DUBLIN, Ireland – Monthly science fiction zine Ansible reported this month that Aidan Harte, sculptor, and Irish fantasy author, has featured in the Irish press recently. Clare County Council commissioned a sculpture for the town of Ennistymon from Harte: this was to take the image of a legendary horse-headed entity known as a púca. The commission was part of a capital project investment aimed at “increasing visitor dwell time” in the town and was chosen from 18 submissions by a panel.
Harte has duly produced the sculpture but its placement has been put on hold due to objections from locals, who say that the sculpture is ‘sinister.’ The local priest has denounced it from the pulpit as a pagan idol. Fr. Willie Cummins (who appeared in the Irish press in May for celebrating Mass in violation of Covid restrictions) has told reporters, “I fully object to this statue. There is something sinister behind it. It will never be erected – I can guarantee you. It looks nasty.”
Cummins’ objections have been backed by others. Fine Gael Senator Martin Conway, a resident of Ennistymon, said, “The Púca still puts the fear of God into old people and was a figure that was used to frighten people. This Púca has upset a lot of people. It is a fairy that a lot of people are wary about. It goes back to pagan times. The whole idea of putting a statue up to a fairy which has connotations to bad luck is inappropriate, disrespectful and offensive. The project should be stopped and abandoned.”
Ciara Fahey, who owns a business in the town, agrees, telling the Irish RTÉ newspaper: “It isn’t welcoming, it’s not warm, and it doesn’t reflect the community, its history, or its people or its culture.”
And Sinead Garvey, who also runs a business in Ennistymon, said, “We have loads of positive stories from our history here in north Clare and I don’t know if something big and black and dark with ‘púca’ written in stone is something that we’d be kind of feeling the love for.”
Harte responded to the Irish Central newspaper on Wednesday morning: “All I can say is that it matters what all the people of Clare think. A vocal minority seem to have been set against it from the start, and that culminated with the priest denouncing it from the altar as a pagan idol. That’s silly; the Púca is no more pagan than the leprechaun. But since the controversy went national there’s been a swing, with locals who like it now speaking up. That’s welcome and I hope it goes ahead. The brief was to make a statue that would attract tourists to Ennistymon. The Púca hasn’t even been put up yet and all Ireland is already talking about it!”
Here's the Púca of Ennistymon in my studio, before he became famous.#puca #ennistymon #clare #pucaofennistymon#ennistymonpuca #Ireland #aidanhartesculpture pic.twitter.com/G2Vg7EvWEc
— Aidan Harte (@HarteAidan) May 12, 2021
Clare County Council is now initiating a “public engagement process.”
The púca (Irish Gaelic for a spirit or ghost) is an old entity. They’re not always horses: they are shapeshifters who can in addition take the form of dogs, hares, goats, ravens and cats. If they do take human form, they may betray their true nature by retaining some aspect of their animal character: for example, a horse’s ears. They’re not just Irish, but are found throughout the Celtic West in various forms. They are the pouque in the Channel Islands, and as the bucca in Cornwall. They also bear a similarity to the kelpie, or water-horse, of the Scottish Highlands.
A boy living near Killarney told nineteenth-century Irish antiquary and folklore specialist Thomas Crofton Croker that “old people used to say that the Pookas were very numerous…long ago…, were wicked-minded, black-looking, bad things…that would come in the form of wild colts, with chains hanging about them.”
Children were warned not to eat over-ripe blackberries as the púca had entered into them (rather as children in England were told not to eat the fruit past Michaelmas as the Devil had urinated on them). Harvests after Samhain are said to be “fairy blasted” by the púca: a reflection of the turning of the year.
The púca can be sinister, or benign: their actions are mischievous rather than evil (although some stories talk about them killing their victims), but they can be alarming – taking a hapless person on a wild ride, for example. You can get around this by wearing spurs, preferably iron – a metal which the fairies are said not to like.
However, the púca can perform good deeds, too – for example, intervening to prevent someone from suffering a horrible accident or protecting them from wicked supernatural entities. They can thus have a function as a guardian of humans.
This is not the first time that supernatural water horses have been immortalized in sculpture in the Celtic world. Selkirk has a pair of kelpies: 30 m high horse-head sculptures, although these are intended to celebrate the horse-powered history of Scotland and the mythic water horse (kelpies are said to have the strength of 10 horses) was a starting point for the concept, rather than the concept as a whole.
Other Irish districts have weighed into the debate, such as Rathfarnham, who have said that they would be happy to home Harte’s púca in a local park. Should Clare County Council decide against the sculpture, Harte is likely to find that he has plenty of other options.
Pagan commentary has been amused rather than scandalized.
Dr. Kari Maund, Medieval Welsh historian said, “The current religious objections seem curiously modern — and inflected by US fundamentalist ideas. The Irish churches were, historically, amongst the most adaptive of early Christian institutions in their adoption of and assimilation to existing cultural norms. Saints, from at least the 10th century, demonstrated the same powers of cursing and intimidation as legendary druids, holy wells coexisted with the beann sidhe and the púca, and a pre-Christian cult was drawn into the new religion in the figure of St Brigid.”
Others have pointed out that there is no irony that Father Ted’s famous song, “My Lovely Horse” was filmed in the Falls Hotel in Ennistymon.
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