A friend posting a photograph of the Cuchulain warrior figure on the road to Sligo over the Curlews, on Facebook, reminded me of just how many good, bad and indifferent pieces of sculpture now adorn/litter/enhance/deface so many of our public highways.

The Percent for Art Scheme has been the main driver of these works in a scheme which has great merit and great dangers. The Scheme also includes temporary (all too rare) installations; garden schemes (even rarer), and self-destructing pieces (rare as hen’s teeth).

It also includes such things as a public performance, like an orchestral performance at a roundabout during busy “peak-times ”.

I’ve been on adjudicating panels for some local authorities who made decisions on small scale developments where an artist designed the knockers on as many doors as were in the scheme, or small sculptural sitting-out places for a small scheme encompassing a designed garden with benches and artist-designed ground based stepping plates. These seemed to me to be nearer the ideal rather than the Ploughshare school of sculpture which dominates so many of our highways.

We’ve become used to the Spire in Dublin’s O’Connell Street, but it’s still not a good idea. The piece on the motorway towards Portlaoise from Dublin is an indifferent piece. The great atlas sphere on the Naas dual carriageway is ok, but what’s its point?

The greatest difficulty is, it seems to me, that local authorities haven’t thought through the maintenance of the pieces thus commissioned, so that with time many of them will fall apart (for which I’m profoundly grateful). The Yeats Figure in Sligo and the Wilde figure in Merrion Square [have another look at VULGO's audio-slideshow on this sculpture and let us know if you agree, ed], are both mistakes, being both vulgar and over-realised literally, and figuratively as evocations of well known figures when sensibility might have dictated a more abstract approach. The Henry Moore figure in Dublin’s St. Stephens Green is fine as an abstract piece but was simply a choice from the artist’s existing stock, nothing wrong with it, a fine handsome piece albeit poorly placed.

A couple of years ago the Solomon Gallery held two important outdoor exhibitions of sculpture for outdoor work and could have been a good guide to many public bodies including the OPW.  One was held in the gardens of the sculptor Rowan Gillespie, and the second in the Iveagh Gardens off Clonmel Street on Dublin’s Harcourt Street. There, fine works, abstract, figurative and semi-figurative/abstract were well chosen by the Gallery’s director Suzanne Macdougald, and attracted large crowds.

I remember taking walking tours through the exhibitions and being amazed at the reaction – the enthusiastic reaction I should say – by the public attending the exhibitions. Sadly insurance and suitable venues proved an intractable problem for further exhibitions, which is a great pity.

The thing which strikes me the most in this area of public statuary is that the scale is so often wrong, usually too small.  There are times when one has to consciously look for the pieces, to be sure that what one saw isn’t just the detritus of the road builders, but intended as a sited piece. The famous Smurfit piece given to Dublin City ‘the Floozie in the Jackoozie’, is a case in point of a good idea but wrong in scale in that the figure was set too low to its streetscape

There is a fine piece by Oisín Kelly outside Portlaoise County Hall.  The Robert Emmet figure opposite the Royal College of Surgeons is fine but too small for the area. The G. B.Shaw figure outside the National Gallery is too small for outdoor consumption and in any event was conceived as an indoor “salon” piece. The Grace Weir doorway outside the Bank of Ireland on Stephen’s green is too small, but it is evocative. The Delaney piece at the former entry gates to Stephens Green simply doesn’t work, and I think the matching gates should be put back and leave the Stonehenge piece enclosed, which might give greater resonance to that particular work.

The large piece in front of the Bank of Ireland H.Q. on Baggot St. only works because it’s enclosed by the undistinguished buildings which frame it, but it they were removed it wouldn’t work. The large piece in front of AIB HQ Ballsbridge needs greater height to work but that’s not going to happen now.

The Conor Fallon piece on the bawn of Athenry Castle works because the sculptor knew the place so well it had the correct scale to it.

So little thought is given to the pre-existing walls and gate/portals of many universities and old buildings.  The gate piers front and back on the old Berkeley Court hotel in D4 are in fact the original gates for the Trinity College Botanic Gardens from 1808, and will I hope be retained. The stone walls around UCG are original, and many of those have been moved or taken down which is a great pity. Such walls and portals are also forms of public sculpture and deserve the same consideration of aesthetics applied to modern and contemporary public works.

Taken as a whole the entire blocks and portals of Government buildings on Upper Merrion Street are also forms of public sculpture. In fact they are like so many such works, a kind of public sacramental (outward expression of an inward grace if you like). The Twin peaks approach to the University of Limerick, although gimmicky, express the energy and modernity of that new university which has put together a fine collection of outdoor and indoor art.

The external façade of the Síamsa building in Tralee could be considered a piece of public sculpture, just as much as the Lusitania memorial in Cobh. Equally the amazing Eucharistic roadside shrine near Kilmacsimon (West Cork), although quite Hollywood in its form, is so kitsch it’s become art again.

More thought needs to be given to the what and the how of public art, not least its maintenance and conservation. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Ciarán MacGonigal is an Arts commentator and Advisor.  He is currently working on a 20^th century history of Irish Art.