The boy in the mask

A Derry man who as a schoolboy featured in one of the most iconic images and a famous mural of the struggle, died four years ago today.

Paddy Coyle was 13 years old when he was photographed wearing a World War Two-era gas-mask and holding a petrol bomb during the Battle of the Bogside. In August 1969, the three days of rioting marked one of the first major risings of public resistance to British rule in the recent conflict.

The image of young Paddy, armed and ready, was later immortalised in a famous wall mural. The black and white image was adapted in 1994 by the ‘Bogside Artists’ group, including Paddy’s cousins Tom and the late William Kelly, and Kevin Hasson.

Tom said: “Paddy never exploited this image, he turned down many offers from documentary makers and the media to tell his story. He believed the picture told its own story. A child in a gas mask with no filter doing what he could do when his family, home and community came under siege.

“He only publicly revealed he was the boy in the photo when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. He lived a life of good humour, devout faith and decency and worked as a driving instructor.

“We spoke a few times about the mural because the Bogside Artists painted 12 iconic images in the people’s gallery in Derry and Paddy’s image was central to that.

“I remember them as intense and difficult times. Paddy’s mother was very devout and like every parent, she worried for her children in the midst of all the chaos and fear.

“But it was his brother Gerard who gave Paddy the telling off, not for going out into the street but for wearing his jacket that weekend without asking - and when the photo emerged there was no denying it. So out of all the trauma there was a bit of humour too.”

The photo was taken by award-winning photographer Clive Limpkin. Mr Limpkin, who passed away coincidentally a month earlier, described his 1969 work as “the nearest thing I ever had to an iconic picture”.

He said he had only taken one shot of the teenager.

He said: “Suddenly there was this 13-year-old boy in the picture, I think I got one snap of him and you don’t generally know if you’ve got a good picture, but I knew then I wasn’t going to beat that and I never got a better picture.”

Veteran civil rights activists Eamon McCann says it was emblematic of the struggle at that time.

“It was a mass struggle and you can see that in the picture,” he said. “Paddy Coyle represented a whole lot of people in a whole lot of places at the time.

“Civil rights was against oppression, for a fair voting system and against discrimination. These are all civil rights demands and they’re not specific to Ireland at all. That’s why that photograph has gone all around the world. It ended up on T-shirts, tea towels, postcards and so forth. Paddy never got any money for these, and he didn’t ask for it either.

“Never was an image of a man more widely distributed without any attribution or acknowledgement, and he didn’t seek to be acknowledged, so that’s fair enough.”

Mr McCann added that the photo was one of the defining images of the conflict “without any doubt”.

“It’s to do with the period of the Troubles and the fight for democracy and against sectarianism rather than what came later,” he said.

“In 1969 and what was happening in northern Ireland was widely seen, and rightly seen, in the context of all the other struggles going on in the world.

“The Americans were against the Vietnam War and so forth. At that time with what was happening in Derry and Belfast could be seen, and was seen by some people, as part and parcel of what was happening globally and not just our own struggle for Irish freedom.”

Urgent Appeal