Long read: The northside "Ballinspittle" statue maker

STROLLING along Coach Street recently, my mind wandered back to a dear friend, Maurice O’Donnell, one of Cork’s great statue makers.

Maurice’s shop, which is now demolished, was located at No 4.

In September 1988, I had the pleasure of interviewing this lovely, smiling gentleman for our local parish magazine The Middle Parish Chronicle and many times after that, I would drop into him and have a good auld chit-chat and watched him creating masterpieces of saints.

I often thought I was in heaven and always came away a wiser man.

Ever since Maurice can remember, he was always making something out of nothing with his hands.

Even at the age 12 when turf was delivered to his home at Roche’s Buildings, he would poke through the sods and pick the blackest ones as these were hard and best for carving; and from these, Maurice would make little figures of people he knew.

Maurice recalls his fascination for statues: “Whenever I went to town with my mother, I would always wind up standing outside Bernardi’s Statue shop on Paul Street with my nose pressed against the window pane, staring at the beautiful statues inside on the shelves; or watching Mr Bernardi putting the finishing touches to them.

“My mother, God rest her, often had to use physical force to get me away from the window. The same applied to churches, especially the North Chapel where we went to Sunday Mass. I think my mother thought I was going to be a priest at one time”.

Dream of being a statue maker

Maurice had only one wish that someday he would be a statue maker like Mr Bernardi. On April 10, 1944, at the age of 15, his dream came true when he went to Mr Bernardi in his shop and asked him for a job.

Under the watchful eyes of Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, St Anthony, and other saintly figures in the shop, Mr Bernardi said: “I will give you three weeks trial. If you are not suitable you go”.

Upon hearing this, Maurice ran home to tell his parents, as well as his friends in the North Mon where he went to school, about the good news.

After the three-week trial, he was kept on and for the next 16 years Maurice worked in Bernardi’s workshop on Brown Street, just around the corner from his shop with an Italian statue maker, Mr Domnick Maggitti. 

During the Marion Year of 1954, he made many statues, the Ballinspittle statue being one of them. He went abroad for two years then, working at the same business. In 1962, Maurice arrived back in Cork and took over the business in Paul Street.

Paul Street a hive of activity 

Recalling the area where he worked, Maurice said: “Paul Street was a very busy street with people coming and going and chit-chatting all day long as buskers entertained them and with local charterers doing their theatrical performances; the 1940s and ‘50s had lots of small businesses. 

"You had shoemakers, a tinsmith; next door to us was Mr Power, he did brass work and O’Mahony’s painters.

“In Brown Street you had Dan Philpott, the plumber, Jennings Mineral Water and Ned Buckley who employed a lot of men from Brown Street and the Middle Parish and you had many young families living in the area also.”

At the time, Kathy Barry lived in Dalton’s Avenue. Later when her shop was demolished, she lived at No. 5 Corporation Buildings. Many of the women from these streets had stalls on Cornmarket Street, popularly known as the Coal Quay.

These women wore the traditional shawl and were very religious and would often be seen pouring out of the local Saints Peter and Paul’s church.

In the 1980s, however, the old Paul Street Statue shop that had captivated young and old down through the years, along with other family and commercial business houses and tenements, was knocked into the archives of the past to make way for the thriving Paul Street Shopping Centre we know today.

Maurice O’Donnell, the softly-spoken gentle statue maker, with Hollywood looks to match, continued his work, executing saintly statues for the people of Cork and nationwide.

His statues were also shipped around the world, including to the Missionaries in Africa. After a long-distinguished career, this much-loved gentleman went to his eternal rest on Sunday, May 2, 2010. Maurice’s statues are on exhibit all over the world.

For archival footage of Maurice at work, see the film: The Last Statue Maker in Cork on YouTube, complied by the international Filmmaker, Eddie Noonan of Frameworks Films.