Years later, showing an unusual degree of insight, the interrogator who created this nightmarish vision, Gerry O’Carroll, described the story as ‘a catharsis, it was symptomatic of a dead Ireland… It was a witch hunt’.12 It was in fact a symptom not so much of a dead Ireland, as of an undead culture, one that was moribund but desperate to revive itself. The moving statue is an inanimate object that is eerily alive.
