The Molly Malone thing is just so embarrassing. Be offended if you wish. Express concern about the damage done. But, surely, the most appropriate response to tourists rubbing their filthy mitts all over the cockle sellers’ blameless bivalves is utter mortification. How do you think this looks, Helmut, François, Knut and Billy-Bob? Is it all just a bit of good fun? Is it? Is it?
One can scarcely imagine a more depressing pointer to the vacuousness of city-break aesthetics. At least those who mooned intercontinentally at Dublin Portal, off O’Connell Street, were – before the bottom inspectors arrived, anyway – putting a little of themselves into their Bacchanalian vulgarity.
There was a bawdy Bartholomew Fair spirit about the early days of that online connection to New York City (which now links elsewhere). Nobody was pretending they were honouring an ancient tradition that might bring them good luck in love and career. Just so mortifying!
Anyway, how did we get here? Oh yes. The controversy about visitors pawing the Molly Malone statue on Suffolk Street in Dublin looks to have reached a crisis point. Dublin City Council has confirmed that, from next month, stewards will be positioned to dissuade potential offenders from inappropriate lunges towards the Malone mammaries.
Four new films to see this week
Ralph Fiennes: ‘I don’t feel any need to slow down. Opportunities come my way – and I can’t say no’
A Minecraft Movie director Jared Hess: ‘On a big movie there’s so much to do, so much to pull off. You’re always dry-heaving’
The Movie Quiz: Who has not played Elle Fanning’s dad?
Since word got around that good fortune attended any such rub, the exposed parts of the bronze bazongas have become sufficiently shiny for Bavarians and Bostonians to redo their eye make-up in them post-frottage.
Molly Malone so becomes one among many statues to habitually draw the attention of travellers throughout the world. For decades, visitors to Edinburgh have been patting the nose of a monument to the famously loyal pooch Greyfriars Bobby. Nothing sordid there, but locals have long fretted about damage to the much-mourned terrier. Restoration work costing almost €500 was commissioned in 2014 to restore the then shiny snout to its previous glory.
Less charmingly, it is said that rubbing the crotch of Victor Noir, celebrated in bronze on his tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, promotes fertility. A NSFW search confirms that not every visitor is using the same body part for their rubbing. Unsurprisingly, one particular fold in the late writer’s trouser now gleams like a tumescent rod of gold.
A bust of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, has a similarly shiny nose. The Juliet statue in Verona, in Italy, suffers abrasion in the same area as does the Dublin cockle flogger. Tourists have been persuaded that rubbing the toe of John Harvard’s statue in the eponymous university is a tradition among students. (It’s not.)
You could reasonably argue that not everyone – indeed, nearly no one – takes these supposed pleas for good luck seriously. One might have said the same of those idiots who, a decade or so ago, defaced the world’s bridges with padlocks honouring a supposedly eternal love that began last week.
[ I love you. Let’s vandalise the Ha’penny BridgeOpens in new window ]
Does that insincerity make these practices any less embarrassing? The believing pilgrim to a holy shrine should be respected for honouring commitment to a sustaining faith. Better that than acting out a newly invented larkish “ritual” for fear of not achieving the required Instagram post. #MollyHooters #Lads4Evuh
At the risk of being unpatriotic, the Molly Malone balderdash feels like the most transparently absurd rub attraction of all. A notion has got around that the statue is a long-beloved Dublin institution. Something from the rare owl times. A bit of coddle. A lungful of freezing fog. Sure, a wallop with the strap never did us any harm. All that baloney.
Most Dubliners know that the harmlessly unchallenging artwork, by the late sculptor Jeanne Rynhart, was unveiled in 1988 as part of the city’s millennial celebrations. M’lady Kylie Minogue and Ye Olde Eurythmics were in the charts. Folk were watching Roseanne and Red Dwarf on the telly.
And the supposed “tradition” of good luck is more recent than that. In these pages, a few years ago, Bernice Harrison traced it back to “sometime before 2014″. Not the era of the Black Death and the Crusades – when such legends really should be born – but the era of Miley Cyrus 2.0 and Game of Thrones. This is akin to suggesting a rub of the iPhone 5s could bring fortune and fecundity.
[ Shining example – The Molly Malone statue and inventing a traditionOpens in new window ]
Even the most freshly invented religions gather a few adherents who sincerely believe in the tenets newly scribbled on the back of a cornflakes box. But rub culture is not even a collective delusion. It is pretence to a collective delusion.
There are essays out there addressing the replacement of traditional faith with less burdensome superstition. This is nothing so significant. Tourists, aware that they have a whole day to fill in some foreign locale, will grab on anything to plug the space between this stupid cathedral and that boring cemetery. Why tickle that nose, stroke that crotch, fondle those bosoms? Because we have to do something with the afternoon.
