could swiftly be replaced, fade away, or be maintained and added to over years and even decades. I could not always predict what would remain, what would disappear, or what would be repurposed as I watched and noted many sites over the decades.

I came to realize that the fragmentation of place was not simply material, but worked on the level of memory, especially when communities were ruptured, displaced, or traumatized. This had real consequences in terms of what people remembered and talked about, especially from the conflict. It refracted through my own family history. Around 2014 my mother offered to drive me to East Belfast as I wished to revisit streets off the main thoroughfare, the Newtownard Road. This was the first time she came with me, and I noticed that she was increasingly surveying the streets at which we stopped, while occasionally murmuring how much they had changed. As we stopped at Bryson Street—a street off the Newtownard Road that was now divided with a peace wall—she casually mentioned “your granda’s [grandfather’s] house used to be there.” In the back of my memory, I knew my maternal grandparents were born and grew up in East Belfast, but when or why they had moved to West Belfast was never discussed. Sitting in the car looking at that peace wall, a story unfolded—my grandfather was born in 1912 and was raised at 36 Bryson Street, in a working-class CNR enclave in East Belfast surrounded by a larger PUL community. He lived in his parents’ house until he married in 1938 and then moved with my grandmother to the largest working-class CNR community in Belfast, the Falls Road in West Belfast. After his parents died, the house was eventually passed on to him, and in the early 1970s it was sold to my parents, who were due to marry in 1973. At some stage before the wedding, the house was broken into, petrol was poured on the stairs, and it was set alight (presumably by local Loyalist paramilitaries). It did not completely burn down, but my parents never moved into the house, and eventually it was subject to a Compulsory Purchase Order by Belfast City Council. It was demolished, the area relandscaped, and a peace wall was erected that is still in place today. The address was simply disappeared from the street plan, as was my grandmother’s childhood home in nearby Lowry Street, which was more prosaically planned out of existence. It seemed extraordinary that such a story had never been told before, but the fragmentation of place—and memory—particularly for working-class communities, had that impact. People move on, the communities to which they belonged are reconfigured along harder, sectarian lines, and communities indulge in “forgetful remembrance” (Beiner 2018) of best-forgotten pasts. All that remains of my family’s multigenerational history in East Belfast is materialized segregation, relandscaped enclaves, and largely unspoken partial memories.

Alongside bringing these personal and professional experiences onto the streets with me, I was aware that walking around working-class areas of Belfast was not a neutral or straightforward endeavor. Even in a post-conflict city, these are not easy places for newcomers or strangers to enter. Ciarán de Baróid (2000:188) has described the working-class CNR community of Ballymurphy as a place “stalked by terror” due to the impact of its marginal geographical location among the architecture of confinement, threat of surveillance, and memory of violent death. Such circumstances shape a sense of community. While my walking occurred many years after the height of the conflict, these places retain those resonances as well as the natural suspicion of outsiders. I found myself empathizing with Uzma Rivzi’s navigations of Iraqi checkpoints—where she was left with no transferable data “beyond memory and experience of place” (Rivzi 2013:497)—due to the restrictions placed on moving through such spaces. Likewise, I took few photos—and did so quickly and quietly, often with my phone rather than my digital camera––as I did not want to draw attention to myself or pause too long. I was often aware of being surveyed on quiet streets by residents who watched me with caution. I employed an experiential approach, utilizing walking methodologies that involved a combination of preplanned route and serendipitous dérivés (offshoots) where the latter were permissible. The aim was to move through the terrain of a city—to be repelled or attracted to particular locations as they were experienced (Bassett 2004)—but all the time being aware that in a post-conflict city bodies are not neutral, and women’s experiences can be quite different from those of white male philosophers (Rose 1999). I only walked in daytime, I paid attention to where I was and who was aware of me, and I swiftly surveyed the streets for material evidence of conflict and peace, present and absent, while walking purposefully. I visually noted—and if possible photographed—damaged structures, official and unofficial barriers, murals, plaques, and other forms of memorial, as well as wasteland, material disjunctures, unplanned absences, and the demolition/erection of buildings. Over time particular sites piqued my interest, and one of those was the site of the bombing of McGurk’s Bar.

