Education correspondent Niall Murray reports on the plan to move the Children of Lir statue to make way for a memorial to victims of residential child abuse
THE Children of Lir in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance are to take temporary flight during the planned construction of a memorial to victims of residential child abuse.
The Oisín Kelly-designed sculpture was made famous around the world during the May 2011 visit of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who laid a wreath at its base in the garden dedicated to those who died in the cause of Irish freedom. But the 7.5m bronze sculpture may now need to be moved while work goes on behind and below it in the Parnell Square garden, just north of O’Connell St.
As part of the Journey of Light design, people would be able to enter Parnell Square from the other side to the Garden of Remembrance and travel through a walkway beneath the 11-tonne sculpture and out into the existing garden.
The project is the subject of a planning application lodged by the Office of Public Works (OPW) last October. As part of its response to queries before Christmas from Dublin City Council planners, details have now been submitted as to how the bronze Children of Lir piece would be moved.
A crane will have to be placed to the right and front of the sculpture, and suitable points of it used to sling it in a manner that does not pose any risk of damage or breakage. The plan devised by the Cork-based National Sculpture Factory, following a site survey late last month, is to move the bronze sculpture to one of two suggested sites either 16m or 40m to the left and front of its existing location.
Oisín Kelly submitted a first design idea around the Children of Lir legend in 1964 and the sculpture was based on a request in 1966 for a redesign based on lines from a poem about the mythical hero Fionn McCumhail. The model was sent to an Italian foundry in Florence for the sculpture to be cast and it arrived by sea at the Dublin quays 18 months later at the end of 1970.
It was formally unveiled in the garden in Jul 1971, marking 50 years since the 1921 British-Irish Truce, five years after the Garden of Remembrance was opened on the Golden Jubilee of the 1916 Easter Rising.
The memorial plan has received mixed reaction from the wider public and from victims of abuse, with some objectors saying the existing tribute to those who lost their lives in Ireland’s long fight for freedom should not be diluted. Many suggested an alternative location should be identified for a suitable memorial to the residential abuse.
Artist and Aosdána member Alice Hanratty’s objection said it would be astonishing to propose “intruding in the sacred space set aside to honour those who sacrificed their lives for our country’s freedom”. Residential abuse survivor and Dublin City Council member Mannix Flynn’s objection last November said a crucifix-shaped pool is the centrepiece of the existing garden and the site would reattach the traumatic memory of those who have experienced abuse to their tormentors, the Church and the State.
“The Children of Lir were turned into swans — metamorphosed, Irish society has had no such metamorphosis with regards the recent histories emerging surrounding abuses and inhumane treatment of children,” he wrote.
The Irish Georgian Society wrote to council planners with concerns about the assertion in the planning application that the memorial represented an “environmental improvement” which would create an “inviting” and “accessible” civic space.
“Conversely, the society anticipates that the construction of the memorial which is subterranean [located under the Children of Lir statue to the rear of an embankment] will provide a dank unsafe space which will attract anti-social behaviour and be wholly at odds with the zoning,” wrote its conservation manager, Emmeline Henderson.
The design by Dublin architects Studio Negri and Hennessy + Associates from Tramore, Co Waterford, won a competition run for the Department of Education last year by the OPW, with two representatives of abuse survivors on the 10-member jury panel. The Journey of Light plan features the words, in English and Irish, of the Government’s apology to residential abuse victims on the walls of two water features that run outside the walkway leading under the Children of Lir sculpture.
The department has set aside a €500,000 budget for the memorial on foot of a recommendation in the 2009 Ryan Report into institutional child abuse.
“While the Children of Lir sculpture signifies rebirth and resurrection, it is simultaneously a representation of lost innocence and a vanished childhood and its incorporation into the design of the new space is hugely symbolic and central to the design philosophy,” wrote the OPW’s planning consultants O’Connor Whelan in a submission with the plans six months ago.
Dublin City Council is expected to come to a decision on the application within a few weeks, after a deadline for submissions on the updated plans passed yesterday.
Artist Name(s): Oisín Kelly
Artwork title: The Children of Lir
Context/Background: The Children of Lir was commissioned for the Garden of Remembrance on Dublin's Parnell Square. The Garden was designed by former Dublin City Architect Daithi P. Hanly, who commissioned Oisín Kelly to make a statue to commemorate Irish freedom fighters. It was unveiled on Easter Monday 1966, the golden jubilee of the Easter Rising, by then President Eamon de Valera. The sculpture drew criticism on the grounds that it was not fitting that a subject from pagan legend, in this case the Children of Lir, should be the basis of a public monument in a Christian country.
Description: Kelly’s work is made of copper bronze and depicts the four figures of the children (Of Lir), and four swans: according to the legend the children were transformed into swans for 300 years.
A plaque next to the statue carries the words:
“In the darkness of despair we saw a vision.
We lit the light of hope and it was not
extinguished. In the desert of discouragement
we saw a vision. We planted the tree of
valour and it blossomed. In the winter of
bondage we saw a vision. We melted the
snow of lethargy and the river of resurrection
flowed from it. We sent our vision aswim
like a swan on the river. The vision became a
reality. Winter became summer. Bondage
became freedom and this we left to you as
our inheritance. O generations of freedom
remember us. The generations of the vision.”
Biographies: Oisín Kelly (1915 - 1981) was born Austin Kelly in Dublin and worked as a teacher until he became artist in residence at the Kilkenny Design Centre in 1966. He initially attended night class at the National College of Art and studied under Henry Moore from 1948–1949.
At first Kelly made small wood carvings and early commissions were mostly for Catholic churches. He became well known after he was commissioned to do a sculpture, The Children of Lir (1964), for Parnell Square's Garden of Remembrance, which opened in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. More public commissions followed, including the statue of James Larkin on Dublin's O'Connell Street and the sculpture Oisín Goes to Tir Na Nóg, at the Irish Life Mall Plaza.