‘Leave Molly mAlone’, statue gropers told
Throngs of tourists swarm Suffolk Street day after day to glimpse the pride of Dublin that stands outside St Andrew’s Church: a statue of Molly Malone, the folkloric fishmonger commemorated in the city’s unofficial anthem “Cockles and Mussels”.
Many of them do more than look: In what’s become an odd tradition that tour guides claim brings good luck, visitors frequently grope the statue. The practice is so widespread and long-standing that the chest on the bronze statue has become discoloured.
Critics say it’s gone on too long. Ray Yeates, the city arts officer for the Dublin City Council, told The Washington Post that the wear and tear shows “a lack of respect for the statue,” which was installed in 1988. And a Trinity College Dublin student who routinely holds street performances, singing and playing guitar nearb,y has started a campaign she calls “Leave Molly mAlone” to protect a statue that has become a fixture in Irish culture.
“I just got more and more frustrated with the way Molly Malone - who is a national treasure and a national icon - was being disrespected,” Tilly Cripwell said. “People were making a mockery of her.”
In his research paper “The Legend of Molly Malone,” Irish historian Sean Murphy said he, like many Dubliners, grew up thinking that the subject of “Cockles and Mussels” was a fictional character from a song set in the 1800s.
But in 1988 officials announced they had found baptism and burial records in the registers of St John’s Church for a “Mary Mallone” who lived to the age of 36 in the second half of the 17th century.
Some of the “research” conducted to legitimise the claim she was real portrayed Molly as someone who “freelanced as a prostitute.”
“Molly’s statue was also clad with an extremely low-cut dress, on the grounds that ‘women breastfed publicly in Molly’s time’,” Murphy said in his paper, quoting a 1989 Irish Times article.
Cripwell, now 22, didn’t know much about the myth of Molly Malone before she started busking a year-and-a-half ago outside St Andrew’s because the town square-like area has good acoustics, and the statue engrossed hordes of tourists.
Cripwell quickly noticed that they almost inevitably rubbed or groped the statue’s breasts. Some guides even encouraged tourists to do so - “for luck, allegedly,” she said.
“I have a microphone when busking and a bit of a platform,” she said. “I wanted to do something about it.”
Cripwell said she recently worked with two feminist organisations as part of the campaign. A representative from one of them wrote on the ground in chalk “Groping isn’t good luck” and “Leave me Malone”. Someone with the other group held a sign that read “Leave Molly Alone” while Cripwell performed a remix of “Cockles and Mussels” that she wrote for her campaign.
“In Dublin’s fair city, they all say she’s pretty, but they choose to show it by touching her so,” Cripwell sang, later adding, “Now no one can save her from the people who claim her, and I want to scream, ‘Just leave Molly alone’!”
Washington Post