MÍCHEÁL Mac DONNCHA presents Danny Devenny’s recent painting titled ‘The Session’ which depicts Bobby Sands along with John Lennon, Woody Guthrie, Víctor Jara and Ché Guevara. Mac Donncha also takes us through Danny’s prison experiences which were part of the inspiration for creating this striking work.
THE
SESSION BY DANNY D
comrades, community agus ceol “When I decided to create the painting, I hoped to have Bobby remembered not only for his death in the H-Blocks but also as we knew him - full of life, energy, serious and focused when needed, but also bursting with passion, laughter and craic. The same attributes that made him such a leader when called upon. How the great ones should be remembered.” – DANNY DEVENNY (RIGHT)
I
n the glow of light, tightly gathered in a cell, they play music and sing together. John Lennon, Bobby Sands, Woody Gurthrie, Victor Jara, Che Guevara. It is an extraordinary picture, a vision of revolutionaries who were also ordinary people who loved music and knew the value of friendship and comradeship. The picture can be seen in one way as Bobby’s dream of playing music with these men, something its creator Danny D was well placed to express as he was a friend and fellow political prisoner with Bobby. “I think of him in his cell, big smile on his face, playing his guitar,” recalls Danny. He first met Bobby in Crumlin Road Prison when Bobby came looking for a ‘hanky’, a cotton handkerchief decorated with republican images by Danny, the first flowering of his activist art. In 1973, Danny had been arrested and wounded in an IRA bank raid that went wrong. He was lucky to survive, as was the RUC man who wounded and arrested him. Both were in a position to shoot the other fatally at close range. Neither did so. Many years later, Danny was confronted by a UVF gunman at An Phoblacht’s office in 44 Parnell Square, Dublin, where he was working. The gunman could have killed him, but shot him in the leg instead. No wonder Danny talks about having had several lives. He is renowned for his long connection with the Short Strand district, but he jokes that it all began across the city on Durham Street on the Lower Falls. His father and uncle were from County Donegal and arrived during the 1921 pogrom and his uncle was wounded in a loyalist attack at that time. Danny’s father’s first wife Molly McEvoy died young and he then married a Donegal woman, anphoblacht UIMHIR EISIÚNA 3 - 2021 - ISSUE NUMBER 3
Mary Lafferty, Danny’s mother, who still lives in Short Strand to this day. “I grew up in a mixed community. Apart from relatives, having Protestant cousins and friends, all my neighbours - their fathers were working in the shipyards. So, we grew up, we mucked around, sectarianism wasn’t talked about, wasn’t thought about. Bear in mind, my parents were from Donegal and we didn’t see ourselves as anything other than Irish from day one. My mother was from the Gaeltacht and went to an Irish speaking school.” He recalls returning to Short Strand from a social outing one night in 1970, the very night when the district was attacked by loyalists, intent on another pogrom, who were thrown back by armed Volunteers of the IRA and civilians of the local defence committee. 29
