Joyriders: Remembering an Ireland washed away by the Celtic Tiger

Ross McDonnell’s photography book, Joyriders, documents an era in the mid to late noughties when Ballymun’s regeneration had stalled, many of the old blocks were still standing and disused flats were frequently being taken over by groups of young people.

His book is a collection of evocative black and white photographs of young men and children sitting around sitting rooms and in cars, gazing from balconies, leaping from steps, running past burning vehicles, using consaws to open doors, watching firemen in action and weighing drugs. The images are eerily beautiful.

Medical staff alternate between frenetic action and personal grief

McDonnell embarked on the project in 2005 when he had returned to Ireland after a few years abroad. Since taking these photos Ballymun has changed a lot. So has McDonnell, who now lives in Brooklyn. He's a writer and executive producer on the new Damien Dempsey documentary Love Yourself Today and is a cinematographer on both the Showtime documentary series Trade, all about the trafficking of people and drugs into the US, and the soon to be released film about a New York hospital's battle with Covid, The First Wave (both directed by Matthew Heineman).

A lot of McDonnell’s time during the pandemic was spent filming doctors and nurses as they tended to sick and dying patients in an intensive care unit for the latter project. It’s a powerful but upsetting watch. Medical staff alternate between frenetic action and personal grief. Many patients die. Others struggle to breathe or are comatose for much of the film. It was a very strange experience, McDonnell says, “This hospital had shifted their surgical nurses onto a FaceTime team, so they were literally travelling throughout the hospital all day with iPads to allow family members talk to patients who were in comas or in the ICU. And that became an incredible way to meet people’s families… That’s kind of where a lot of the stories emerged from.”

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His previous project, Trade, was similarly hard hitting. "I made more than 20 separate trips to Honduras, probably 30 trips to Mexico, " he says. "I was on the road, probably three weeks a month shooting and living with these people. [Migrants] are particularly powerless ... I think, at the end of that show, I definitely was carrying a lot of the weight of what I saw. Honduras was particularly violent at that time. People in the film had lost very close family members. We were there for that and then with them for months after. We were kind of grieving along with them."

I followed him and up at the block at Balcurris there were a lot of cars being driven around and a lot of chaos

The Joyrider project was a relatively relaxed experience from an earlier, looser period in his life. He had just moved back from New York to Celtic Tiger Ireland which he found weird and unfamiliar. "I just felt very at odds with what was happening in Ireland and also very engaged by what was happening that I hadn't photographed before. I was travelling around a lot trying to capture this disappearing Ireland that I felt was being homogenised during the Celtic Tiger, being sort of washed away in favour of car loans ... Everything just felt like an abstraction."

One Halloween he found himself in Ballymun. “I got the bus out there and was just roaming around,” he says. “It was pretty wild, a bonfire outside each block. And it was just a lot of fun. I met one young guy who said, ‘If you want to follow me, you’ll see what’s really going on, man’ and I followed him and up at the block at Balcurris there were a lot of cars being driven around and a lot of chaos. And a couple of weeks later, I went back with some handmade prints that I had made ... A couple of guys came up and recognised me and I took out all these prints and distributed them. And that started the relationship. I wasn’t the police. I was okay. And there wasn’t a huge age gap between us either. I think I was 24 or 25 at the time. And the oldest guys in that group were 22 and maybe the younger guys were 16.”

What fascinated him was how, in the face of suburban desolation, these young men were reclaiming their environment. “They’d throw parties in those empty apartments and when people moved out, the council would [cover] them up, and then they’d get this saw out and open it up,” he says. “It was a real cat and mouse thing. The guys could open one flat with the consaw and then go through the balconies or make holes in the walls to keep another flat sequestered. If there was a raid on that flat, where [people]had seen the door being opened, the flat next door would remain untouched, because the doors had been sealed. So there was a lot of subterfuge happening in the buildings. They became really adept at controlling their territory. There were exit routes.”

There were always people dropping in on their way to do something else, hanging out for a bit. I was just another one of that cast of characters

He notes a tension in the book as the photographs move from youthful exuberance to something darker circulating around drugs. “In the context of the book and the narrative, it is quite innocent at the start,” he says. “And then you have this sort of moment where there’s a pacing shift [from] ‘Oh, wow, this is a lot of fun’ to ‘Okay, this is getting kind of serious now’. The book documents that transition.”

He never intended this work to contain a simple or heavy-handed message. "I had documented a lot of drug stories in other parts of the world, in Mexico and Afghanistan, " he says. "I didn't necessarily want to bring it back to a harrowing portrait of addiction in some disadvantaged community … I felt like that story is often told but I felt like with these pictures, I was seeing something that I hadn't seen before. This was a very kinetic, very fast moving environment that's just always teetering. Is it going to fall over into full-blown criminality? That's the tension that's there … I don't want to stigmatise them because it's titillating. That's not what the story was. The first film I made, Colony, about honeybees, is a very lyrical study of Americana and agriculture. And that has its own self-contained world ... I think Joyrider does that as well."

How was he looked on by the young people he photographed? Were they suspicious of him? “There were always people dropping in on their way to do something else, hanging out for a bit. I was just another one of that cast of characters.”

He’s still friends with many of them. Some ended up caught up in the criminal justice system. But many of them have ordinary lives with jobs and businesses. Many of them came to the Gallery of Photography for the recent book launch where they found themselves signing books. “It’s been an incredible experience reconnecting with them ... I think there’s a real source of pride in that work now with the passage of time. All of the guys, for the most part, are very grateful that they were captured in that moment.”

This was the story of Ballymun, this tightening gyre of social factors and they were the last generation to grow up in that environment

He’s pleased that people from Ballymun seem to have embraced it. “I was nervous the community blowback would be strong ... but actually, I think there’s a real social and historical value in these pictures now ... I think if I was rushing the book out a number of years ago it wouldn’t have resonated as much.”

He hopes that ultimately what comes across in the images is that these young men were reacting to the system and environment they found themselves in. “The structures that were around this group of young men are hugely significant in this narrative,” he says. “The council was giving people surrender grants to move out of those flats and [moving] people from more vulnerable populations into those flats ... This was the story of Ballymun, this tightening gyre of social factors and they were the last generation to grow up in that environment. So I think the book really tried to dig into that in a subtle way, where there’s the presence of this building and its destruction. This sense of transgression and freedom that these guys are exerting over it is victorious to me.”

McDonnell has a number of documentary projects in the pipeline as, variously, a director, cinematographer and producer. Documentaries are having a bit of a golden age thanks to their popularity on streaming sites. "I heard that there were four films on Britney Spears, " he says and laughs. "When Colony was happening, documentary was a cottage industry. It was very much the poor cousin of everything else and definitely very focused on festival runs. That's changed radically in the last 10 years."

Photography is a trickier proposition thanks to the cameras on everyone’s phones. “There is, within photography, a bit of an identity crisis,” he says. “How do we stay relevant as photographers, because everyone is a great photographer now? That business and privilege of being the guy with a camera is gone now ... But the awkwardness of being the only one of your friends walking around with a camera is gone. It’s not something anyone stops to think about anymore, because we’re all attracted and seduced by the power of taking pictures.”