Unfit to Plinth? – Frank McNally on Ireland’s uneasy – and sometimes violent – relationship with statues

Walking along Dublin’s O’Connell Street at the weekend and thinking about statues, I found myself struggling to recall the identity of the two men on plinths between Daniel O’Connell and Jim Larkin. Both are overshadowed by their more famous neighbours: dwarfed by the sheer size of the O’Connell monument on one side and outshone by the personality of Larkin’s on the other.

The latter, sculpted by Oisín Kelly in 1979, did for Dublin’s political statuary what Michael Flatley would do for Irish dancing – raising both arms, in defiance of convention (Larkin’s arms have arguably aged better than Flatley’s puff-sleeved shirt).

Memory still blank about the other two, I had to cross the street to read the inscriptions and remind myself that they were William Smith O’Brien, Young Irelander, and John Gray, nationalist MP and journalist of the same era.

Both date from the 1870s and are so similar – they were by the same sculptor, Thomas Farrell – that they now almost blend into one.

From Leningrad to Louth – Frank McNally on a little piece of Ireland that is forever Russia

---

Paris on a shoestring – Frank McNally on James Joyce, TS Eliot, and the art of revenge hospitality

---

A Man You Could Count On – Frank McNally on Richard Taaffe, aka ‘Uncle Yaxy’, who brought Austrian imperial secrets to Dublin

---

Blarney Barney – Frank McNally on a tale of two euphemisms

---

Their chromatic and sexual homogeny may also explain why both suffered minor graffiti damage –only chalk – during the recent demonstrations. And yet politically, 150 years on, both are on the side of the latter-day angels.

Despite being one of the more moderate leaders of the 1848 Rebellion, Smith O’Brien was transported to Tasmania for his speeches. Nor, unlike fellow patriot John Mitchell, did he blot his record on the slavery debate. As for Gray, his contribution to the poor of Dublin rivals Larkin’s if only in that he instigated the scheme that brought clean water from Wicklow’s Vartry river for use in the city. He may have saved more lives than trade unionism.

***

As I now know, those two statues were not supposed to be so close. Later that day, by sheer coincidence, I started re-reading Ulysses again (yes – I swear – this will be my fourth time). And unlike previous occasions, I now noticed that during the trip to Glasnevin for Paddy Dignam’s funeral, while crossing the Liffey from the southside, Leopold Bloom’s carriage passes Smith O’Brien’s statue before O’Connell’s.

Bloom notices flowers laid under the Young Irelander and thinks: “Must he his deathday” (in fact it was Smith O’Brien’s 50th anniversary, or near enough). Then, several paragraphs later, we read: “They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator’s Form.”

Was this Joyce getting his statue order mixed up, I wondered? No. It turns out that Smith O’Brien’s monument was originally a Southsider, located on the O’Connell Bridge end of D’Olier Street, where it served as a traffic island until traffic overwhelmed it, forcing relocation in 1929.

That was a big year for moving statues in Ireland. It also marked the end of the line for King William III and his horse on College Green, which had been the most reviled sculpture in Dublin for over two centuries.

A writer in 1898 noted that, even then, it had been “insulted, mutilated and blown up so many times that the original figure, never particularly graceful, is now a battered wreck”. Another explosion in 1929 was the last straw. With new political management in Dublin by then, King Billy was finally deposed.

***

Ireland’s 20th-century war on statuary (not to be confused with the 21st-century one, which seems to be aimed mainly at Luke Kelly) frequently involved explosives. Lord Nelson was the most famous example, but the Earl of Carlisle and Field Marshal Gough had both gone the same way, a decade earlier, from plinths in Phoenix Park.

More peaceful, although deeply ironic, was the fate of Queen Victoria, who in the early years of independence had sat awkwardly at Leinster House. A few years after Smith O’Brien was promoted to Dublin’s main street, it was her turn to be transported to Australia, as a recycled gift to Sydney.

Few statues here suffered the same indignity as that of Edward Colston in Bristol.  Even in Dublin, where the Liffey was conveniently close to many unwanted memorials, only the 1950s “Tomb of the Unknown Gurrier”, a crime against taste rather than politics, received a watery grave.

But in post-independence Galway, at least, one prominent statue did go the way of Colston’s. After his death in 1867, Lord Dunkellin, aka Ulick de Burgh, had been commemorated in Eyre Square with a sculpture partly funded by donations extorted from his unadmiring tenants.

One night in 1922, they had their revenge. First the statue was sawn through, then pulled down.

It was dragged by its neck towards the Claddagh, accompanied by a crowd of thousands, including bands. Dunkellin was thrown into the sea, reportedly, to the soundtrack of a then-recent hit, I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.