Leave Molly mAlone: A campaign against groping statues
10 April 2025
Dublin's most famous statue, Molly Malone, is showing signs of wear. Not from the weather, but from wandering hands: her bronze breasts have discoloured due to excessive touching. Following a local campaign to put an end to it, the Irish capital has introduced stewards to police behaviour around the statue.
The tradition is thought to have started around 2012, after a guidebook claimed touching the statue's breasts would bring you good luck. Most visitors grope, while others kiss or press their face in her chest for a picture.
Worries go beyond preserving the statue. "The other day, some tourists also mimed groping me after groping her," Tilly Cripwell, the street performer behind the Leave Molly mAlone campaign, told CNN. "It's a really bad example of the standards we're setting for behaviour around women in society.”
 | Ciara Boulman Molly Malone is the main character in the song "Cockles and Mussels", Dublin's unofficial anthem. She's one of the city's few female statues, so you can imagine how Dubliners feel about having a local legend subject to such inappropriate behaviour. Groping statues is a universal issue: statues of singer Dalida and journalist Victor Noir in Paris and those of Juliet in Munich and Verona are other famous examples of art degraded in the name of luck. |
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