Murals by the Bogside Artists

Where their art is housed

by Pat Ashworth

It is an arresting image, and it covers the entire gable end of a house in Rossville Street, Derry. A young boy wearing a Second World War gas mask, and clutching a petrol bomb, is pictured against a background of destruction in the Bogside, crucible for the Bloody Sunday riots in which 14 unarmed civilians were killed by British paratroopers on 30 January 1972.

The mural is the first of a series of 12 in the People’s Gallery, painted between 1994 and 2006 by the Bogside Artists — Tom Kelly, his brother William, and Kevin Hasson — all of whom grew up in that community during the Troubles. It is one of the most famous and most photographed murals in the world. But also, Tom Kelly says, one of the most misunderstood.

“When it first appeared, The Times described it as ‘violent’, and The Irish Times as ‘sinister’,” he remembers. “The boy is a 12-year-old wearing a gas mask that doesn’t work — wartime stock from a hut broken into at the heart of the Bogside. Hundreds and thousands of canisters of CS gas were being fired into this small area, and the kids wore the masks.

“I had one myself — big floppy things, and, when the gas got behind the mask, it was worse. But the kids thought they were cool, and wouldn’t take them off.”

The boy is facing what was, at the time, a sectarian police force, trained and backed up by the British Government. Paisleyites had declared their intention of burning the Bogside to the ground. “The mural asks the question: ‘What is this kid doing here in this silly mask?’” Kelly says. “When we first created it, we included on a poster a quote from Charles Dickens, along the lines of ‘There’s none so finely felt, so delicately perceived, as injustice to a child.’”

The artists describe the murals — memorials to victims of the violence, and all created with the consent and support of the Bogside community — as “a not-too-silent witness to the colossal price paid in suffering and brutalisation by a hopelessly innocent people in their struggle for basic human rights”. 

Read more: http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2015/17-july/features/features/where-their-art-is-housed

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