It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in Protestant Belfast, and a former Loyalist terrorist is showing us around his neighbourhood. We admire the monuments to victims of Republican murders, and the retired terrorist tells us about dragging a dead man out of a bombed shop, but just as you visit Venice for the canals, you come to Belfast for murals. Here on the Protestant side, most glorify British soldiers of world war one and Loyalist killers, often in the same picture.
But suddenly, on a street corner, looms a piece of excellent unintentional camp: a wall-sized mural of the late Queen Mother (Loyalists revere the British royal family), complete with the phrase, “She had a soldier’s heart”. Her 101-year-old face beams at passing tour buses.



