If you’ve spent any amount of time in South Dublin, you’ve probably visited Marlay Park, a 300 acre public park known for its concerts, playgrounds, and history. Although I grew up very close to the park and spent a lot of time there as a kid, my exposure was mostly limited to the playground. I only started seeing more of the place once I began bringing my own kids for walks there a few years ago.
In 2024, we were on a walk through an unfamiliar part of the park when we came across a statue I hadn’t noticed before. It looked like a lad Sieg-Heiling (making a Nazi salute), but I didn’t pay much attention and kept walking. The next year, I saw him again and made my kids stand in front of him making a similar (though not identical) pose.
After taking the picture, we went to the little coffee shop near the Manor House to get an ice cream and then strolled about in the walled garden. Marlay Park opened in 1975, and last year it held a celebration to mark its 50th anniversary. In the walled garden, there were little signs around with pictures of the park through the years. Now I run a blog about occult books, and I spend a lot of my free time reading about witchcraft, satanism, black magic and all that other wonderful stuff. When I glanced at this poster, my brain honed in on one word. “Necromancy”. Necromancy is the art of speaking to the dead. Marlay Park, for me, is picnics, bike rides and sunshine. Who the Hell is performing Necromancy in Marlay Park? Most people will probably find it hard to imagine quite how intrigued I felt when I noticed that the photograph accompanying the word necromancy was the Sieg-Heiling statue.
A black magic Nazi? If I was going to appear on mastermind, Black Magic Nazis would be my specialist subject! But wait, there’s something else in the picture. What the hell is this thing?
It’s hard to tell from the small image, but I thought it was a sheep. What would a satanic Nazi want with a sheep? Whatever it was, it wasn’t there when I had just walked by the statue. Where was it now?
After getting home, I did some googling and found a single webpage that discusses the statue by name. This webpage contained a better photograph of the statue in its original form. That doesn’t look like a sheep! It’s a devil’s head!
The author of the webpage noted that the statue originally depicted a devil being banished back down to Hell. He also noted that he remembered being scared by the devil’s head when he was a child in the mid 90s, but had been unable to discover what had happened to it.
I later found a thread on reddit where somebody claims the statue was originally of a person playing with a dog. Another poster in that thread claimed that it had actually depicted a person sending a devil back to Hell, but nobody else in the thread paid attention. A few people commented on how the man looks like a stormtrooper, and the tone of the discussion is generally quite confused.
Ok, so now I was properly intrigued. It wasn’t just me. Other people had noticed that the statue looked like a Nazi, and where was the missing devil’s head? Looking at the photos, I noticed that in the background of the earlier photo, the bushes were much closer than in the later pictures, but I think that’s just the angle. I was able to check old maps of the park and they confirmed that the edge of the park in that area was altered when the new road was built, but it didn’t affect the statue. This statue, or at least most of it, has remained in the same spot since being installed in Marlay.
I contacted Dun Laoghaire county council, and they checked in with the foreman of the park who had worked there for 40 years, but he didn’t know where the head went.
After quite a few emails to different Arts organizations in Ireland, I managed to contact Vincent Browne, the man who sculpted the statue. I had an hour long conversation with him about Sean Connery, Native American Zodiac signs and raising children. Eventually we got around to chatting about the statue, but he had no idea that the head was missing. He was able to tell me that the idea for the statue came to him when he had been reading a book that discussed necromancy and its gestures, symbols and incantations. He was struck at how the Nazis also brought darkness into world with their gestures and incantations.
Neither the county council nor the artist knew what had happened to the statue, so I had to look elsewhere. After a bit of searching, I found out about a man named Peadar Curran, a local historian who had done a research project on the statues of Marlay park. He was able to tell me that the statue had been vandalised a few times, that the head had actually been uprooted and moved to other spots within the park. I contacted the local police station and asked if they had ever dealt with any reports of this statue being vandalised, but they had no record of it.
Somebody else told Peadar that the head, which was topped with two sharp horns, was labelled a danger to park users and removed. This makes sense. When I talked to Vincent Browne, he mentioned the fact that many childrens’ first reaction to a statue is to climb on it. I can imagine a child hurting themselves quite badly after monkeying out over the stormtrooper’s raised arm and falling down onto the devil’s spikes. Peadar and his team were given access to the farmyard sheds where bits and pieces from the park are stored, but apparently the devil’s head was not there.
When I talked to Vincent Browne, he confirmed that the statue was meant to depict a Nazi, but the Nazi isn’t banishing the demon; he’s summoning him. This makes much more sense than the reddit theories. The statement behind the work is pretty clear (and accurate). Fascism is evil. This makes it all the more frustrating that the head is missing. This used to be a statue of a fascist raising a demon from Hell with a Nazi salute. Without the head, it is literally just a statue of a fascist. Honestly, I think it’s disgraceful that it has been left like this for so long. What it currently represents is the opposite of the artist’s intent. I’m also a little shocked that the artist was never informed that his work had been altered. It seems to me that the park was morally if not legally responsible for informing the sculptor of the significant change to his artwork.
It’s been gone for at least 18 years, but it’s possible that the missing devil’s head is still somewhere in Dublin. Maybe it’s in a store room in Marlay Park somewhere or in somebody’s shed or something. Maybe it’s hidden in a bush. That park is huge. The head is a big chunk of metal though, so if it hasn’t been melted down and recycled, it might still in salvageable condition. If anyone reading this has any idea where the devil’s head might be, please get in touch with me through comments or email (dukederichleau666(at)gmail.com). I think it’s high time to put it back where it belongs. The Marlay Park Nazi needs his demon!
When I started writing this a few months ago, my plan was to contact again Vincent Browne before posting anything online. I didn’t want to rattle any cages without his permission. Unfortunately, Vincent passed away while I was in Ireland over the summer, and I never got to follow up with him. I was genuinely saddened to hear of his passing. His artwork was an important part of the Dublin I grew up in. I used to meet my first girlfriend at his Mr. Screen statue every Friday night when I was 18. When I was back in Dublin, I went into the Savoy Cinema to visit my old pal. I annoyed the usher into taking a picture of us together again. He was not happy about doing so, and the resultant photograph is not great.
Vincent was a great artist, but also a lovely person. I contacted him just a few months before he died. He was quite sick when I called, but he was more than happy to spend his time chatting to a complete stranger about his life, our families and his passion for art. We also discussed another statue he made of a demon that used to sit outside of Dublin airport. It seems to have been removed when the new terminal was being built. Anyone know what happened to that one?
This post took a lot of research. Thanks to Dún Laoghaire and Fingal county councils, Peadar Curran, Blackrock Historical Society, John Twomey, Rathfarnam Garda Station and of course Vincent Browne.
