"The Statue" is to Cork city what "the Pillar" used to be to Dublin: a place more than a monument. Situated where Patrick Street meets Patrick's Bridge and looking towards the height of Patrick's Hill, the statue, inanimate though it may be, has been part of the city's life since 1864.
It commemorates Father Theobald Mathew, "the Apostle of Temperance", one of Ireland's most celebrated Capuchin priests and founder of the total abstinence movement.
The statue still has a central significance for Cork, but now its days dominating the main street are numbered. Under the £7 million plan for the refurbishment of Patrick Street and Grand Parade it is to be moved to an inferior junction at Winthrop Street.
If it was the vintners who wanted to shift Father Mathew one could understand it, because of the damage inflicted on their business during the years of his crusade. But the vintners of today aren't worried by the trials of Victorian hostelries. Instead it's the city fathers, the heirs of the very people who most applauded the priest, who want him to move out of the way of the grand new scheme which is going to transform the city centre.
This is the result of an international competition won by the Spanish architect Beth Gali. Cork Corporation says that a public consultation process is to be held to assess the response to the designs tendered - and accepted - for the city. These are posted at the Vision Centre in North Main Street; but it must be said - and the Corporation spokesman, Finbarr Long, accepts this - that these drawings are almost impervious to interpretation by lay people.
Little reaction
Perhaps not surprisingly, they haven't produced much reaction. "The people are just not in tune with it," says Long, who anticipates a summer of detailed explanations. What, for example, is to happen to Mangan's clock, another important street marker? Nothing; he thinks the new scheme will accommodate that slender structure. The problem for the statue is that the pavement on one side of Patrick Street is to be widened to give a plaza-like Continental effect, and on the other side is to be narrowed to allow for traffic movement.
Changes are to be made also on Grand Parade; again, traffic-flow is the excuse for the possible removal of the Berwick Fountain, a three-tiered ornamental commemorative structure designed by Sir John Benson in 1860. It was commissioned by Walter Berwick Esq., "in remembrance of the great kindness shown to him by all classes in the city and county of Cork while presiding amongst them for 12 years as Chairman of the Quarter Sessions. . ."
Irish-speaking dogs
It is a thank-you note to Cork, just as the Father Mathew statue is a thank-you note from Cork. Directly across the road from Father Mathew is a little, wall-mounted limestone drinking bowl, its curved basin cut with the letters spelling "madrai". This too has its own provenance: its designer, Seamus Murphy, called it the world's only cut-stone drinking trough for Irish-speaking dogs; it was commissioned in 1950 by Keith Stokes (of the clock repair business) as a gesture to the hounds of all descriptions tied up outside his Milk Bar restaurant on Patrick Street while their owners regaled themselves inside.
This too is under sentence of removal. But surely a streetscape, however innovative and important, shouldn't simply dispose of features which have been part of the city's geography for many years? The new design takes precedence over old affiliations, and a modern architect can decide what is important to the people of a foreign city - unless, of course, the people offer a reminder themselves, as they are invited to do. But will they? Will the people of Cork oppose the relocation of Father Mathew, whose reputation as an evangelist of abstinence obscures his many other important attributes?
"He is almost the only man, too, that I have met in Ireland who in speaking of public matters, did not talk as a partisan. With the state of the country, of landlord, tenant, and peasantry, he seemed to be most curiously and intimately acquainted. . .His knowledge of the people is prodigious, and their confidence in him as great; and what a touching attachment that is which these poor fellows show to anyone who has their cause at heart." Thus William Makepeace Thackeray recorded his meeting with the priest in his Irish Sketchbook of 1843; that was before the Great Famine, of which Father Mathew was one of the very first to warn the British authorities and during which he worked with heroic diligence to save lives and redeem or condemn those who made blatant profit from the catastrophe.
Cholera epidemic
Born at Thomastown, Co Tipperary in 1790, Theobald Mathew was ordained in 1814 and had been some years in Cork when the city was stricken by a cholera epidemic. His experiences of helping the stricken, allied to his role as a governer of the Cork workhouse and visitor of the condemned at Cork jail, encouraged him to join the temperance movement which had been begun already in Cork by a small group led by a Protestant, a Unitarian and a Quaker. Their efforts aroused only "laughter and derision" from the populace, according to the biography by John Francis Maguire. In 1838 the four men gathered at a house in Cove Street; later they held a public gathering after which, says Maguire, the priest became public property.
Within weeks of his death in 1856 a public meeting resolved that a statue should be erected in one of the public thoroughfares of the city, and in 1864 it was unveiled "to the delighted gaze of one hundred thousand people."