From statues to skorts, Ireland’s talent for preoccupation with the wrong things is intact |
By the time the end of year round-ups roll round, some of the stories that preoccupied us during the previous 12 months already seem to belong to a different era. These are the news stories that shouldn’t have been news – not because the media should not have covered them, but because it’s hard to believe these were real events and not a fever dream.
Ireland has always had talent for getting worked up about all the wrong things – particularly, it seems, where women are concerned – and this year was no exception.
Ireland finally began to take sexual assaults on women seriously last spring. About time, you might think – except there was a caveat. A tiny one. The sexual assaults in question did not involve real women, or even a real woman, but a bronze statue of Molly Malone.
We have a long history of projecting all sorts of values on to statues in this country. Forty years ago, it was the statues of Our Lady that were seen to sway, raise their hands and cry blood read tears in places like Ballinspittle and Asdee. In the mid-1980s, moving statues became a battleground for the piety of a nation that found itself squarely divided into believers and sceptics, and a distraction, or maybe a purification, from the awful events in Tralee, where the revelations of the Kerry babies tribunal were laying bare the darkest corners of the Irish psyche.
In 2025, a year when woman after woman bravely waived her anonymity to go public with stories of violence and abuse, because they had had enough of the collective silence on this issue, a bronze statue of a voluptuous Molly Malone became an........