Tom had been working as a muralist since 1984 with the Outreach Programme of the Orchard Gallery. He was a pioneer in the field, seeing in art a valid and effective means of reconciliation. Tom’s lifelong friend Kevin Hasson and, later, his brother William joined him in mural making in 1993 after Tom had left the Orchard Gallery. They completed their first mural together in October 1994. William had been a freelance artist who had exhibited his work throughout Ireland. For him, it was a natural transition to join the group. All three were profoundly disenchanted with the gallery circuit and how it was run. All three had grown up in the Bogside and had witnessed the worst of the Troubles. They agreed that it was necessary for the Bogsiders to take back their own story from the milling machine of the British media and to tell it in a way that both edified and instructed. One has to remember that the Bogside was a bleak wasteland in those days where the pallor of the 1972 atrocity hung over the place like a shroud. We felt that the biased reportage of our history, as it was relayed back to us by television, radio and newspapers, did not do justice to the abominable suffering endured by a people over such a long period. We felt this all the more keenly, as we ourselves were part of it.

We are well aware of the difference between propaganda and art. It is mainly a difference of intent. We are chronicling history - no more, no less. To do otherwise would be an insult to our craft and a sin against our calling as creative witnesses. True, those who choose to see otherwise must take the integrity of our endeavour on trust. We like to think that the style of our approach makes our purpose clear. We do all we can to distance what we express and how we express it from the character of propaganda. Neither racism nor bigotry has any real place in art or any other form of communication. Also, we paint what we decide to paint. Freedom of expression is a fundamental democratic right for which men like Solzhenitsyn (to name but one artist out of many thousands who have been persecuted for claiming that right) paid dearly. Art, too, has its martyrs.

To get the money to paint each of the five murals we have completed so far for the Bogside we have gone collecting from door to door. These murals therefore really do belong to the people in every sense of the word. We like that idea. Elsewhere, the public’s attitude to artists is ‘ . . . well, they would do it anyway, for nothing.' This is true of all vocational occupations. It explains why nurses, teachers, social workers etc (those, in fact, who help more than anybody else) are badly paid. Take the vocational and voluntary workers out of the picture and the world would crawl back into the jungle over night. Artists who ‘make it’ in the art world are feted in the same way as Ronnie Biggs was feted for escaping from prison. Biggs, to give him some credit, managed to escape back in.

The actual making of the murals has been greeted with support, even from the Protestant community, many of whom were as distressed about Bloody Sunday as were the Catholics of the Bogside. Local artists, who view themselves as hip with what is fashionable in modem art, do not consider our work ‘contemporary’, a fatuous argument from our point of view, insofar as our work cannot be other. What they mean is that we are not ordering the world to suit our purposes, which is what is in vogue in the art world at the moment. We are expected to kneel at the shrine of sensationalism and novelty as if we could inflict that nonsense on the people of the Bogside. Modem art so-called is this; you must order the world as if you were God, but you must do so for the hell of it (there being no valid reason left, presumably, for doing anything). God is capricious, chaotic and absurd, like the rest of His Creation, and closely resembles Jean Paul Sartre on a pub-crawl, and if thou wouldst walk in His likeness, thou too must be capricious chaotic, absurd etc. We have been approached by many capricious etc contemporary artists anxious to work with us so that they could hoist their neglected flags to our mast. In every case we have declined.

Whether you are prepared to admit it or not, these works are very popular and internationally known. They draw in large numbers of tourists, thereby keeping the tourist industry happy. Tourism in Northern Ireland employs some 34,500 people. That is a heavy investment for a place whose population numbers 1,700,000. Hotels in the city, taxi firms, restaurants, pubs, hostels and private entrepreneurs all have a stake in the popularity of our work. We state these as simple facts, since it was never our intention to create a tourist draw. It is simply a byproduct of the successful fulfilment of the vision we conceived for the Bogside from as far back as 1993. Over and above the commercial benefits they may bring to Deny, the murals serve a much deeper and, to our mind, more crucial purpose. They function as talking points for the local population. They assist in the process of reflection on times and events lived through. In so doing, they assist in objectifying the past in a very positive sense and in this way they are curative - profoundly so. Had they been badly painted or been, as our critics demand, ‘contemporary’ with all the inevitable obscurantism that involves, they would have failed - and we with them. They also raise self-esteem, encourage artistic endeavour in the young, give pride to the old, and last, but not least, lend a definitive and unique character to that area of the city that is recognised the world over. The artists, for their part, are committed to completing the remaining five murals for the Bogside, which together will give a coherent and accurate chronicle of the key events of the Troubles that continue to shape our present.

No. All our work has been done on a voluntary basis and will continue so. The cost of an average mural, depending on scale, can cost anywhere between £600 and £1,000 bearing in mind we use only paint and brushes and not expensive spray equipment or high-power projectors. Were we in the business of showing off our skills at the expense of what we are trying to express, we might very well go down that road. All ‘our’ murals belong to the people and will remain in place according to their will.

Depends on the weather. We have tried painting under a tarpaulin roof, but our work suffered and so did we. A mural can take anything between two and six weeks.

If there was a methodology to this, we would be happy to give it. But the fact is, we do not permit our varying views to jeopardise what we believe to be much more important, viz our friendship. The secret lies there. We are also aware of the idolatrous worship of ego that currently fuels the art world. We keep well away from it. ‘Me-My-Work-and-I’ is not a platform on which you can hope to express anything worthwhile. You serve the craft if you love it. If you don’t love it, you should not be in it. And if you do love it, you will not abuse it, or, least of all, debase it by offering it up to the promulgation of racism, bigotry, false beliefs, demagogic worship, or any other form of the evils that afflict us.

Birds sing: men make art; it is a natural human activity; where would we be without it? Man does not live by bread alone, but where is the starving man who would not swap his Rembrandt for a loaf of bread? In other words, life itself and the respect for life is what is primarily important. Art these days is money. Is money overrated?

No. That’s like saying jazz has institutionalised the struggle for justice. What hasn’t, in those terms? Jazz, as a music idiom, may be institutionalised, but not its content. Today’s antiestablishment menace is tomorrow’s money-spinner. And what do you mean by struggle? The class struggle? The establishment loves the rebel even before it gets rid of him. If, in his lifetime, Ché Guevara had received all the money made from his posters since his death, he would be sifting where Fidel is at the moment, only smoking bigger cigars. The day we give up creativity is the day we stop asking the arts councils to fund us and adopt the more reliable method of scratch cards.

Well, there have been a few. The Unemployment Bureau springs immediately to mind. Then, of course, there’s the Oxfam Shop, the Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul’s, Help The Aged, Bill Gates, Al Gore, our beloved Goebbels, Jean Claude Van Damme, Salman Rushdie, Thatcher, the Hotspur Annual 1967, Les Patterson, Germaine Greer, and the very late Frank Sinatra.