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“I first met Ross in Balcurris in Halloween of 20
05. I saw him with his camera. I went up to him and said, ‘if you want to see the real shit come with me’. This is what eventually led to his Joyrider project. I can tell a good person and trusted him from the start. The advice he gave me led me on the right path. I was dealing heroin and crack cocaine at the time. If it wasn’t for him I’d have been dead or in jail by now. He said, ‘you have brains up there, drugs are not the answer.’ My first child Ava was on the way at the time. I ended up doing a degree and am a qualified engineer now. You’ll never see me standing on the street again. It broke me when I heard the news from LJ. The last thing he shared with me was a picture of me on the back of a crushed car and his last words were, ‘I love you loads.’” – Ian Giltrap Links to TD articles about Ross totallydublin.ie/arts-culture/roadmap-swift-justice totallydublin.ie/arts-culture/arts-culture-features/ joyrider-ross-mcdonnell totallydublin.ie/arts-culture/in-the-frame-rossmcdonnell-limbs Ross with Ian Giltrap JOYRIDER Ross McDonnell Joyrider is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the Ballymun housing estate. The book documents rites of passage on the ‘block’: experiences that convert youthful abandon to criminal enterprise. Inspired by societal changes, McDonnell spent several years working in Ballymun as residents were being relocated in anticipation of the complex’s final demolition. The estate, constructed to replace Dublin’s inner city tenements in the 1960s, was a failure from inception. Despite its utopian vision, the lack of planning and infrastructure rendered the area chronically underdeveloped. Ballymun became an iconic symbol of the city’s underclass, ravaged by successive drug epidemics and inter-generational malaise. Joyrider, now beautifully published in its complete form for the first time, depicts a marginalized youth reclaiming space in the face of this “urban regeneration.” We see, writ large, the forces and tensions that shape and mould us all as young individuals: creation and destruction, inclusion and escapism, environment and identity. Joyrider launches in the Gallery of Photography on Thursday October 21 at 7pm. Thirty Nine Books, edition size 1000, €52 rossmcdonnell.com 24 25 28