Robert Ballagh at 80

‘Greatest living’ is a phrase we should use with extreme caution. However, Robert Ballagh’s contribution to Irish art over nearly six decades of creativity is unsurpassed in Ireland and internationally. Initially associated with being a founder of Irish Pop Art, Ballagh has moved way beyond designations like this.

He has been a designer of over 70 stamps, the Irish pre-Euro currency, stage sets which include Riverdance, and a series of potent political paintings and murals that have become a history of Irish political struggle over the last 50 years.

From his 1969 ‘Marchers’ to this year’s rendition of the 1916 leaders in a picture titled ‘HQ Moore Street 1916’, Ballagh has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to capture the essence of political struggle internationally and in Ireland.

Standout pictures include last year’s ‘The Thirtieth of January’, marking the 50th anniversary of Derry’s Bloody Sunday, and the 1994 ‘Slán Abhaile’, which became a must-see mural in Belfast. There is the 1989 ‘History Lesson’, which shows Ballagh between Pearse and Connolly and which also featured as a cover on Eoin O’Broin’s ‘Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism’.

• (below) The ‘Slán Abhaile’, mural in Belfast

There are paintings related to the hunger strikes in terms of the street politics of the time, including a stunning piece called ‘Legacy’, created to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1981 hunger strikes.

Alongside this are a series of paintings dealing with the 1916 Rising, one of which was used for the commemoration booklet for marking the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a time period when there was not one state event to mark this key date.

There is also the 2012 reinterpretation of Walter Paget’s ‘Birth of the Republic’, which was commissioned to raise funds for the refurbishment of the Glasnevin monument for the rank and file 1916 volunteers. It shows a wounded Connolly directing operations in the GPO.

We should also mark and celebrate a lifetime of political activism by Robert Ballagh. He was one of the founders of the Irish National Congress and currently is president of the Ireland Institute. Ballagh was the first chairperson of the Irish Artists Association in 1981. He has also been a public supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign in Israel in support of Palestinian rights. His is a life in art and political activism.

Robert Ballagh has created a body of work that has preserved a history of Ireland that many would overlook and neglect. His work has shown the power of social and political commentary in art today. Like the work of Seán Keating, who designed the first currency of the free state, and John Lavery, whose work framed the birth of partitioned Ireland, Ballagh’s art has shown the consequences of partition and points a path to a more hopeful future.