Craigyhill

Craigyhill in Larne, showing the neighbourhood Eleventh Night bonfire under construction.  The children you can see were skipping and jumping across the pallets that are still waiting to be added to the enormous edifice.

And in the extra, there are some accompanying displays that I would not consider using as the main, because of their extreme loyalist paramilitary message and imagery.  Some were more extreme still than the ones you can see here. So these images are not here to be celebrated in any way; more as a record for me, and to underline how fragile the peace process is - in some respects - in Northern Ireland.

Richard grew up near here, and his sister Diana taught at the local school for the whole of her career.  They remember that these bonfires used to be small, neighbourhood affairs. Still clearly contentious and problematic events, but not the massive constructions of today. Richard also thinks that those big glossy panels of paramilitary images came later too, both with the advent of cheap, professional printing and with other social and political changes. His memories of local loyalist murals, in the past, were of cruder, hand-painted ones.

Walking around Craigyhill was such a strange mix of sights and sounds. Children ran home from school, past those images of armed men. I could hear chickens clucking behind the fence on which they were fixed. The kids at the base of the bonfire were loving the adventure of leaping from one heap of pallets to another; they could have been anywhere, on any scrap of neglected land or unsecured building-site.

What do these kids think, though, of those glossy panels with their armed, balaclava-wearing figures?  Does it all fade into the background - or not?