An Irishman's Diary

I MISS Lady Lavery, sometimes. Not that I’m yearning for a return of the punt, which ceased to be legal tender 10 years ago this week.

It’s just that Hazel, if I may use her first name, was a big part of my life at an impressionable age. She continued to haunt me even after retreating into the watermark of banknotes. In fact, given the ethereal nature of her beauty, it seemed fitting in later years that you had to hold her up to the light to see anything.

I noticed her portrait somewhere the other day, for the first time in a while. And it struck me that, as a female personification of Ireland, she was – if anything – more suitable now than a decade ago. Not to put too fine a point on it, she looked as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. With her pale, emaciated features and outsized eyes, she resembled a cross between a Bratz doll and one of those heroin-chic models that used to be all the rage.

Like the famous picture of a careworn mother in 1930s California, Hazel Lavery’s face could in some ways summarise the plight of IMF Ireland. Except, of course, that there is no trace of worry in it, only stoicism. When you’re playing the part of Cathleen Ní Houlihan, after all, what’s another downturn? By coincidence, a day or two later, I fell into conversation with the psychiatrist Eimer Philbin Bowman, who told me of a tribute she paid to Lady Lavery in 2002, on the occasion of the latter’s retirement from currency duties. It so happened that the event was marked by a dinner in Dublin’s Kildare Street Club, at which Emer’s husband, broadcaster John Bowman, was main speaker.

The guest of honour was another person who had featured on the old banknotes, TK Whitaker, whose signature graced them both when he was secretary of the Department of Finance and governor of the Central Bank. And the tribute was partly for him. A friend of Eimer Philbin’s since her teens, when, as part of a weekly collection for the Donnybrook church building fund, she was responsible for ensuring the Whitaker household coughed up their pledged shilling.

Maybe her enforcement powers back then included the threat that, like the ancient bards, she would shame any non-payers in verse. Or maybe not. Either way, in 2002, she eulogised the old currency in the form of a limerick, delivered by her husband as follows: “Lady Lavery’s powers to entrance/ Cut no ice with the men in Finance,/Instead the big spenders/Made her legal tender/To be had for just one hundred pence.”

We’ll move swiftly on from the imputation that Hazel Lavery could have been had for any amount of money. Except, of course, between the confines of a picture frame. Where, it must be said, she could be had frequently.

So often did her husband, Sir John Lavery, paint her, indeed, that even before featuring on banknotes, she must have risked devaluation.

He asked her to sit for several hundred portraits, which, lovely as she was, seems excessive. But disturbingly for romantics, her features as captured were not always unique. Take the picture called the Red Rose, for example, which now hangs in Cork's Crawford Gallery. It is unmistakably her face. Yet we learn that the picture began life in the 1890s as a portrait of one Mrs William Burrell, before being transformed (circa 1912) into Sarah Bernhardt, and later again into a Viscountess Curzon. Only then did it take the permanent form of Lady L.

Being subject to which vicissitudes, it’s a wonder that any of her portraits became hard currency.

And perhaps this is yet another argument against reviving the punt. Lacking in personality as its notes may be, there’s a lot to be said for the stability of the euro.

SPEAKING OF hazels, I wept bitter, ironic tears when reading a report earlier this week wherein English conservationist and television presenter Kevin McCloud paid tribute to Irish forestry.

At an event hosted by Coillte, he said a large proportion of British wood imports now came from this country. And then he added: “Nobody was really aware in the UK about this extraordinary resource on our doorstep.” How quickly they forget! And how less likely that they would have forgotten if, like me, they had been educated by the Patrician Brothers. Those gentlemen drummed it into us (sometimes literally) that Ireland was once an arboreal paradise, covered with forests, until perfidious Albion denuded the place – first to flush out rebels, then for farmland, and finally to supply the British navy, so they could go off and plunder other small, defenceless countries.

The result, eventually, was one of the least-forested countries in Europe. And this was all done in the name of – how the word seems to mock us tree-lovers! – the “plantation” of Ireland.

In fairness, it should be admitted that, in later centuries, the native Irish carried on the clearance work with enthusiasm. And that in some parts of the country today, trees are still regarded with suspicion, as a Protestant invention. Even so, it’s a poignant joke that our recent timber exports should be such a pleasant surprise across the water.

The ancient forests remain a ghostly presence, and not just in the smoke from peat briquettes. They haunt the very language. Why, in the old Ogham alphabet, even the letters had tree names, including duir (meaning oak), beith (birch), and coll (hazel).

Those same trees in turn attached themselves to placenames, like Derry. They also became surnames, like McColl. On which note, although I’m unaware of any etymological relationship between the words, it is at least a pleasing coincidence that, to her fellow Irish-Americans, Hazel Lavery would probably have been known as a “colleen”.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com