The artist had been working on this painting for a two year period and it was not until it was well advanced that the main image was introduced, up to that the point the work had been a more generalised expression of the troubles in Northern Ireland. As with previous works the artist had found the image in a newspaper; The Sunday Timeshad covered the story of a car bombing in Talbot Street in Dublin and carried a photograph of one of the victims covered with the evening newspapers. For the artist the juxtaposition of this image against the formalist contrivances of the rest of the painting seemed to symbolise the psychological and emotional trauma of ‘the troubles’. Sometime after the work was completed Donagh visited Dublin and went to the site of the disaster and spoke to the boy selling newspapers in exactly the same spot where the bomb had exploded. He told the artist ‘.. everyone thought that it was me who had been killed but it was one of my customers, he shielded me from the blast’.

Further reading:
Rita Donagh Paintings and Drawings, Whitworth Art Gallery/Arts Council of Great Britain 1977 (texts by Rita Donagh)