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‘We were told to get out by the UDA at gunpoint’

GROWING up a Catholic in Loyalist- dominated Newtownabbey on the fringes of Belfast in the late 1960s and early 1970s meant an uneasy childhood for Kilkishen- based artist Anne Stewart. So traumatic was it that after leaving  she didn’t return to the area for over 40 years, until she made a trip back there in 2018, but she has used the difficulties of her early life for inspiration for a new exhibition, Memories of Displacement in a Divided Community, which goes on display at Scariff Library this Thursday. The majority of the exhibition consists of pictures of the pupils of her alma mater, Stella Maris in Newtownabbey, who lost their lives during the bloody conflict. “There is one portrait of Bobby Sands from a photograph; the rest are distorted photographs of the students,” she says. On Tuesday, she was busy closing off sources of natural light at the library, so that viewers will get a real sense of the work when …

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