In Dublin—where Spanish students, British stag dos and American genealogists look for a good time—a statue just off the main thoroughfare has developed a groping problem. Next month, a protection order is being enforced to stop those who insist that fondling the chest of the bronze figure of Molly Malone—a young and pretty mollusc-seller and central character to sports anthem “Cockles and Mussels”—is a “Dublin tradition”.
Located on Suffolk Street, the statue boasts a cultural legacy akin to The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen or Mannekin Pis in Brussels. Wrapped up in equal parts metaphor and myth, it is unclear whether Molly Malone was a real person, or indeed if her occupation was that of market seller or sex worker, as is often suggested. In many ways, it doesn’t matter. Her presence represents the resilience of Dublin’s working class—but it’s become instead a site for tourist kink.
In May, a group of wardens provided by Dublin City Council will patrol the statue following complaints about people, largely tourists, grabbing and rubbing the statue’s breasts, supposedly for luck. According to the council, a pilot scheme is running in early May to guard the statue as well as educate tourists about its importance. They also shared plans to re-cover parts of the statue that have become discoloured–her breasts, mainly.
The campaign to protect the statue, Leave Molly mAlone, was first raised by 23-year-old Trinity College, Dublin student Tilly Cripwell, who regularly busks on Suffolk Street. She grew infuriated at leering tourists, sometimes as many as 70 an hour, at a time when women’s rights feel particularly fraught. “I think that people see her in a busty dress and take it as a green flag to touch, as happens in society with the ‘she’s asking for it' mentality,” she tells me. “It’s not like it’s written into Irish folklore as good luck… I think people have just seen a boob within reach and initiated it.”
Though touching body parts of statues for luck is a widespread tradition—the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, the testicles of Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” and the breasts of Shakespeare’s Juliet in Verona, which is currently being treated for damage due to excessive touching—this treatment of one of Dublin’s few female statues struck Cripwell as both crude and repressive. “I think the constant patrolling is just a figurative barrier, which defeats the point,” she says. “The point is mindset reform around behaviour, and for a realisation to drop that it’s both wrong and insensitive for the artwork and what it represents.”
And this is far from the first statue to have met with feminist controversy. Back in 2020, a sculpture of the “mother of feminism,” 18th-century author and radical Mary Wollstonecraft, was unveiled in Newington Green only to draw criticism for the inclusion of her naked frame. Writer Tracy King tweeted at the time: “Statues of named men get to be clothed because the focus is on their work and achievements. Meanwhile, women walking or jogging through parks experience high rates of sexual harassment because our bodies are considered public property.”
Molly Malone is best understood in the context of its installation, Dublin historian Donal Fallon says. Erected in 1988 as part of the celebrations of Dublin’s 1,000th anniversary, “it was a much-needed feelgood moment for the city in a decade recalled for emigration, drugs and other challenges.” Fallon believes that an attempt to police the statue will only lead to more poor behaviour around it. “Like the so-called ‘love locks’ on the Ha'penny Bridge, this is an invented ‘tradition’.”
There are positive traditions associated with several Dublin monuments—the placing of guitar plectrums at Phil Lynott’s feet outside Bruxelles, the flying of pride flags near Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square—but Cripwell believes that the practice of touching Malone’s breasts is a mixture of both sexism and the bandwagon effect. “The majority of people touching her are simply doing so because they see others doing it.”
In an ideal world, she says, the statue would be raised and detailed by a plaque. “It seems so basic,” she laughs. “But those are characteristic of other statues, and very easy modifications to make rather than a stewarding system which is short-term and perfunctory.”
She pauses. “So much about why I want this whole thing to succeed is that it would be a small victory in a world of quite a lot of darkness when it comes to gender equality,” Cripwell says. She adds that, with misogyny such a subject of public debate—Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s Adolescence, a television show about a boy who murders a girl from his school, has hit number 1 on Netflix—it’s a good time to speak up about sexism.
“Sadly, the thing that will likely push forward action with regards to misogyny is men speaking about it. But, in essence, that’s why this is so important.”
