Mural in Carlow town destroyed with graffiti
The mural by the River Burrin was vandalised last week
“I WISH they’d come to me, I’d have given them something useful to do,” said artist Gala Hutton of the vandals who sprayed black tags over his love-themed mural along the Burrin river in Carlow town. “It was meant to be a walk-through experience and now they've obviously decided to add to it,” he said.
Gala completed the brightly-coloured mural last year and was mildly impressed that it took this long for it to be vandalised. “It's been doing really well. It was untouched until recently,” he noted, crediting the locals who have been keeping an eye on it.
Online, people were less calm about the appearance of meaningless tags on a piece of community art, calling it ‘rotten’ and ‘disgraceful.’ Matt Cocci, chairperson of Carlow tidy towns committee, said the group was “frustrated” at the appearance of yet more vandalism.
“We’ve been fighting graffiti forever, it's a never-ending battle,” he said. The group regularly cleans and paints over graffiti in the town and along the Barrow track, a hotspot for spray painters.
“It's disheartening for any artist or community to see a mural defaced like this,” he said. Matt is even considering installing a PVC artwork in a new community garden, which can be replaced if it is vandalised, rather than deal with potential graffiti. “The community and the council want to beautify the areas. But at the back of our heads, we're thinking ‘are we going to put the time and effort just for a kid to come around with a spray can’?’’ He described the graffiti artists as having “no respect for their community. I can’t understand why teenagers get a kick out of it. We’ve got to give them an outlet. If we had a wall designated as part of the skate park, then there’s no reason for them to go anywhere else.” He pointed to the graffiti art workshops available during Carlow Arts Festival that encourage young people to hone their craft rather than replicate meaningless tags.
Because it is difficult for gardaí to identify or charge the young people who commit this form of criminal damage, Matt suggested that the community, instead, should come together and call out the perpetrators.
