Molly

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I'm not sure this is quite what Delacroix had in mind when he painted "Liberty leading the people" at the time of the 1830 revolt against Charles X. His Marianne was almost equally well endowed but not a patch on our Molly

This is Molly as we normally think of her, wheeling her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow - from Grafton Street to Andrew Street as it happens.

This piece of street sculpture has fascinated me since it appeared on the streets of Dublin. Boobs aside, it is a most expressive and elusive piece of work.

I have strung together here just a few of the photos I have taken as I passed by. Molly can be domineering, teasing, bewildered, coy, attractive and even pretty.

Some people may feel the boobs intrusive but I have seen them defended on the basis that in those days mothers were breastfeeding all over the place and boobs were popping in and out like nobody's business.

Quite a current resonance then.

I always felt she was up for more than just pushing a wheelbarrow round the streets of Dublin. These photos show just a few of the Mollys encapsulated in this one piece of street sculpture.

This lady could be mistress of one of those nearby Georgian Houses instead of delivering fish to the door.

Here she is in her new, temporary, location in Andrew Street, outside the church that now serves as a tourist office.

This is her most assertive pose. You can feel the steel, so to speak, and this is the one I used to give her a play at being Marianne for Delacroix.

But I'd prefer to leave you with this one which has an air of gentility and serenity about it.

The background is a building currently, and conveniently, being renovated in Suffolk Street.

Molly was sculpted by Dubliner Jeanne Rynhart.

Marianne

I had occasion recently to do a clearout of old papers in the course of which I came across a very interesting monograph written in 1985 on the crisis in Northern Ireland. You might like to read it? But first a bit of background on the author.

Marianne was born in France of Irish-French parents, and French was the language of the home.

When it came to career time, she decided she wanted to be an interpreter and went to the interpretation school in Geneva, just across the border from where she lived in France.

Sensibly, one of the course requirements was to spend some time in a country of the language she was hoping to interpret, and, while there, complete a monograph on some aspect of that country's linguistic, social or political life.

Marianne was taking English and Spanish, and, as she had Irish relations, she decided to come to Ireland and do her English language monograph here. Given the intensity of the Northern Ireland problem at that time (1985) she decided to do the monograph on the North.

She read widely around the subject before she put pen to paper and when she got around to formulating her outline she had a well thought out analysis of the situation from a political science viewpoint.

One aspect of her approach was to distinguish between what was going on at the political level on the one hand and the underlying interplay of violence (physical force) on the other. In doing this, she naturally assigned the IRA, UDA, RUC, Crown Forces etc. into the latter category. At the end of the day, these entities were all engaged in trying to force a military solution (or underpin a political one with force).

I thought this a perfectly valid academic approach to analysing the problem. Imagine my surprise then when her supervisor in Geneva threw a freaker. No way were the Forces of the Crown going to appear in the same bucket as the IRA. She was told that these two groups were in no way morally equivalent and could not therefore be lumped into the same section of the analysis.

What a load of cobblers that was. But what provoked this irrational, unscientific and unacademic outburst? The explanation soon emerged. Her supervisor was British.

As she needed her qualification, she had to compromise, which she did, barely.

You can read her paper here. I think that anyone with a modicum of understanding of the Northern Ireland situation, as it evolved up to 1985, and, indeed, since, will see that the paper was well thought out, and even prescient.

I leave it to you to judge.