“My God, who thought that up?”

The Sunday Times reports on a new decommissioning process in Dublin.

The council said that, before the decommissioning policy, there were no formal procedures for the removal of works in Dublin. Ruairí Ó Cuív, the council’s public-art manager, said he had proposed the policy last year to stop the “willy-nilly” removal of art. Eamonn O’Doherty, the sculptor of the Anna Livia fountain (the “Floozie in the Jacuzzi”), which was on O’Connell Street from 1988 to 2000 and is arguably the most famous public artwork to be removed from the streets of Dublin, questioned why there was a need to remove public artworks when the city had so few. “I was unable to get a definitive answer as to who made the decision to remove the Anna Livia. Whenever I brought the question up with officials, they said they supposed it was the city manager, which was just an excuse,” said O’Doherty, who also designed the Galway Hookers in Eyre Square and the famine memorial in New York.

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