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"The work is remarkable in that it is simultaneously a vibrant response to events still vivid in the psyche of the community and, even at it testifies, it transcends those immediate passions and proposes an

historian's distance and objectivity. The work says: You know the people in these pictures because they are your neighbours and your allies and you know what they endured.....This is work of conscious ostentation, of deliberate defiance.

It is work Diego Rivera would have approved of. But it has delicacy too. Every mural explains but also embraces. Every mural instructs but at the same time has the intimacy and consolations of a family photograph."

(Brian Friel, world renowned playwright)

To Accomplish Anything you must Begin with a First Step. Nothing Worthwhile has ever been Achieved without Discipline.

"Tom had been working in public art since 1984 with the Outreach Program of The Orchard Gallery. He was a pioneer in the field, seeing in mural painting a valid and effective means towards peace and reconciliation. Tom's life-long 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 joint mural in October 1994. William had been a freelance artist who had exhibited his work throughout Ireland from Dublin to Limerick and Belfast. 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 in Derry. 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 uplifted and instructed. For a fuller explanation of their approach to mural making you may read an excerpt from their book MURALS.

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 treatment of our experience, 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."