Dublin Festival of History to bring city's past to life

What happened to the so-called 'Floozie in the Jacuzzi' after the infamous statue was decommissioned from O'Connell Street? That is just one of the stories being told as part of the Dublin Festival of History that got under way over the weekend.

Three hundred events exploring the capital's past, are taking place over the next fortnight in what organisers say is the largest free history festival in the world.

One of the many talks recounts the history of the Anna Livia monument, erected on O'Connell Street in 1988 as part of the capital's millennium celebrations.

The statue of a woman reclining in a concrete plinth surrounded by water, was picked without public consultation and was controversial from the start.

An RTÉ News report from the time, by the late Charlie Bird, reports that when its design was revealed one politician described it as "The Tomb to the Unknown Guerrier".

The Anna Livia statue later developed a number of nicknames including the Floozie in the Jacuzzi, inspired in part by the number of times that people poured dishwasher soap into her fountain turning her water bath into bubbles.

People also began dipping their feet in the fountain and occasionally bathing in it, but businesses on O'Connell Street also criticised the amount of rubbish thrown into the monument and the number of people they regarded as loitering around it, as the surrounds of the concrete plinth could seat around two hundred people.

After thirteen controversial years, in 2001 Dublin City Council decommissioned the statue, as part of a regeneration plan for O'Connell Street and to make way for the erection of the Spire.

After ten years in storage in St. Annes Park in Dublin, the Anna Livia statue was moved to the Croppies Memorial Park beside Heuston Station, where she now appears to levitate over a small pond.

Aoife McCloughlin, Curator and Art Historian says the statue, now extracted from her concrete plinth, has been in the park for fifteen years, unbeknownst to most Dubliners.

"I think she kind of lives a half life in this current location. People don't realize that she's actually kind of tucked away, like hidden in plain sight.

"It's interesting to see her get another life but I think it brings up interesting questions about the afterlives of sculptures and their longevity," Ms McCloughlin said.

Her talk as part of the Festival of History, "The Life Cycle of Public Art, and the Anna Livia / Molly Malone sculptures from inception to public reception, 1988 to present" also examines how people interact with these two female statues.

"The fact that they're both at a low level to the ground, they're very accessible, in contrast to a lot of the statues of men around the city, which are on top of plinths and very inaccessible.

"I think it's very nuanced. The kind of public engagement with the works, brings up the question whether public engagement can be seen as engagement or whether it could be seen as vandalism," Ms McCloughlin said.

"When you look at the newspaper archives, things get dismissed as vandalism. It's good to take a step back and actually analyse what's happening here.

"I would view putting the washing up liquid in the fountain as a positive form of public engagement, whereas touching the breasts of Molly Malone, I'd see that as a negative, it deteriorates the statue, so it could be considered a form of vandalism," she added.

An insight into life in the Iveagh Trust is also part of the festival programme, with rare access being granted to a flat preserved after its long time residents passing.

Nellie Molloy lived in the flat from 1915, when she was eight years old, until her death in 2002 and the items there show how three generations of her family lived during different stages of the twentieth century.

Ray Woods, Former Estate Manager with the Iveagh Trust and his colleague Rachel Murphy are giving a number of tours of Nellies Flat as part of the festival, which Mr Woods describes as like stepping into a time capsule.

"My favourite room was the parents' bedroom, it doubled as an eating area and cooking area. There was a curtain over the bed that they pulled, just to hide off that it was actually a bedroom. The cooker would have heated up the flat as well."

"This was luxury. There were three rooms. When you consider that there were 26,000 people in the tenements, 20,000 families, up to 13 people lived in one room, so coming into this would have been luxury. They were delighted. They had come from one room across the hall," Mr Woods said.

"The modern history of Ireland from the formation of the State is pretty much encapsulated in what went out on outside those windows from during the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence and the Civil War all went on out on Patrick Street.

It was a mirror to the world. That's why Nellie loved it here. She never moved, never wanted to move, never wanted a thing changed in the flats. She loved it," Mr Woods added.

Donal Fallon, Social Historian and Programmer with the Dublin Festival of History says the festival is the largest free history event in the world

"There are more than 300 events in it. Lots of the talks are about big anniversaries, there's great ones this year, such as 300 years since Gulliver's Travels was published, but also local history, social history, national and international history. There's something in the program for everyone."

"We have the four historians from each of the Dublin League of Ireland clubs in the same room at the same time, up in Cabra Library. We also have to remind ourselves that sport is our own living history and our own living memory."

"We have talks on architectural history. In 14 Henrietta Street there's a talk on Christy Brown. We have tours that bring you into places that you'd never get into. That's really important to me to open up the doors of the city to people.

"I see the job of the Dublin Festival of History being to make Dubliners and everyone who lives in Dublin think again about the past and the role it plays in their lives."

The Festival of History runs until the 11 October.