This is Robert Ballagh

Robert Ballagh (born 22 September 1943) is an Irish artist, painter and designer. He was born in Dublin and studied architecture at the Bolton Street College of Technology. His painting style was strongly influenced by pop art. He is particularly capably known for his hyperealistic renderings of well known Irish literary, historical or initiation figures.

Ballagh grew taking place in a ground-floor flat upon Elgin Road in Ballsbridge, the abandoned child of a Catholic mommy and a Presbyterian dad who converted to Catholicism, both of whom had played sport for Ireland. He became an nonbeliever while brute educated at St Michael’s College and Blackrock College. Before turning to art as a profession, he was a professional musician later the showband Chessmen. He met his future wife Betty bearing in mind she was 16 years old; she died in 2011. He met artiste Michael Farrell during this period, and Farrell recruited him to encourage with a large mural commission, which was painted at Ardmore Studios.

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Ballagh represented Ireland at the 1969 Biennale de Paris. Among the theatre sets he has meant are sets for Riverdance,I’ll Go On, Gate Theatre (1985),Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1991) and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1998). He has with designed greater than 70 Irish postage stamps and the last series of Irish banknotes, “Series C”, before the foundation of the euro. He is a fanatic of Aosdána. Ballagh’s paintings are held in several public collections of Irish painting including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Lane Gallery, the Ulster Museum, Trinity College Dublin, and Nuremberg’s Albrecht Dürer House.

The late-1960s Civil Rights Movement in British-controlled Northern Ireland and the brutal wave of the authorities gave him an long-lasting interest in republican politics. In 1988 he contributed to the West Belfast Féile an Phobail arts festival. In 1989 he was a founder devotee of the Irish National Congress and chaired it for 10 years. In 1991, he co-ordinated the 75th anniversary commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising, during which he claimed he had been harassed by the Special Branch of the Garda Síochána.

He is the president of the Ireland Institute for Historical and Cultural Studies, which promotes international republicanism. It is based at the extra Pearse middle at 27 Pearse Street, Dublin. It was birthplace of Pádraig Pearse in 1879.

In July 2011 it was reported that he might regard as being running for the 2011 Irish Presidential election similar to the sponsorship of Sinn Féin and the United Left Alliance. A Sinn Féin source stated there had been “very informal discussions” and that Ballagh’s nomination was “a possibility” but “very floating at this stage”. However, on 25 July Ballagh ruled out management in the election, saying that he had never considered mammal a candidate. His discussions bearing in mind the parties had been nearly the election “in general” and he had no ambitions to rule for political office.

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That same month, Ballagh broke ranks when his colleagues in the travelling production of Riverdance in their decision to be active in Israel. Ballagh is an active advocate of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which has insisted that artists and academics participate in boycotts of Israeli businesses and cultural institutions.

In October 2011, Ballagh attributed Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness in his Irish presidential election bid.

In July 2012, Ballagh said he was “ashamed and profoundly depressed” at the en masse closure of Irish galleries and museums. He cited an example of some Americans and Canadians upon holiday in Ireland. “They described most of the National Gallery as creature closed along bearing in mind several rooms in the Hugh Lane Gallery. I’m happy they didn’t objection going out to the Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham because that’s closed too. At the dwindling I met them, they were returning from Galway where they had found the Nora Barnacle Museum closed too.” Ballagh condemned the hypocrisy of political leaders, saying: “I know arts funding is not a big issue for people struggling to put food upon the table but we are talking about the soul of the nation.”

He published his autobiography A Reluctant Memoir in 2018.

In 2019, he appeared as a contestant on RTÉ’s Celebrity Home of the Year, where his home finished in second place.

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