McGurk’s Bar Bombing, December 1971

The bombing of McGurk's Bar in the working-class CNR area of the New Lodge in North Belfast occurred on 4 December 1971. It is now known to be an act of extreme violence that involved the indiscriminate targeting of civilians based on the assumption—due to its location—that the patrons would be from the local CNR community. The bombing culminated in the deaths of 15 civilians, including 2 children, and was the most significant loss of life associated with the early years of the Troubles. Media reports from the days and weeks that followed the bombing indicate shock and revulsion at the loss of life, but from an early stage there was an ambiguity threaded through the reports as to the possible culpability of the dead in their own demise. Media sources created suspicion by circulating the statements and assumptions of the state, especially the security forces. As early as 6 December, a report in the Irish Examiner noted a “mystery surrounding the death dealing explosion at McGurk’s Bar, North Queen Street, grew last night as forensic experts pinpointed the likely epicenter of the blast as inside the bar, not outside as earlier thought” (Irish Examiner 1971). A little-known Loyalist gang, calling themselves “Empire Loyalists,” claimed responsibility for the bombing within days of the attack (Irish Press 1971b), but this was largely ignored. The repetition of “mystery” extended over weeks and months, with reports attributed to forensic experts “confirming” the location of the bomb as being inside the pub. At the inquest in June 1972, the forensic expert indicated that they could not tell where the bomb was positioned; however, his statement was contradicted during the inquest by a police officer who stated that, due to the building collapsing in, he assumed it had been situated inside the building (Irish Independent 1972). The only eyewitness—an eight-year-old child—testified that he had witnessed a man emerge from a car and place the bomb in the entrance hallway before running away (Irish Independent 1972). Despite this evidence, senior army officers continued to make public statements such as

the army was 98% certain that the bomb which blew up McGurk’s bar some weeks ago, killing 15 people, was placed inside the building by somebody known to the denizens—by which was meant that one or other section of the IRA was responsible either advertently or inadvertently for the catastrophe. (Irish Press 1971a)

Official suspicion of working-class CNR communities meant that the loss of life at McGurk's was not only publicly questioned, but the families felt the authorities’ investigation was shaped and hampered by it (MacAirt 2020). The insinuation that the bar’s patrons were terrorists was frequently made in newspapers for years following––including Fleming and Edwin (1972)––and the state’s involvement in facilitating this narrative has been a major reason for ongoing demands by the families for new inquiries. Only one man, a Loyalist paramilitary called Robert Campbell, has been tried and imprisoned for his role in the bombing (he admitted being in the car that transported the bomb), and controversy around the bombing continues.

The varying responses to the bombing clearly indicate it was a complex event to understand, but survivors and the victims’ families claim it was not thoroughly investigated by the authorities, and it was only with the transition to peace that they have had access to mechanisms to push for greater accountability. After the signing of the GFA (United Nations Peacemaker 1998), a number of avenues were created to investigate so-called legacy cases, including the over 3,000 unsolved murders committed during the conflict. After 2005 this was through the newly formed Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) Historical Enquiries Team (HET). In 2006 the families of the McGurk’s bombing victims officially complained to the police ombudsman about the police handling of the bombing investigation. In July 2010 an initial final report was due to be published, but was withdrawn; a public apology was provided by the police ombudsman because of his acceptance of initial criticism by the families regarding his dealing with the case and factual errors contained within the report (Hutchinson 2011:foreword). A reformulated final report was published in February 2011, and it found “investigative bias” in how the security forces dealt with the bombing. The ombudsman concluded their investigation “was not proportionate to the magnitude of the incident” and did not give “adequate consideration to involvement by loyalist paramilitaries” (Hutchinson 2011:60,63). It also failed “to correct a public perception ... that some victims of the bombing were involved in the atrocity” (Hutchinson 2011:74). After long deliberation as to the meaning of the word “collusion,” the ombudsman reported there was “insufficient evidence” to find the catalog of poor decisions and lack of actions was “a deliberate, conscious act” (Hutchinson 2011:76). This final contention continues to be disputed by the families and their supporters (MacAirt 2020). Despite the police ombudsman’s report, the PSNI contested its findings in a 2014 HET report that claimed there was no evidence of bias on the part of police investigators. Only in 2022 has the PSNI accepted that a denial of investigative bias was irrational and contrary to the weight of the evidence (Irish News 2022). The 2014 HET report was finally quashed in June 2022, after seven years of court cases taken by a descendant, Bridget Irvine, but the campaign for new inquests into the deaths is ongoing (the latter was last denied in 2018).

