Ireland Day 3: Merrion Square Park

It is here! The last collection of images from Day 3 of my trip to Ireland with Andy. This collection of images will finish off the pep rally images and then follow our route to go find some supper.

There is a lot of sweet art in Merrion Square Park. But my favorite by far is the Oscar Wilde Sculpture. It is everything!

Here is the final collection of images from Day 3 in Ireland:

They sold programs for the game at the pep rally. Which was nice cause I was able to get one and then not worry about it on game day.

Some of information about the Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture before we get into it from the Wiki:

English sculptor Danny Osborne was commissioned by the Guinness Ireland Group to create a statue commemorating Oscar Wilde, which was unveiled in 1997, by Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland.[2] The initial budget of IR£20,000 was later increased to IR£45,000.[3] Since marble alone was deemed inadequate, the statue was formed from different coloured stones from three continents. The torso is of green nephrite jade from British Columbia, Canada, and pink thulite from Norway. The legs are of Norwegian Blue Pearl granite with the shoes being black Indian charnockite and finished with bronze shoelace tips. The statue also wears a Trinity College tie made from glazed porcelain, and three rings – Wilde’s wedding ring and two scarabs, one for good luck, the other for bad luck.

The statue is mounted with Wilde reclining on a large quartz boulder obtained by Osborne himself from the Wicklow Mountains. The sculpture also includes two pillars flanking the boulder with one pillar having a nude pregnant representation of Wilde’s wife Constance Lloyd on top. The other one has a male torso representing Dionysus, the Greek god of drama and wine, atop it. Both flanking sculptures are in bronze and granite, and both pillars have inscriptions from Wilde’s poems carved onto them. The inscriptions of the quotes copy the personal handwriting of figures including Seamus Heaney, John B. Keane and Michael D. Higgins.

Three people, living at the time near to the artist’s West Cork studio, posed as models for the three sculptures.

When the statue was unveiled in 1997, it was the first statue commemorating Wilde, who had died 97 years earlier. It received near unanimous praise for the materials used and for its location near his childhood home at 1, Merrion Square. In 2010, the porcelain head of Wilde had to be replaced because cracks were forming on it. The porcelain head was replaced by a new one made of white jadeite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde_Memorial_Sculpture

This is what playground equipment should look like!

National Memorial for members of the Defence Forces who died in Service of the State.

The Victims is a sculpture group by Andrew O’Connor in Merrion Square Park, Dublin, depicting a dead soldier on a bier mourned by his wife and his mother. Conceived around 1923 as part of an unrealised World War I memorial for Washington, D.C., the components were donated to Dublin galleries in 1938 and 1947 and the group was assembled in Merrion Square in 1976

The General Office of the Prime Minister.

That is it! That concludes the pictures from Day 3 of Ireland! On to Day 4, which because that was the day of the football game, there are much fewer images.