Focal points in public spaces in towns and cities across Ireland take many forms. Many of them speak to a specific moment in time.
Others continue to garner attention long after the reason for their installation is lost to memory. Focal points such as fountains, statues, clocks, and monuments are epicentres for social gatherings, magnets for camera-wielding tourists, and places to hang out with friends. The St Patrick Monument at the Octagon and the Clock Tower at the bottom of High Street are two focal points in Westport with quite different histories. Today they add character to the town and are constituent parts of its identity.
In August 1969, the Connaught Telegraph, under the heading, 'The Fight to Save Big George is On', reported that a Fine Gale 'rear guard action' sought to save the truncated column of the George Clendenning monument on the Octagon. The nineteenth-century memorial commemorated George Clendenning, a Westport resident, banker, and agent to Irish peer, politician, and slaveholder John Denis Browne, 3rd Earl of Altamont. Clendenning kept a vigil over the Octagon atop a high column for almost eighty years before he suffered decapitation at the hands of Free State soldiers. What remained of the statue, reliefs and text were removed in 1943 though the column was retained.
At an Urban District Council (UDC ) meeting in August 1969, Tom Durcan and Charlie Hastings proposed a motion calling for the preservation of the Clendenning Monument. A year earlier, it was agreed that the site would be handed over to the McBride Memorial Committee. A bronze bust of 1916 patriot John McBride was to be installed on a new pillar. Seán Staunton queried why the Fine Gael representatives wanted to retain a 'statuteless and defaced stump of a memorial to one of the ascendancy whose ilk gave nothing to the Irish people but penal laws and famine and a resolute denial of nationhood for centuries'. Matt Beckett assured those present that there had been no meeting of Fine Gael to decide a policy on the monument. He would not support the Durcan-Hastings motion if it went to a vote. The debate rumbled on.
The erection of a clock tower in Westport in the 1940s attracted far less discourse. John Malone first mooted the idea at a UDC meeting in 1944 – a public clock was 'badly needed.' R. Hughes had prepared a specification for a twenty-foot concrete base that would cost £115. Other designs were drawn up by T. P. McGowan and a firm of clockmakers. UDC Chairman J. McGing called for a review of the plans. Town Clerk R. G Browne noted that a clock costing £115 would add 4.4 pence in the pound to the town rate.
In August 1944, Browne sought tenders for the erection of a clock tower and base at the fountain at the bottom of High Street. Acting Town Surveyor, T.P. Flanagan, prepared the plans and specifications. Kelly & Sons, Westport submitted the lowest tender (£218 7s 3d ) and secured the contract. In July 1946, when the base and tower were installed, Browne sought proposals for installing an electrically driven clock following the specifications of Town Surveyor T. J. Egan. This contract was awarded to Messers Potts.
The Connaught Telegraph dubbed the four-faced Art Deco style clock the '11th Wonder of the World.' Popularly known as the 'Four-Faced Liar', the clock often displays different times on each of its four faces, or, where all four faces agree, the time is often incorrect. Time marched on for the Four-Faced Liar and Big George. In 1990, St Patrick came to occupy the vacant column on the Octagon. It now seems as if he has been there forever.
In 1944, The Mayo News published a poem titled 'Big George.' In one verse, the author tells us that George often 'cast off his chilly pose' at night to go to the clock in the Market tower to converse with a 'comrade long held dear.' One wonders if St Patrick ever casts off his chilly pose to meet long-departed companions beneath the clock in the Market Tower or if he makes his way along Shop Street to the Four-Faced Liar.