Situating McGurk’s Bar in Time and Space

To move beyond a documentary record of the bombing, investigation, and dissatisfaction of the survivors and families, material approaches have a potentially important contribution to understanding not only how this event materially persisted, but how McGurk's existed within a materially meaningful world that both predates the bombing and endures to the present. An archaeological approach can focus on the changing material nature of McGurk’s, from the historic setting of the bar to the treatment of the site after the bombing and the memorialization processes to the present day. Historically, McGurk’s Bar was situated within a marginalized area where historically working-class CNR communities were permitted to reside on one of the earliest routes outside the original city walls (traditionally, Catholics were not permitted to live inside the walls [Horning 2013]). This area was structured with British identifiers, and the population was surveyed suspiciously within an institutional landscape. The bar was located on the corner of Great Georges Street and North Queen Street, in an area in which all the street names reference the British royal family. It was placed directly opposite Victoria Barracks, a British army base that since 1798 had been strategically located on the main thoroughfare leading from the plantation city to the north and east. Some of the barrack buildings date from 1737, and the site was extended again in the 1880s; it was at that stage one of the largest army bases in Ireland (Belfast History Project 2017). The bar had been located opposite the barracks and run by the same family for at least one previous generation before the bombing took place; houses appear on that site on Ordnance Survey maps from 1900.

In the 19th century, the barracks existed within a wider institutional landscape that also included the Belfast Poor House (the still in situ Clifton House) and an Eye and Skin Hospital that later became a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC)Footnote 4 police station from 1933 to 2000. The army barracks was badly damaged by a Luftwaffe bombing on 15 April 1941 and was mainly derelict until the remaining buildings were almost demolished, to be replaced with a social-housing complex called the Seven Towers, erected between 1963 and 1968 (Emporis 2020). These towers were the type of high-rise social housing that was common at the time, but, unlike most of their contemporaries, to the present day they remain occupied in this enduringly under-resourced community. To reiterate the enduringly colonial nature of this cityscape, the Seven Towers were originally given “imperial sounding names,” such as “Churchill House,” which the residents lobbied the Northern Ireland Housing Executive to change. They were eventually replaced with traditional Irish names, 30 years after their construction in 1996 (Grogan 1996). Following Paul Shackel’s (2019) analysis of industrial landscapes of exploitation in northeastern Pennsylvania, one needs to recognize the structural violence of the landscape in which McGurk’s Bar existed: a marginalized working-class CNR community surrounded and surveyed by an imperial, militarized, and institutional landscape. This bar functioned as a community hub in an otherwise hostile environment and was perceived as such by all sides.

At the time of the bombing in 1971, Northern Ireland was experiencing the early, brutal years of an escalating civil conflict that had already resulted in the mass movement of people fleeing sectarian attack—with an estimated 60,000 people, 80% Catholic, fleeing their homes in the city between 1969 and 1976 (Coyles et al. 2018:2). The disruption to society was on a scale previously unknown in the state of Northern Ireland. Indiscriminate bombings of public places were becoming common, and everyone was living in a state of heightened awareness of security. McGurk’s Bar was on a main thoroughfare and therefore was, in theory, vulnerable to attack. But it was also heavily surveyed in its militarized, institutional setting, so it should have expected some protection. This discrepancy is one of the reasons that there were immediate––including Evening Echo (1971)––and longstanding (MacAirt 2020) claims of collusion between Loyalist paramilitaries and security forces so that the attack could take place without any assailants being seen, never mind apprehended, at the time.

