The Fates in Stephen’s Green

The Fates in St. Stephen's Green. Please don't look at the children. No, really! Photo by David Lansing.

Should really try and stay awake, despite no sleep for a day or so, or tonight will be hell. Shower and a fresh shirt. Throw open the window to my stuffy room. Fresh air. A little misty rain. Lovely. Maybe go for a stroll. Back down Earlsfort to St. Stephen’s Green. Stop for a breakfast of fresh lamb’s liver and bacon should the opportunity arise.

Bono and The Edge are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’re tucking in to a full Irish breakfast and a pot of tea. Tea sounds good. But first a walk around the Green.

Just inside the gate, looking sinister and cold, bronzed versions of the Fates. Moirae. Unmerciful crones deciding what’s to happen to me. In the back is Clotho, the spinner, and in front of her Lachesis, who doles out the lots, but the most terrible is the eldest, Atropus—like atropy?—who snips life short.

A plaque on the edge of the pond says the three sisters were a gift from the German people in thanks for Irish help to refugees after World War II.

An odd thank-you gift: three unmerciful women.

Still, worth a picture. Stand back a few feet and take in the lovely green hedges and lawn and big-leafed trees to soften the nasty women. But someone is yelling at me. Coming up the path. A yellow-vested toddler in each hand and more dancing around her, like small yellow chicks.

Stop! she screams. No pictures! Do you hear me! No pictures.

Odd. Is this woman a living representation of the Fates? Scurrying up to me she places a hand in front of my camera. No pictures! she shrilly screams for the umpteenth time.

Is it not allowed to take photos in the park? I ask.

You’re taking pictures of the children! she says. You can’t take pictures of the children!

I’m not interested in the children, I tell her. I’m taking a photo of the Fates.

Well, the children are in it. No pictures of the children. It’s against the law!

Really? It’s against the law in Ireland to take photos with children in them?

Not yet. But it will be shortly, she says. Because of the priests, she says angrily.

I’m not a priest.

No matter! No photos!

So I put my camera away and the shrill sister to the Fates moves along with her brood of yellow chicks. Which have been accidentally but inevitably captured a minute earlier. And here’s the photo for all to see, children and all. Please, just concentrate on the Fates. Pay no attention to the toddlers coming up the path. None at all. Look away. As are the Fates. Because, you know, the priests!