Cork In 50 Artworks, No 42: Brian O’Doherty’s murals at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh

Created in 1995 when the artist was working under the Patrick Ireland moniker, the ogham-inspired One Here Now had been covered up for years 

Brian O'Doherty (formerly known as Patrick Ireland),  with his wife Barbara Novak at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh in 2018. Picture: Clare Keogh

In 2014, Miranda Driscoll was appointed director of the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh. She had not yet taken up the position when she attended an exhibition opening at the centre and got into conversation with a local artist. “The central gallery at Sirius is filled with light,” says Driscoll. “It opens out onto a balcony overlooking the sea; and on a sunny day you could be in Croatia or somewhere. We were talking about how beautiful the space was, and he said to me, almost in a whisper, ‘I think there’s a Patrick Ireland mural behind the walls’.” 

Patrick Ireland was a pseudonym used for many years by the artist Brian O’Doherty, and It turned out that he had indeed painted a series of murals in the gallery in 1995/96. “But this was nearly twenty years later,” says Driscoll, “and I thought they must have been painted over. These kinds of works are ephemeral, they tend to disappear. The murals were almost a myth.”