The Swallowing Tree
David Farrell

Farrell made his first photograph of what he would subsequently term ‘The Swallowing Tree’ during the first search in 1999 for the bodies of Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright at Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown. These two young men belonged to a small group of people who became known as the Disappeared from the conflict in Northern Ireland. These people were all Catholics who had been vanished by the republican movement in the 1970s and early 1980s as a means of ‘policing’ their community. What separated these people from other atrocities was the absolute denial of their fate and whereabouts by the IRA. They hovered in a limbo-land of uncertainty and doubt. Eventually in 1999, as part of the peace process, the IRA admitted the ‘killing and secret burial’ of ten people and released a list of locations where nine of these people had been buried. These named locations were mostly anonymous bogs but they shared one final twist of fate. All the locations were in the South of Ireland. These people had been exiled in death.¹ (150-250 words)

David Farrell, born in Dublin in 1961, is a fine art landscape Photographer of the Real World.

Latent Image Editions was set up by David Farrell, as a way of publishing his own books.