Search Results for 'Albert Power'

THE SCULPTOR Albert G Power is best known as the creator of the Pádraic Ó Conaire statue, once an integral part of Eyre Square, but now on display in the Galway City Museum.

In his famous statue of the writer and Irish scholar Pádraic Ó Conaire, the sculpture Albert Power presents a brilliant likeness to the man Galway knew as he went about the town. Liam Ó Briain, a friend and fellow Irish enthusiast, remarked that Albert Power had captured exactly how the man looked. Meeting Ó Conaire in town one evening, Ó Briain remembered that he looked in reality as he is on the statue: ‘the stick in his right hand, the little hat on his head’, a face that could show his ‘puckish humour.’ *

“On Thursday night a crowd numbering several thousand assembled inside the Square, and two men set to work sawing at the base of life-size bronze monument of Lord Dunkellin, a brother of the notorious landlord, Lord Clanricarde of Portumna. In a scene reminiscent of the downfall of Saddam Hussain’s statue in Baghdad, shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a rope was fastened around Dunkellin’s neck, and with a mighty pull, down it fell amidst great applause.”

Even before it came to Galway the statue of Sean Pádraic Ó Conaire was causing a stir. As Albert Power carved away in his stone-yard at Berkeley Street, Dublin, word had got out that this was a work of exceptional standards.

The name Pádraic Ó Conaire provokes thoughts of his short story ‘M’asal Beag Dubh’, Albert Power’s charming statue, or of his “fondness for a drop” - few think of his involvement in the Irish revolution.

On October 6 1928, writer, journalist, teacher, and raconteur Pádraic Ó Conaire died in tragic poverty in Richmond Hospital, Dublin, at the age of 46. Since the turn of the century he had established himself as one of the leading lights of the Gaelic Revival, an innovative writer who pioneered the short story in Irish.

First published in Irish in 1918, Seacht mBua an Éirí Amach/Seven Virtues of the Rising is a collection of seven stories by Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882–1928), published in English for the first time. Despite the title of the collection, the stories themselves are not directly concerned with the actual events of the 1916 Rising, although there are several allusions to key figures and locations.

The iconic statue of writer Pádraic Ó Conaire will finally be returned to the Galway City Museum today, in advance of a bronze replica being installed in Eyre Square later this year - the statue's original home.