More prosaically, the material integrity of the area was already under threat from urban planners in 1971. The area around the bar—especially the vibrant, socially diverse docklands area known as “Sailortown” (Campbell 2001)—had already been designated for so-called slum clearance as part of the Belfast Urban Motorway project. This ambitious road-building program was being refined from 1964 onward to connect major towns to Belfast and introduce a motorway ring road around the city center (Johnston 2014). While this type of road-building program was in keeping with many similar “regeneration” or “urban-renewal” schemes in this period, it actively displaced or isolated working-class communities from the city center (O’Neill 2018). As the conflict spiraled out of control from 1971 onward, some of the grander plans for this regeneration scheme were shelved and others modified. After the bombing, McGurk’s and the adjoining building were demolished, and the site was left vacant until it became part of the foundations for the Westlink motorway overpass, which opened in 1983. From 1971 to the early 1980s the area was in material flux. The demolitions associated with “regeneration” saw the erection of large, newly constructed social-housing blocks—the Seven Towers. They were situated alongside the remnants of an institutional landscape that retained some of its original structures—Clifton House—alongside repurposed institutions—the increasingly militarized RUC police station. The act of materially absenting McGurk’s Bar did not remain uncontested, but attempts to monumentally re-presence the bar back into its original location only began in earnest after conflict “ended” and the peace process officially began in 1998.

Approaching the Memorial Landscape at McGurk's Bar

I spent a significant part of my childhood in North Belfast. From the ages of 8–13, I lived in one of the more middle-class areas that branched from the main thoroughfare, the Antrim Road, but I attended Catholic primary school until the age of 11 at the interface of working-class CNR and PUL communities in Ardoyne. This meant frequent Monday mornings of cleaning up classrooms after vandalism attacks on the school over the weekend. My classmates and I were aware of glances—and comments—made as we walked in our convent-school uniforms the short distance for a weekly swimming lesson at the council-run pool in the neighboring PUL area of Ballysillan. At the age of 13 my parents separated, and my mother moved to the margins of South and West Belfast, while my dad stayed in the North, and so I spent a lot of time traveling back and forth between the two areas. I started to make note of its changing face, especially North Belfast, as it has one of the more complicated sectarian geographies of the city. In contrast to the largely monolithic nature of the CNR Falls Road running parallel to the PUL Shankill Road in West Belfast, North Belfast can be best described as a mosaic of enclaves that coexist through a complex range of material and psychic interfaces. It is a part of the city where monumental peace walls were less prominent—although they still exist—and communities tended to live side by side with locally acknowledged “hidden barriers and divisive architecture” (Coyles et al. 2018). In the vicinity of what was McGurk's Bar, the use of main roads as interfaces, the placement of shopping and industrial centers (perceived as “non-places” by residents [Huck et al. 2019], although the use of entrances often indicated from which community pedestrians came), the design of road interchanges, and the landscaping of green spaces between communities, all came together to create an environment in which only local people knew all the nuances of separation (Coyles et al. 2018:4–9). The more subtle but structural nature of segregation in this part of the city required more intimate knowledge of how to safely traverse from one part to another. It was in my walking from the city center to my father’s house, witnessing his negotiation of the city in his car and attending Catholic Mass in the local St. Patrick’s Pro-Cathedral, that I first became aware of the memorial to the McGurk’s Bar bombing. Over the years I noted as it developed at the intersection of Great Georges Street and North Queen Street, and especially how it was re-presencing the building into a city where it had been bombed and then planned out of existence.

