TAIGS OUT
Trespasses“TAIGS OUT” is an anti-Catholic slogan painted on the McGeown family’s wall. Its retouching, amid preparations for a new coat of paint across the estate, makes the words more than a surviving mark: they are renewed as another summer of triumphal display begins.
The Slogan on the Wall
The phrase is an imperative of expulsion: it marks Catholics as unwelcome in the place where it is displayed. In the scene, Davy McGeown is returning home with Cushla Lavery after being hurt. He holds his medals throughout the drive, while Cushla helps him out of the car and links his arm as they walk up the path. The slogan is therefore encountered at the threshold of the family home, in the course of an act of care rather than in an abstract account of communal division.
Renewal and Narrative Force
The wall’s message has been retouched, while a man elsewhere in the estate scrubs away last year’s paint with a wire brush, leaving dull red, white, and blue dust on the tarmac as he prepares a fresh coat. The contrast between removal and renewal gives the slogan a cyclical force: the previous display is being cleared, but not in order to end the practice. The closing observation that “Another triumphal summer was beginning” frames the renewed words as part of a recurring season of public assertion and intimidation. Betty McGeown opens the door as Davy and Cushla reach the step; the family’s welcome at home stands against the exclusion written on its wall.
