Gang war in Crumlin, suicide in Midleton, war in Iraq, curtailed lives in Africa - Brian Maguire, on sabbatical in Paris, is an artist who refuses to ignore painful issues or political injustice, writes Lara Marlowe

THE METRO stations on the way to the Irish painter Brian Maguire's studio - Stalingrad, Crimea - conjure up images of hardship and war, which seems fitting for a painter whose biography on the Kerlin Gallery website notes: "He has consistently brought his mordant wit and savage indignation to bear on the indignities inflicted on the oppressed individual."

Maguire's habitat, in the far reaches of Paris's 19th arrondissement, is not, he jokes, "a Gucci world". Soviet-style concrete boxes line the boulevard de Flandres. Local residents are Asian, African and Arab, from all corners of France's former empire.

In our era of self-obsession and conspicuous consumption, Maguire is one of a dying breed; a genuine artiste engagé. He dismisses critics who believe that artists should be craftsmen tasked to create beauty. "Picasso was attacked for being a member of the communist party, and he said: 'What do you think we are? Monkeys who paint?' We are people. I have always been engaged in politics. Marxist criticism of society made sense."

Maguire grew up in Bray, where his father was a chargehand in a shop. He became an artist because "probably it was the only thing I was ever praised for". He studied at the National College of Art and Design, where he became a professor and head of the faculty of fine art in 2000.

Maguire has spent the first half of his sabbatical from NCAD producing 18 paintings, which he is about to exhibit at Dublin's Kerlin Gallery. He will spend the second half working in Africa and teaching art in Ramallah.

Even Maguire's decision to buy a studio in Paris was determined by international politics. He usually paints in the US every summer, in New York or Idaho. But in 2003, following the US invasion of Iraq, "it was just the way America was going that year - I didn't want to spend money there, to tell you the truth". So Maguire painted in Paris instead. He grew to like the working-class immigrant neighbourhood and purchased an airy studio above the print shop where the late Irish artist, Michael Farrell, made his lithographs.

"When I came to make this show, I was still wondering not so much about the events of Iraq, but about the debate that occurred and the Bush line that we're going to bring democracy to this country, which was never really challenged as hypocrisy," Maguire says. "So I began with two paintings: first [assassinated Chilean president] Allende and [assassinated prime minister of Congo] Lumumba. These were two elected leaders of their countries and American presidents ordered their removal from power and their executions . . . I felt that this information should have been part of the discussion, and it wasn't."

Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon are the painters whom Maguire most admires. Both influences are clearly visible in his work. He considers himself an expressionist, like the German painters of the 1930s.

In Maguire's mind, there is no break between the outrages of decades past and ongoing injustice. He has painted Tommie Smith, the black American gold medal winner who, with bronze medallist John Carlos, gave a black power salute on the podium at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Both men were stripped of their medals and hounded by the FBI.

Maguire painted the banners of the Irish regiments who served with the British army, in Saint Patrick's Cathedral. "It's as much a part of our history as anything, but it's lost. This is something that has become hidden. By painting it, I bring it out. If there's a logic behind my work, that's it," he says.

Hence the title of Maguire's show: Hidden Islands: Notes from the War on the Poor.

MAGUIRE IS SCANDALISED by the gang war that has claimed the lives of 13 young men in Crumlin in recent years. "It came out of resentment over damage to a motorbike, for fuck's sake," he says. "The only response is a criminal justice response. There is no political response to this feud, no attempt at mediation, other than perhaps some priests. There's no use of the State apparatus."

When Maguire represented Ireland at the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennale, he painted young criminals from headshots published in newspapers. The same method inspired his Crumlin Youth. Though Maguire has researched the Crumlin feud and knows "who did what to whom", he has made the face unrecognisable.

"I have tried to paint it in such a way that it shows what happened to him," he says. "He's been wiped out. The painting is of a guy who's been erased."

A triptych from Midleton, east Cork, was inspired by the town's former record as the world suicide capital. "There is a walk where everyone who is buried killed himself," Maguire says. "When you enter, there's a dramatic national graveyard. As many people died fighting the British as those who died by their own hand 100 years later. There's something in this . . . All this work is an X. It's like making an X, making a mark and drawing attention to something."

The father and brother of one of the suicide victims set up an organisation "whose pride now rests in the fact that if they get a cry for help, they can have a counsellor with that person in seven minutes". The suicide rate in Midleton fell from 33 to three over successive three-year periods.

But Maguire is still angry with the politicians. The hotline organisers in Midleton "were going to push a coffin to Dublin to look for support", he recounts. "They met the prime minister, Bertie, and he offered them €80,000. But they never got the money. I heard about it on a radio programme that follows up promises. They rang his unfortunate PR official, who hung up on them. The result was I went down to meet the guy. I was able to make a painting."

An image resembling an infant in a pram was inspired by a prisoner Maguire saw strapped to a trolley and abandoned temporarily outside a police station in Brooklyn. "I've worked in American prisons and I know how you become nothing," he explains. "You are just there to be ordered about, and you can be left on the side of the road."

Guest Worker was inspired by the employment policies of Irish Ferries. It shows a man whose mouth is gagged, squatting on a weighing scale. "The nature of being a guest worker is that you don't have a vote, you can't bring your family and your value is in relation to your productivity - and this is why he's on a scales, with no genitals and no voice," Maguire says.

A large blue, green and grey canvas shows a supine figure being slotted into a brain scanner. Maguire became familiar with the machines when his own father suffered a stroke and, like many in Ireland, had to wait for a diagnosis.

But his anger over inadequate medical care in Ireland is tempered by outrage over conditions in Africa. "They don't need it, because they're all dead at 41," he says. "The average life expectancy is 41 across central Africa, and it's 82 across northern Europe. It's a giant accusation, surely."

I PUT IT to Maguire that he is the last of the angry young men. At 57, "I'm hardly young any more, for f**k's sake," he says, laughing. "For me, most art comes from a spirit of revenge, sometimes from a spirit of love, but not often."

His own work comes "mostly from the desire to say 'this is happening', and that's seeking revenge for some kind of injustice."

Yet the effect of Maguire's paintings is less bleak than you'd expect. "If you say something with passion, if you are angry, in itself the thing is optimistic," he says. He gestures to images of his paintings in a catalogue. There are bright oranges, turquoises, yellows. "If you look at it from a distance, it is quite colourful."

Maguire's work is represented in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the The Hugh Lane Gallery, as well as museums in Holland and Finland and private collections in the US and Germany. His paintings range in price from €4,000 to €20,000.

"I've sold everything I've ever made," he says. "I don't know how this works, but it has worked. I have very little work in stock."

One painting, of a classical French armchair, seems out of character. "The chair is like bourgeois life," Maguire confesses. "It was a gift, and it's quite comfortable. A lot of the deprivation and murder in the world happens so that people can have good suits, myself included. It's about power and wealth."

Is a little luxury a bad thing, I ask. "No," he replies. "I like the chair. I'm not a Calvinist. I didn't throw the chair out, and I'm not embarrassed by it. But I still see it has another meaning. I have as many contradictions as the next man."

Brian Maguire's exhibition, Hidden Islands: Notes from the War on the Poor, is at the Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2, until Apr 19