According to Ciarán MacAirt, an activist and descendant of Kathleen Irvine, who was murdered in the attack, the first act of memorialization of McGurk’s took place in its immediate aftermath, when a statue of Mary was placed at the site by a local man the day after the explosion (Ciarán MacAirt 2021, pers. comm.). Local legend contended that this statue actually belonged to McGurk’s and it was the only element of the bar left standing, but this was an apocryphal tale. It does, however, hint at why a statue of Mary has reappeared and been retained in the ongoing memorialization of the site. MacAirt has described how it has reappeared on a number of occasions as memorialization practices have evolved and formalized. He was not sure exactly when it reappeared at the current memorial, which was first erected in 2001, but he is certain it has perched on an upper lip of the memorial since at least 2011, perhaps prompted by a high-profile media investigation into the bombing at the time (Ciarán MacAirt 2021, pers. comm.). A timeline for the later, more formal, memorials at the site is slightly easier to discern. The first memorial was a plaque detailing the names of the dead (Fig. 3) that was moved to the site in 1991 on the 20th anniversary of the attack. The plaque was a replica of one that had originally been placed off Duncairn Parade, in the heart of the CNR New Lodge community, that was initially placed offsite because it was expected that it would be attacked or taken down if added to the actual location of the bar (Ciarán MacAirt 2022, pers. comm.). The second memorial was an unobtrusive Celtic cross in the style of a traditional gravestone with surrounding ironwork (Fig. 4). It was placed at the top of Great Georges Street, against the foundations of the Westlink overpass, at the approximate location of McGurk’s for the 30th anniversary of the bombing in 2001. This memorial was inaugurated after a church service in the local Catholic church, St. Patrick’s Pro-Cathedral. St. Patrick’s has a long-term connection with the local community, as it is the second-oldest Catholic church in Belfast, and it had an intimate connection with the bombing, as newspaper reports at the time indicated two of the victims—Phyllis and Marie McGurk—returned earlier than expected from the church that evening and subsequently died in the bombing (Strabane Chronicle 1971). Most of the victims’ funerals took place in this church in the aftermath of the bombing. This made St. Patrick’s a meaningful location for a commemorative event—a vigil Mass—to begin, as it also emphasized the reason the pub was targeted: it was (rightly) presumed the occupants were Catholic. The Mass was followed by a procession to the bombing site by the attendees and culminated in the placement by family members of 15 wreaths to represent the dead.

Fig. 3
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The first memorial plaque to the dead of the McGurk’s Bar bombing. (Photo by Ciarán MacAirt, 2022.)

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Fig. 4
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The second memorial to the dead of the McGurk’s Bar bombing, a Celtic cross behind metal railings. (Photo by author, 2021.)

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For the 40th anniversary in 2011 the associated mural, which now dominates the site, was completed. The mural is unusual for Belfast in taking a three-dimensional form; it follows the contours of the overpass foundational pillars supporting the Westlink to recreate the facade of McGurk’s Bar as it appeared in 1971 (Fig. 5). On closer inspection it also includes three-dimensional additions that emphasize the outline of the bar, including wooden panels and window frames. Trompe l’oeil artistic techniques have been used to represent important details, including an open doorway with a barman standing in the hallway. So effective is this technique that from a distance the rendering could be mistaken for an actual building and, in doing so, uncannily re-prescences the bar into the cityscape from which it was so violently removed in 1971. This mural memorial is unique and unlike any mural, of which there are many, in Belfast (McAtackney 2011).

Fig. 5
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The third part of the memorial, a trompe l’oeil mural representing McGurk’s Bar as it looked in 1971. (Photo by author, 2021.)

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At the same time that the mural memorial was completed, there was an installation of individual pictorial plaques, representing each victim, placed between the top of the mural and the lip of the Westlink, where the statue of Mary resides (Fig. 6). A poster with text explaining the events of December 1971, with links to the families’ fight for justice, was also added at that time (Fig. 7). Taken together, these elements clearly articulate that this act of re-presencing was not only conceived as an act of remembrance, but also as a call to action. A relative of one of those murdered, Robert McClenaghan, stated to the media at the unveiling in 2011 that “tonight is about getting people renewed energy, heart, and commitment to go on until we find out the truth, for all our families” (McClenaghan 2011). For the 50th anniversary, in December 2021, the families launched “Never the Same,” which, as Ciarán MacAirt (2022, pers. comm.) explains, “utilizes modern technology to produce a GPS-activated sound installation—people at the site can use an app and actually hear the families discuss the impact of the atrocity as the visitor moves around it.”Footnote 5 The re-presencing of the bar back into the cityscape—now with an accompanying soundscape—has been an intentional and ongoing act that aims to disrupt and materially contradict the official claims of the past as being settled. This aim has not been uncontested. The mural has been the victim of so-called paint bombing attacks since its creation, including in 2015 (BBC 2015), when blue paint was thrown over the “barman” and the Celtic cross. When I visited the site in December 2021, there was evidence of further, low-level interactions: the barman with paint splashes on his legs and an ambiguous text: come\in!\mother\fuckers, written onto his white sleeve (Figs. 8, 9). These micro-interactions with the mural indicate the heightened political nature of its dissonant presence since McGurk’s was monumentally re-presenced into the city.

