Fanfare For An Uncommon Man

“In some ancient cultures, the basic idea of a house and the way it would be decorated was pretty much the same idea as a decoration for a temple: to make it a microcosm of the universe. Stars on the ceiling, the four elements represented, so that people felt like gods living in their small fun-sized universes. If you’re living in a gorgeous temple, you’re thinking, ‘Hang on – I’m in a temple, I’m probably a god!’ But if you put somebody in a tower block, and it’s a shitheap, you’re gonna subconsciously take in the message: ‘Hey, I’m living in a shitheap, I’m probably a shit.’ Our environment, and our response to it, creates us.”

Alan Moore, in an interview with the present writer, 2002.
St Aidan’s Cathedral in Enniscorthy, a great neo-gothic edifice completed in 1847 as the Great Famine raged, was designed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an Englishman who populated the county of Wexford (and much of Ireland and the UK) with his creations.
The son of a French draughtsman, Pugin sought to reflect the glory of God in the lexicon of the high gothick and medieval, an architectural genius who converted to Catholicism at a time when it would have ill-served him, who wrote eloquent polemics and put his shoulder to the task of eradicating the ‘pagan’ Classical influence from architecture.
Here was a man who loved the sea, supplementing his income by ‘wrecking’ (salvaging cargoes from shipwrecks), and was himself marooned off Leith while transporting woodcarvings from Flanders. The same man who designed the Houses of Parliament and was once imprisoned for non-payment of rent. A man who married three times, buried two wives and sired eight children, who worked for 25 years from the age of 15 until he was made mad by a mercury prescription for an eye condition or perhaps syphilis or simple exhaustion, was committed to Bedlam in Beckenham and on his return home suffered a stroke and died at the age of 40, leaving behind scores of towering monuments to his god and talent.
If you’re passing through Enniscorthy on a slow day, call in and take a look at the altar sculpted by James Pearse (father of the patriots Padraig and Willie), and the West transept where the baptismal font stands upon its original base of Minton tiles, and the great golden reredos carved from Caen stone, and the oak pulpit and the episcopal seat. And on the way out, maybe light a candle in memory of an uncommon man.