Murales

A move to soften the image of west Belfast's Shankill Road has seen a loyalist paramilitary mural being replaced by something more colourful.
Graffiti artists have been hard at work painting over the Ulster Freedom Fighters mural which dominated the local landscape for many years.

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The work took two days to complete.

Entitled Hidden Treasures, it features some of the best bits of past and present Belfast life.

Murals have often been seen as a symbol of Northern Ireland's divided past, glorifying both loyalist and republican paramilitaries while also marking territory.

In the past few years, they have even become a tourist attraction, with visitors to Belfast taking bus tours along the Shankill and Falls Roads.

Shankill community development worker William Smyth said it was important now to start changing young people's attitudes.

"Our children are conditioned daily by paramilitary murals, and we need to recondition them to life that's non-paramilitary," he said.

The artists were a little surprised find themselves taking on such a project.

Darren Finnegan says this was "definitely the first time" they had done something like this, adding: "Hopefully it's the start of a lot more projects".

Fellow graffiti artist Boyd Hill said he had painted in locations such as Cape Town, New York and France but never anything like this.

Fonte: BBC News