Near where I live in Dublin is the Trinity comprehensive school in the working-class suburb of Ballymun. At its entrance stands an equestrian statue, more than twice life-size. The bareback rider is clearly contemporary: a teenage girl in a hoodie, jeans and trainers. But the horse, highly stylised and heroic, seems to belong to the 19th century, with its flowing mane, flared nostrils, bowed head and balletically poised right foreleg. You don’t have to know anything about the history of the statue to see at once that it is a reoccupation and repurposing of a very particular tradition of public memorials to great men.
But the history is nonetheless worth knowing. The artist, John Byrne, fashioned the horse from a mould he took of a statue of the Victorian general Field Marshal Hugh Viscount Gough that now stands in the grounds of Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. But until 1957, when it was thrown off its plinth by explosives set by the IRA, it was in the Phoenix Park in Dublin.
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