On Halloween in 2005, filmmaker Ross McDonnell was walking through Ballymun, a suburb on the northern edge of Dublin’s Northside, when a teenager approached him. The boy, a resident of the estate’s notorious tower blocks, led him to a roaring bonfire composed of cars and debris, a beacon of destruction among the concrete. Carjacking, joyriding and arson were commonplace in Ballymun, as much acts of recreation as criminality in one of Ireland’s most impoverished areas. Ross, a Dublin native who for years had driven past the seven towers as a film student, felt compelled to document their residents, so often caricatured according to Ballymun’s reputation for drug use and deprivation — but rarely afforded the chance to present their own perspectives.
Source: Ross McDonnell photo youth culture and community n an estate doomed for demolition – i-D