The Evening Irish Times of 11 October 1904 featured an article complaining about the condition of the statue of Sir Michael O’Loghlen in the Round Hall of the Four Courts. The statue had originally depicted the famous barrister and judge in a seated position holding a scroll; the Times noted that no effort had been made to replace the scroll, allegedly broken 15 years earlier by a workman:

But there was another account of how the scroll had been lost. According to the Dublin Evening Telegraph of 30 June 1922, it had been accidentally damaged by one of the housekeeping staff in the Four Courts while cleaning. A workman helped her patch it up – and, it seems, may have taken the blame for the damage too. The couple fell in love, and later married.

Mere days after the Dublin Evening Telegraph article, the statue in question was decapacitated in the Battle of the Four Courts, and no one worried any more about the missing scroll. It took another nine years before the Four Courts opened again for business – without the statues which had previously graced the Round Hall.

Although pre-1922 photographs of two of the statues, taken by the future Mr Justice Hanna, a keen photographer, appear in a book of memoirs of the period, these do not include the statue of Baron O’Loghlen. Of this, we only have written descriptions such at that in the Times article above, and the image below, via Independent Newspapers and Europeana, depicting how it looked after the destruction.

Perhaps, however, it leaves a legacy in the form of issue of the romance provoked by the initial damage to its scroll!