At its February meeting, the Institute’s Council agreed to confer Honorary Membership on Fergal MacCabe.

Honorary Membership is the highest honour that the Institute can bestow. Honorary Members, if already Corporate Members or Fellows, retain all of the rights that go with those memberships. However, Honorary Members do not have to pay annual subscriptions, and – by long standing tradition – do not have to pay for attendance at Institute events, such as Planning Conferences or CPD sessions.

There are very few Honorary Members on our rolls, most of whom were founder members or previous Presidents of the Institute, with Fergal MacCabe joining Philip Jones, John Martin, Ciaran Tracey, Enda Conway, Patrick Shaffrey, Joan Caffrey, Jan Gehl. Fergal was president of the Institute 1990 – 1991, he is also an author and to mark his Honorary Membership we include a review of his latest book, Faithful Images: Public Art in County Offaly, below.

BOOK REVIEW

EVOCATIONS OF OFFALY

Review by Diarmuid Ó Gráda

MacCabe, Fergal and Paul Moore, Faithful Images: Public Art in County Offaly (Tullamore, Co. Offaly, 2023); 124 pages, price €20

Public art could too easily be dismissed as eclectic bric-a-brac randomly scattered across public spaces. In reality the public realm is a contested space and Irish public art has invariably been divisive. Memorials celebrating imperial heroes have stirred republican emotions. Bombed public statues around the capital include Field Marshall Gough (1944), Admiral Horatio Nelson (1966) and King George IV (1970). Connections with colonial culture also made elegant demesne houses a target for revolutionaries. Later on, some public buildings of the imperial regime were turned into icons of the struggle for freedom. Kilmainham Gaol was the main place of custody during the revolution and Fintan O’Toole has described it as a museum of suffering, a sound-box echoing with last words.

Offaly did more than most to shake off its colonial past. It even changed its name (from King’s County to Offaly) and it saw a disproportionate amount of the demesne house burnings during the revolution. Despite the lapse of time and the turn in taste public art remains controversial and this book on County Offaly confirms that. Offaly Historical And Archaeological Society now brings us an impressive array of monuments and sculptures and they mark the stylistic progress from the reliably classical to the socially realistic, and then moving onwards to more loosely anatomical forms. Readers will be surprised at the range and variety of the material presented by a county with such a modest urban network. And yet again the book’s title is too unassuming as the work includes monuments to landed grandees as well as memorials marking Offaly’s achievements in the sciences, notably cartography (Trig Marker, Croghan Hill, 2019) and distilling (Pot Stills, Tullamore, 1999).

This wide countryside celebrates sporting heroes as diverse as The Hurler (Birr, 2019) and Mick The Miller, a greyhound (Killeigh, 2011). Bogs lie at the damp heart of Offaly and it is fitting that Oisín Kelly’s Turf Cutter (1979) emerges as a stoic survivor. We see that wizened old man leaning earnestly into his task. It’s fitting too that he’s larger than life. Yet we are told he was not supposed to end up in Offaly at all. For over a decade Kelly’s great work graced the Dublin headquarters of Bord na Móna. It was transferred to County Kildare when the Board moved there and was later moved again, ending up in Shannonbridge in west Offaly. Since that peat works was closed the future resting place of the Turf Cutter is unclear. That surely is a pity.

And the hand of reparation reached Offaly’s public monuments, sometimes rising from unexpected sources. A statue of the Duke of Cumberland (Birr, 1747), the loathed butcher of Culloden, was removed when Scottish soldiers were billeted in the town in 1915.

The author Fergal MacCabe is a distinguished architect/planner and a native of Offaly. His entertaining text draws on his own intimate knowledge of the county. MacCabe is also an artist and his striking watercolours were used to great effect in Michael Byrne’s Tullamore, A Portrait (2010). Here he combines with the talented photographer Paul Moore to show us the public art of the faithful county. Moore, an award-winning photographer, is Offaly-based where he has a growing reputation in architectural and commercial work. MacCabe and Moore make a very good team.

This book really helps us to define the faithful county. The chosen page size, 30 cm by 18.5 cm, corresponds to the golden section that is considered pleasing to the human eye. It certainly lends itself to a subject matter that uses a vertical emphasis. Each entry is afforded a geographical bearing and that helps us to find it. There is a growing market for art trails on themes such as Harry Clark’s stained glass windows and Fáilte Ireland might now provide on-line assistance for people on the trail of these Offaly works.

Dr Diarmuid Ó Gráda FIPI is a planning consultant and the author of Georgian Dublin: The Forces That Shaped The City (Cork University Press, 2015)