MEATHMAN'S DIARY: When St Patrick wore a mini-skirt

In recent weeks in its coverage of the submissions to the draft Dublin City Development Plan, the Irish Times reported that the Sisters of Charity have sought the rezoning if its lands at Merrion Road in South Dublin, which would see the property valued at some €50 million if sold for residential development. It reminded me of a saga surrounding St Patrick on the Hill of Tara, and a solution provided by the same Sisters of Charity over 20 years ago.

The saga went on for eight years, from June 1992, when the Office of Public Works (OPW) removed the old statue of our patron saint from the Hill of Tara in an almost overnight operation. The line at the time was that it was to be repaired and restored. However, this never happened, and the poor man was left lying on his back in an old OPW yard at Athcarne, Duleek, for many years.

The cancelled statue was, in the words of the late Elizabeth Hickey of Skryne Castle, "a kindly representation of Ireland's national saint carved by Navan man, William Curry, and erected at his own expense at the end of the nineteenth century."

She continued: "Artistically, it symbolised an Ireland by way of finding its own values again; an Ireland perhaps of shamrocks and wolf-dogs, of round towers and mitred saints; but a more serious Ireland also, of scholars such as Douglas Hyde and Eoghan O'Growney, of idealists such as Horace Plunkett; the political Ireland also of Charles Stewart Parnell … there were many strands to that Ireland and William Curry's statue of St Patrick was but one."

A committee was established by Rathfeigh Historical Society to campaign for the return of the statue, and eventually, in 1996, the OPW and the then Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, one Michael D Higgins, announced a competition for the design of a new sculpture which would be erected on the way up to the visitor centre, and not on the original location as it was felt it wasn't appropriate in the archaeological precinct. But further controversy was to follow when the statue chosen as the winner, Ann Hennessy's depiction of St Patrick not wearing traditional medieval robes, mitre, or carrying a crozier topped with a shamrock.

The sculptor explained; "Rather, he is dressed in a knee length tunic, and his head is shaven, as its is said was the custom of the early Christians in order to differentiate themselves from the Pagans."

It depicted a man who fought druids with fire, who was said to have been untouched by rain, who could light up the dark with his fingers, and changed himself and his followers into deer to escape from High King Laoghaire.

Well now, this wasn't going to work either, and Michael D had to knock that idea on the head, after much opposition and the dubbing of the proposed momument as 'St Patrick in a mini-skirt'. Eventually, the Sisters of Charity came to the rescue with a statue of the saint that they were seeking to relocate from their grounds at Merrion Road. It had been presented to them by the Power family, and stood on a high plinth overlooking the entrance to the convent and nursing home complex.

It now watches visitors arriving to the Hill of Tara, having been erected in time for St Patrick's Day 2000.