Fig. 6
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Partial representation of the pictorial plaques representing all the victims of the bombing individually. (Photo by author, 2021.)

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Fig. 7
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A poster, located to the left side of the mural, explaining the mural and the families’ campaign for justice. (Photo by author, 2021.)

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Fig. 8
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Evidence of paint splashes on the leg of the barman depicted in the McGurk’s mural memorial. (Photo by author, 2021.)

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Fig. 9
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Text: come\in!\mother\fuckers, written in black permanent marker on the right shoulder of the barman depicted in the McGurk’s mural memorial. (Photo by author, 2021.)

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Given the context of the mural, one can only imagine that paint bombing—symbolically replicating the bombing itself—was facilitated by vehicular access to the site. North Queen Street remains a main thoroughfare, but it is not a space that is easy to navigate by foot. To walk to the mural memorial from the city center involves long detours through traffic islands and multilane intersections to eventually reach the site. To continue past the mural memorial leads one to the New Lodge and then onto Duncairn Gardens, which marks the interface with the PUL working-class area of Tigers Bay. As the road acts as a form of interface, few would walk from one area to the next. All these factors mean the mural memorial site must be read primarily as a significant presence for two groups of people: the local community and those who drive past it while traversing the city.

The vicinity of McGurk’s is an area in long-term transition and subject to multiple regeneration initiatives that have attempted to update the traditional institutional landscape in ways that maintain, but also attempt to elide, the structural violence of its past. This mirrors Paul Shackel’s observation that “what ruins are saved and remains visible and what is removed from the landscape is, in the long run, highly political” (Shackel 2019:1). In 2021, there were enduring presences from the original institutional landscape, most notably the grounds and buildings of Belfast Charitable Institution’s Clifton House, a poorhouse active since 1771. It is now presented as a heritage center as much as a charitable foundation (Clifton House 2020). The “recy,” the Victoria Army Barrack’s recreation building, is used by the local community (Belfast History Project 2017). The road front contains a range of social housing that has been built and landscaped to replace earlier institutions—many with details mimicking historical buildings—and on the footprint of earlier housing that was marked for clearance in the 1960s (O’Neill 2018). This includes housing placed on the demolished site of the North Queen Street police station. This site lay vacant from 2000 to 2014, when it was originally closed and designated as a peace process “regeneration zone,” optimistically deemed unneeded in the wake of the GFA, but requiring over a decade before it became more than an empty space. There has been removal of traditional community resources, including St. Kevin’s parish hall, which was demolished in 2016 after many decades serving the congregation of St. Patrick’s Pro-Cathedral. It has not been replaced yet, but currently acts as a “storage facility” (scrapyard) for contractors building many of the University of Ulster’s new campus buildings that are, not uncontroversially, gentrifying the wider vicinity (McConville 2015). This is a messy and disjointed landscape, the subject of institutional surveillance, violent attacks, and mundane planning initiatives, that has been continually disrupted with little consultation or care for how the longstanding communities experience and inhabit the place. Since the GFA there have been many attempts to challenge the structural violence of historical setting and erasures, including the successful campaign of residents of the nearby Fishers Court to be renamed Mc Gurks Way (in Irish, Bealach Mhig Oirc) in 2012 ( Fig. 10). Despite opposition from some Unionist politicians, this request was passed by Belfast City Council, and the renaming took place in the same year (BBC 2012); it is hardly a coincidence it occurred within one year of the mural memorial being inaugurated.

