The Tart with the Cart….
As soon as a statue is erected in Dublin, the quick-witted Dubliners soon find a name for it. Where Nelson’s Column used to stand in O’Connell Street they erected something that can only be described as a large bath with a woman in it. What it is supposed to represent, no one knows, or at least they are keeping it a secret. However, some Dublin wit quickly named it "The Floozy in the Jacuzzi". Likewise, when they erected one of the famous (or infamous if you prefer), Molly Malone pushing her wheelbarrow, another wit named it "The Tart with the Cart".
The song, Molly Malone is known to all schoolchildren in Ireland, but it took me all these years to find out today that legend has it that she was in fact a ‘tart’, selling a lot more than ‘cockles and mussels’. The following is a version of the myth.
Firstly, during the Dublin Millennium in 1988, and the unveiling of the commemorative statue one of the Protestant churches in Dublin claimed to have found an entry in one of their old registers dated 1663 for a Molly Malone and were claiming her as one of their own. However, the Catholics were having none of it as the Church of Ireland – the Protestants – never name their children after the Virgin Mary, and afterall that is what the name Molly derives from.
The Dublin legend has it that she lived in the mid 1800’s and all her family were Fishmongers, specialising in Cockles and Mussels.
Molly was reputed to be a true beauty and spent her days pushing her barrow through the streets, in particular the wealthy Grafton Street and St. Stephen’s Green area. That was of course during the daylight hours. In the evenings she would make a beeline to the area surrounding Trinity College where she sold her more sought-after wares to the male students.
It is a strange fact that cockles and mussels can be picked up along the foreshore close to Dublin in particular at Sandymount where the tide recedes about two miles out. The shellfish are everywhere and appear to be of a high quality. However, I never met an Irishman who ate them. It seems that many years ago, probably as far back as the Great Famine, or possibly during the First or Second World Wars, when there was a severe shortage of any kind of food, many people ate them out of necessity. The story goes that they did not know how to clean and prepare them and many died. As a result no one eats them now.
A Scotsman, James Yorkston wrote a song in 1883. It was first published in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is believed to be based on the Dublin legend or myth.
How strange things are, for it was only today, at my age, that I learned that Our Molly used to ‘sell her body for acts of lewdness’. Furthermore, the story goes that she died, not only ‘of a fever’, as the song goes, but from typhus and venereal disease.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I will ever sing the song again even though it was only number 156 on my list of party songs.
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Molly Malone (Cockles and Mussels).
In Dublin's fair city, Where the girls are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone
As she wheeled her wheel barrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying cockles and mussels alive alive oh.
She was a fish monger
And sure t’was no wonder
For so was her father and mother before
And they all wheeled their barrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying cockles and mussels alive alive oh.
She died of a fever
And no one could save her
And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone
Now her ghost wheels her barrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying cockles and mussels alive alive oh.
Alive alive oh
Alive alive oh
Crying cockles and mussels
Alive alive oh.
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There is a version of the song by the Dubliners on the following link:
There is a version of the song by the Dubliners on the following link:
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