ZOZIMUS

THE only people throwing a good party these days seem to be the gays — and the gay lawyers definitely got the crowds out when they booked the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin for their gig last Thursday night.

Zozimus enjoyed a few glasses of wine, courtesy of law firm Maples and Calder at the event organised by a new gay legal networking group called OUTlaw. “If there weren’t challenges, there would not be a need for OUTlaw in the first place,” we were told by Peter Ryan, one of the organisers.

Worthies like director general of the Law Society Ken Murphy; Michael Farrell, of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties; Ms Justice Marie Baker; president of the Law Society Patrick Dorgan; and others mixed in the gallery with cool music, cool food and a cool crowd.

“I want to point out some of the issues we as LGBT and the legal profession have to face in the future,” we were told by Ms Justice Aileen Donnelly in her talk, which encompassed gender-fluid, genderqueer, gender-binary and even hermaphrodites — a wonderfully evocative word that we haven’t heard in a long time.

Listening to the learned judge, the whole gender issue seems awfully complicated, but just in case you think it was all heavy-duty stuff, it was a fun night, with Chief Justice Frank Clarke as the “warm up act” for this new networking group of legal eagles. The top lawman in the country told us that the “development of the law requires diversity in those who bring cases, and those who decide them”, and who would argue with that?

******* WE wrote a while back about the lack of equestrian statues in Dublin and the sad fate that befell most of them — either blown up, sold off or given away as presents — because of their historic connections to the British crown.

We weren’t quite sure of the fate of King William III, better known as Dutch Billy of the Boyne fame, who stood in College Green before being removed in 1929 by T&C Crampton (for £25). Last heard of, it was put into storage by what is now Dublin City Council, although there were unconfirmed reports that armed IRA men held up the council depot and sawed off King Billy’s head so that the statue could not be reerected.

Now we discover from a very learned article by Dublin City Archivist Dr Mary Clark that in 1949, “it was agreed” by the City Council to sell the mutilated statue to its own Waterworks Department as scrap metal. Parts of the horse and King Billy, by the renowned sculptor Grinling Gibbons, were used to mend water pipes around the city.

With official vandalism like that, no wonder the Unionists are suspicious about us.

All that remained was the sawn-off head of King Billy and in 1988 that was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in London for £11,000, but later withdrawn. In 1993, a rare book dealer in Washington DC, Joshua Heller, offered a similar head for sale for $45,000. It was said to be brass, rather than lead, so we can’t be sure whether it’s the genuine article. Brass, or not, we should bring it back to Dublin and put it on a plinth as a cross-border gesture of goodwill. ******* THE former RTE journalist Barry O’Halloran, who wrote Lost Innocence, the story of the Kerry Babies Inquiry, has just published another book, although this one is unlikely to make the best-seller lists. O’Halloran, who did a PhD in Classics in Trinity College, has just had his thesis published under the catchy title of The Political Economy of Classical Athens: A Naval Perspective. He includes a series of water colours by Belgian-born but Kerry-based artist Mieke Vanmechelen, of ancient fortifications around the Greek capital that no longer exist but based on original research “For about two decades I was a frequent visitor to Greece and became an avid reader of its history,” O’Halloran tells me from Australia, where he is cycling 1,100km from Melbourne to Adelaide, as you do. “As I visited the famous ancient sites, I was struck by a contradiction between what I was seeing and what I was reading in the history books which claimed that classical Athens had a primitive economy.” O’Halloran has had enough of academia for now and is returning to his journalist roots and is well advanced on another book, Revolution in Athens, which deals with more recent events and will be published next year.