For sale: secure property investments

Declan O’Neill has been snapping up Northern Ireland’s former police stations as they come on the market – but with his camera, not his chequebook

DECLAN O’NEILL is a 43-year-old Antrim-born, London-based artistic and commercial photographer and occasional sculptor.

Last year, knowing he was interested in setting up a home and studio back in Northern Ireland, his uncle, John McElhone, phoned him to suggest he might be interested in purchasing the closed PSNI station in the village of Coagh in Co Tyrone.

O’Neill flew home to have a look but ultimately didn’t put down a bid because the building didn’t quite meet his requirements. He thinks it sold for about £60,000 (€72,000). However, his interest sparked a more artistic fascination in the architectural and security legacy of the Troubles – together with a more personal journey into his own past.

With the Troubles generally viewed as over, it’s an architecture that is rapidly disappearing, says O’Neill. Good riddance, many will say; still, O’Neill felt he had stumbled on structures that needed to be recorded before they were demolished or renovated beyond recognition.

This set him off on a photographic odyssey around the North, capturing pictures of the deserted stations in out-of-the-way places such as Claudy, Kilrea, Markethill, Rathfriland, Kells and Donemana. He photographed stations in every county apart from Fermanagh. “In a way it was about me reconnecting with home and meeting people,” he says.

“These are images that resonated with me from growing up in Northern Ireland. These were places where you would drive past and you couldn’t even peek over the walls because of the security – they were all fences and cameras, and photography was banned as well. You weren’t meant to glimpse them for long. There was a mystery to them.”

Kelly was also conscious of the fact that these are buildings where RUC officers – and, sometimes, British soldiers accommodated with them – worked, ate, lived and slept. And in some cases they died by bomb and bullet.

On some occasions, too, these were buildings where it was the police officers and soldiers who did the killing. O’Neill also photographed Loughgall station in Co Armagh, outside which in 1987 the SAS shot dead eight IRA members and a civilian who had driven into the carefully planned ambush.

Apart from one man in Donemana in Co Tyrone, nobody seems to be buying the buildings as homes, he says. “They are buying them to knock them down or to scrap them because there is so much steel and copper in the fortifications. I was told one man bought a station for £80,000 and scrapped it for £150,000, and was left with a plot to sell as well.”

O’Neill is still on the lookout, and if a station comes up for sale that would suit his needs he may yet make an offer. “Prices range from £60,000 to £150,000 for four- to five-bedroom houses, solidly built – with cells in them as well. In terms of London, where I live, it is for nothing,” he says.

In 2001 the PSNI took over 131 stations. Since then there has been a steady programme of closures, and the current plan is that by 2015 only about 50 working stations should be left. Dozens more stations are due to close in the next few years.

O’Neill says he will continue to photograph the rundown stations and may yet stage an exhibition of his photographs.

“If we don’t look at them now the perspective gets skewed and gets lost, because people haven’t looked at them at the right time. And then they won’t be there any more, and you get a tourist-board image of what these buildings were about, which is completely wrong.”