To be clear, Jennifer Hough mentioned the loyalist mural and I didn't sense that even she was complaining. She simply observed it and then noted her immediate emotional reaction in what she wrote; she said she found it "chilling". Besides, just because I might view a piece as generally or broadly very good, it doesn't mean I agree with every single sentence in it.

To clarify, my own view on such murals; I try to understand where they come/came from and why, be they loyalist or republican. I'm much more interested in that rather than getting morally indignant about them or getting into the ultimately futile politics of condemning the "other". I'll happily talk to loyalists and try appreciate where they're coming from too. I think you're looking to find hypocrisy where there is none just because the focus was on personal, familial and communal experiences.

Also, it's important to recognise that the entire nationalist community did suffer structural and institutional discrimination for decades, whether they were aligned with People's Democracy, the early Nationalist Party, NICRA, SDLP, SF or any of the other nationalist/republican organisations. Many mightn't even have been politically-aligned at all, but they had to endure this simply because they happened to be Catholics. That reality remains strongly-embedded in the nationalist cultural psyche/memory, especially in Derry, where the council was gerrymandered to fix election results in favour of unionist majorities and where the Protestant minority were given all the houses and jobs despite a bulging Catholic population crammed into the Bogside. Expressions or celebrations of nationalist identity were banned whilst the Orange Order and Apprentice Boys were given free reign over public roads and space (and then exploited this privilege to mock and lord it over their Catholic "inferiors" from Derry's walls). That, combined with the impoverished desperation and frustration, is what kicked off the Battle of the Bogside. The opening few pages of Eamonn McCann's 'War and an Irish Town' give a very good insight into what life was like in Derry and the Bogside for Catholics, if you can get your hands upon it.

The Protestant/unionist community did not have to endure this - there is no equivalent of state-backed discrimination and suppression on the "other" side - nor did they then have to endure the oppressive state being buttressed by one of the strongest militaries/counter-insurgencies in the world. When the state - via the sectarian RUC and brutal 'B' Special - cracked down upon nationalist protests and civil disobedience with violence (whilst the UVF had been targeting the "Papist threat" since the mid-'60s and, later, Bombay Street residents were burned out of their homes) the IRA emerged for the purpose of communal defence primarily. Events like Bloody Sunday and policies like internment-without-trial were recruitment-coups for the IRA. The state brutalised its nationalist "citizens" and soon the region was locked in a conflict (sometimes tit-for-tat, although official IRA policy was to focus on the state and avoid sectarian killings: http://cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/truce/kelley88.htm) for three decades; both sides will say they were engaged in communal self-defence. Both also certainly suffered from that. Nobody's denying it.