Fig. 10
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The street name: Mc Gurks Way\Bealach Mhig Oirc, attached to the street behind the McGurk’s mural memorial. (Photo by Ciarán MacAirt, 2022.)

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The material elements most explicitly related to the recent conflict—the police station and the bombing site—were most effectively erased from the cityscape, but with little consideration of how they could linger, be retraced, and even re-presenced in the future. Having navigated the traffic islands and busy road networks to this site, the dissonant materials, odd layouts, disjunctures, and contradictions that make up this space are hard to ignore. The grand institutions in renewed landscape settings continue to exist and dominate—Clifton House—alongside the uneven footprint of institutions that have been erased, but can still be partially traced—Victoria Army Barracks. Most poignantly, one site that was doubly erased—McGurk’s Bar—has been re-presenced through various stages associated with a social-justice campaign. Standing at the mural over many years, I have noticed the footprint of the original institutions retained in the uneven street plan, with the dissonant presences of buildings from the 18th century and repurposed structures alongside long-term demolished spaces that have not yet become something else. This landscape jars; it has been intentionally landscaped to be inhospitable and uninviting, but it also communicates a complex history that remains entangled and constitutive of the present. The thoroughfare is not an easy place to visit; it is car busy but people quiet, due to the imposition of major road networks through an enduringly close-knit community. The landscape speaks of a lack of care by the city of Belfast in protecting and enhancing this community for decades that continues to the present day. The entrance to a dark underpass is not a place where people naturally linger, but the physicality of the mural memorial is an affecting presence that maintains community focus on historic injustices and that passing cars cannot ignore. The statue of Mary, trompe l’oeil features of the red facade of the bar, Celtic cross gravestone, and pictorial plaques of the victims reveal memorialization as an ongoing process and speak to its active and pressing nature. The enduring feelings of injustice are communicated alongside the new buildings and historic institutions, as the mural memorial demands recognition and justice in the most meaningful place possible, that of both violent and structural erasure.

Conclusion

Like all cities, Belfast is an ever-changing entity that uses regeneration to create a brighter future while retaining material remnants of darker pasts as they coexist in the present. But, as a post-conflict city, the “material memory” (Olivier 2011:9) of community tragedies and erasures remain in overt and subtle forms, their very existence contradicting official claims of violence being relegated to the past. The unresolved nature of the Troubles is re-presenced through mnemonic devices deliberately erected in meaningful places, such as the McGurk’s Bar bombing mural memorial, and through more mundane means, such as peace walls, which still direct how the working-class city is traversed. Material dissonances are not always easy to decipher, but, taken together, their jarring nature reveals, even to the outsider, that conflict continues to shape much of the city. Belfast was built, and consistently reaffirmed, as a place without history and a past because it suited the post-plantation status quo to do so. Contemporary archaeological approaches have an important role to play in revealing the fragility of such claims. This article discloses that best-forgotten memories have many touchstones and lived experience is still constituted by ongoing interactions with materially persistent pasts. This is especially the case for those communities most impacted by violence that cannot ignore the enduring markers of conflict that make up their material world. The peace dividend has not materialized for those who deserved it most. Belfast is not unique in this regard; materializations of violence, which contest official claims of peace and stability, are to be found in many cities marked by enduring social injustices.

The case study of McGurk’s Bar reveals how material memory of the past has not only been retained, but—in order to “live on” (Olivier 2011:9)—has been re-presenced, added to, and meaningfully reworked by those demanding justice. Despite the bombing of the bar in 1971 being absented from the city for decades—first through the bombing and then through urban planning and road-building programs—it retained the potential to be re-presenced through the unaltered street plan. This absent presence has allowed the McGurk’s campaigners to effectively disrupt official attempts at peace-process placemaking, which have focused on relandscaping and dropping public art into main thoroughfares (McAtackney 2018), by re-presencing it into place. Engaging with this site through both traditional and more creative sources and methods has revealed that there are many ways the complex mix of past and present in the contemporary city can be dissected. By bringing together the personal with the professional, I have aimed to show that an archaeological gaze can be both factual and emotional in creating meaningful understandings of the post-conflict city.