Belfast stories  

There are wall hangings from the women’s prison at Armagh gaol, walkie talkies used by the Irish Republican Army and weaponry, both real and replica, such as rifles used to shoot at soldiers. Pamphlets, posters and British army and police uniforms are also on display.

And there is a scale model, rescued from the governor’s office, of the Maze prison complex, which housed many Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries during the conflict, as well as bricks from the now-demolished home of Tom Williams – an IRA volunteer executed during the second world war. There is even a metal dustbin attached to a flagstone so visitors can recreate the sound West Belfast residents made to warn of an impending army raid. 

Carson says the origins of the collection date back to 1972, when the first Republican prisoners and internees in the Maze prison camp (then called Long Kesh) made handicrafts from wood and other materials to pass the time in jail and to raise money. Leather wallets, wooden plaques and needlework items found their way first to people homes in West Belfast and then to the club as donations. As the collection grew, so did the museum and so, latterly, has its reputation.  

“Visitors come from far and wide,” Carson says. “Often, they don’t know the first thing about the Troubles, but have heard about us. Some call it political tourism, or even a terrorist trail, but the whole point of the collection is an educational one – to demonstrate man’s inhumanity to man.”  

The Roddy McCorley Society is also looking to expand and has received planning permission for a museum and cafe extension to its premises, with promises of council funding.  

There are other individuals and museums that tell Belfast’s history. In another part of Nationalist West Belfast, not far from McCorley’s club, is the Eileen Hickey Irish Republican History Museum.

A former Armagh gaol inmate, Eileen Hickey, who took a university degree on her release and became a teacher, was disturbed to find that many young people had no understanding of the roots of the conflict, so she began to collect republican memorabilia as a teaching aid.  
 
Regenerating communities 

Hickey and a group of volunteers then transformed a dilapidated social club in a former linen mill into a museum that seeks to explain the development of republicanism from the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 to the present day.

Though there are no artefacts from the 18th century, the 20th-century history of Ireland is well represented in weapons and medals from the 1916 Easter Rising, handbooks on guerilla warfare from the 1950s, miniature cameras and radios smuggled in to prisoners in the Maze and a recreation of a cell (with an original door) from Armagh prison, which was closed in 1986. 
 
The weaponry – from pikes to rocket launchers – “isn’t a Rambo-style thing,” says Johnny Hickey, the widower of the museum’s founder. “Eileen was determined that it should be an educational tool not an attempt to glorify violence.”  

Hickey is particularly keen to emphasise that the museum also houses a library and interpretive centre to help with education projects and those conducting historical research. 

Hop on a bus outside the mill and you can be dropped off half an hour later at the doors of yet another museum, this time telling the story from the loyalist point of view in East Belfast. The story is told by former members of the Ulster Defence Association, a paramilitary organisation.  
 
The Loyalist Conflict Museum: Andy Tyrie Interpretive Centre consists of three rooms in a shop front next to a working men’s club. Like its nationalist counterparts, it is run by volunteers, many of whom are former paramilitary prisoners. Here, too, there’s an emphasis on the leather goods and carvings made by prisoners and the hand-painted artworks that adorn the walls.

Started as a project to help former prisoners reintegrate into the community, the museum is now a place of reflection, with a mission to help educate younger generations not to repeat the mistakes of the past, says Robert Scott, the peace tourism co-ordinator of Charter NI, a community organisation that supports the museum.  

But it is also a move to make Troubles tourism part of the effort to regenerate rundown areas whose local economies have suffered badly in recent years, adds Scott.  
 
Common histories 

Museum collections are popping up in community centres all over Belfast, taking their cue from the success of the Somme Heritage Centre and the Museum of Free Derry, both of which began as community-led initiatives and have transformed into major tourist attractions, with the support of government funding. 

Scott says there are plans for a significant tourism hub in East Belfast that would incorporate the work of various local museums in the area and build on the work of the walking tours, which offer visitors the opportunity of hearing first hand from ex-paramilitary tour guides. The tours include stops at the many loyalist murals that are dotted about East Belfast. Walking tours of nationalist areas of West Belfast, such as Falls Road, also give people a chance to see murals. 
 
Scott is keen to point out that the East Belfast walking tour is run jointly with community leaders from Short Strand, a nationalist area, and guides hand over to each other, so that “different sides of the story can be told”. 

Casual visitors might be surprised to see how much all these loyalist and nationalist museums have in common. They are run by groups of volunteers and don’t advertise, but use social media and word-of-mouth recommendations to encourage visitors. Belfast’s black taxi tours, which take tourists around the city, are their most regular customers.

They also guard their independence fiercely, having little engagement with the professional museum world, apart from getting advice on conservation and maintenance. They are proud of the fact that they are deeply embedded in their localities.  

“It’s important these museums are situated in areas where they came from, so that you can see the cranes of the shipyard, the cafes and shops where people grew up,” says one of the volunteers at the loyalist Conflict Museum. 

Peter Doak, now a lecturer at the University of Leeds, was part of a two-year research project for Ulster University that examined local communities’ engagement with their history. He points out that, despite their political difference, the volunteers running the museums have deep respect for each other.

What they share is a feeling of “being abandoned or ignored by the conventional narratives of the Troubles”. The Troubles Gallery at the Ulster Museum, which has had a substantial revamp, was not an adequate vehicle for telling their story, he says.  

“The people we spoke to had a profound sense of disengagement with the gallery’s portrayal of the Troubles,” Doak says. “They were also worried about academics trying to impose a single objective history. People wanted to tell their own story.” 
 
Finding a way forward 

Doak takes a positive view on the impact these histories told by local communities will have. “People have become used to the fact that history is contested,” he says.  

“There will be different interpretations even in a small place like East Belfast. There is no single narrative that can capture everyone’s experience because the Troubles did not affect people uniformly.” 

There is little prospect of an all-encompassing interpretive centre for the Troubles. A project that was aiming to transform the remnants of the Maze prison into such a centre has been mired in political disagreement for more than a decade. 

“It has been talked about for a long time, but it is difficult to see how it might happen,” says Deirdre McBride, formerly of the Community Relations Council, who has been coordinating a series of events for Northern Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries. “In the absence of such a centre, these local initiatives have become even more important.”  

It is crucial, according to McBride, to recognise that the small museums are run by former combatants so, inevitably, they will focus on the military side of the conflict. “But that is not the whole story,” she says. “The danger is that we and the local communities are not necessarily hearing the voices of other victims of the suffering.”  

She praises the unsung work that local museums have done during the Decade of Centenaries in working with communities and stories of non-combatants affected by the first world war or the Easter Rising. 

These museums have shown the way in negotiating difficult political conversations, she says, and could provide a path forward for a broader debate between organisations such as National Museums Northern Ireland and community-led museums.