The Posters That Tried to Empty the Town

Notes from the Fleadh, Belfast, August 2026

This is my first Fleadh. It is Aidan's first in twenty years, which makes us an odd pair walking into it: one of us discovering the thing, the other returning to it. My partner is a musician, so the week is not something we attend so much as something we are absorbed into differently. Aidan disappears and is consumed into sessions. I order a Guinness, find a corner, and amongst the chatter and the music do the thing I cannot help doing in any old pub: I read the walls.

The walls of The Garrick are worth reading. The pub has stood on this Belfast corner since the 1870s, and like half the pubs in the city this week it is hung with originals. Not reproductions, not themed decor bought by the metre, but the real survivors. A Cowan's whisky advertisement, "Begorra it's Cowan's". Beside it, a Murray's Mellow Smoking Mixture sign, and this one stopped me properly, because it is not a poster at all. It is embossed tin. The pineapple trade mark, the lettering, the pack itself all stand proud of the surface, and while waiting to be served I ran my fingers across it. Grooves pressed into metal over a century ago, in this city, possibly within a mile of where it now hangs. You can feel the history in a way no screen and no print will ever give you. I sell reproductions for a living and I will happily tell you that an image like that cannot be reproduced. It can only be visited.

On the same wall is the poster that really made me think:  Canadian Pacific. A woman in a blue dress, wide-brimmed hat, the red ensign unfurled behind her, a liner steaming across the corner of the frame. TO CANADA AND UNITED STATES. It is a lovely piece of illustration, warm and open-armed, and it was designed to do one thing: persuade people to leave.

Canadian Pacific was never just a railway. It ran the ocean liners, it held enormous land grants across the prairies, and it profited from a single emigrant three times over: once on the crossing, once on the rail journey west, once on the sale of the land at the end of it. Posters like this hung in shipping offices across Ireland and Britain in the early 1900s, and Ireland was prime recruiting ground. Somebody looked at that open-armed woman, in a room possibly not far from this one, and decided. Half a parish could vanish through a doorway like that.

Which is what makes the room I am sitting in so very extraordinary.

Because under that poster, tonight, the pub is full. Fiddles, a box, a flute, a hundred voices in the gaps between tunes. The Fleadh has filled Belfast with people who stayed, and people who came back, and the descendants of people who left, whose great-grandchildren have now flown in with instrument cases as hand luggage. We have spoken to people from New York and Boston who have flown to be here. Aidan is one of the ones who came back, twenty years since his last Fleadh, and the week keeps ambushing him. On the street he runs into people he has not seen in years, musicians he grew up with in sessions and competitions, and now they are introducing their teenagers. Whole childhoods have happened since he last played here.

The whole week is one long act of community, and it is happening directly beneath the elegant machinery that once tried to empty this beautiful city. Nobody planned that. It is just what happens when a pub keeps its walls.

That is the thing I keep coming back to, sitting here with my second Guinness. A poster is never only a picture. The Cowan's ad wanted your money. The Murray's sign wanted your loyalty to a Belfast tobacco house. The Canadian Pacific poster wanted your future, and got a great many of them. These things were designed as instruments of persuasion, and a century later they have outlived their own arguments and become something else: evidence. Proof of who was selling what, to whom, and what it cost.

I think this is why I turned my passion into a business. I will never be The Garrick, which cannot be imitated. The originals belong on walls like these, in the towns that made them. The designs belong to anyone who wants to live with them and think about them.

The session is starting again… I am going to stop writing now.