Amid a sea of paintings depicting the river Lee in an attractive way at an exhibition at Crane Visual Art, in Dance Cork Firkin Crane (the unwieldy name of the venue in the Shandon area of Cork City) one piece of art stands out. It depicts a golden skull with two dragons coming out from behind the head, superimposed on a river with old-fashioned boats and one of the eyes of the skull filled with tiny primitive dwelling huts.
Even more surprising is the title of the mixed-media piece. It’s called The Legacy of the Merchant Princes.
Artist and Buddhist nun Mary P O’Connor doesn’t make pretty art. Brought up in the Mardyke in Cork’s Middle Parish, O’Connor loves the Lee and has great memories of swimming in it as a child and jumping off the “Shakey Bridge” in Fitzgerald Park. But she refuses to sugarcoat the river because its port was the site of the importation of spices, coffee, silk and other goods, exotic in the 18th and 19th centuries. And she adds that butter was exported from Cork during the Great Famine. Such activity filled the coffers of the city’s merchant princes.
“All of that happened in the port of Cork so there is a legacy there that we can’t forget,” says O’Connor. The skull represents the dead people who were exploited as slaves, some of whom were Irish, in the Caribbean. It is covered in gold leaf. “It’s a precious, shiny skull. Below the skull is an iceberg-type thing hiding the nasty stuff about how merchant princes everywhere got rich by exploiting Asia and Africa. Everything that went into my piece has a very deep symbolism.”
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The exhibition entitled River Run is the culmination of a new annual art competition, conceived and sponsored by Liam Mullaney of Myo cafe on Pope’s Quay along with other sponsors. You can see why Mullaney is fond of the river, with its quay walls opposite his bohemian cafe. During the summer artists, musicians, writers and tourists take their drinks outside to sit close to the river.
O’Connor takes me down from Shandon through Widderlings Lane (of which I was unaware despite being a Corkonian) andr into Myo for coffee. She has had a varied career marked by early success when she won the Guinness Peat Aviation Award twice in the 1980s.
Recalling the time she fell foul of the arch-conservative bishop Cornelius Lucey, O’Connor explains that she was exhibiting a male nude in an exhibition at the new Triskel Arts Centre in Cork in 1979 when she was a student at the Crawford College of Art and Design.
The bishop feared for O’Connor’s morals and threatened to ban the life drawing from the exhibition. I have to laugh when she shows me a photograph of it on her phone. The figure wasn’t entirely naked. He wore white socks with a dark stripe. And his modesty was covered by the pose he struck. Much ado about nothing, you could say.
Thanks to a phone call from a member of the local media to the bishop, he caved and the be-socked male was allowed to be exhibited.
O’Connor never fails to surprise. When we finish our coffees, she says she wants to go over to Bishop Lucey Park to hug one of its trees. She does this regularly. It grounds her. Crossing the river, we head for the south side and discuss the revamped city park which many people insist on calling the “Peace Park”. That seems to be the preferred name and there are city council moves to address this long-running issue.
Joining O’Connor in a quick hug of a tree (a first for me), I ask her if she has made her peace with the late bishop. No way. The bishop got his revenge, forbidding her from marrying an Israeli in a Catholic Church because he wasn’t baptised, she says.
O’Connor didn’t win the River Run art competition, although she is one of the runners-up. The award went to Norma Healy for her pleasant painting of rowers on the Lee, with the water all silver and shiny as it laps from the movement of the oars.
The writer and artist Robert Gibbings would have approved. In his book, Sweet Cork of Thee (published in 1951), he writes about his beloved river Lee: “In old times, one needed to wash in Jordan to be cleansed, one needed to dip in Siloam for sight to be restored; but today, merely to stand beside the lake at Gougane Barra brings to one’s whole being a peace beyond the telling.”
According to folklore, the sighting of a lucky magical otter in the river Lee supposedly means you’ll stay in Cork forever. This is supposed to be a good thing. But try telling that to the householders and businesses that have been affected by the river bursting its banks. That’s a whole other story.
River Run continues at Dance Cork Firkin Crane until January 3rd, 2026
