91. Right panel from The Blood Of The Beasts triptych photograph by Nigel Rolfe, seen in the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

This is a scan of the postcard I bought from the gift shop, as at the time, IMMA was another gallery that stupidly enforced the no photography rule, which is a pity, as there's more of the forearm in the original.

The Museum's blurb would have it thus: "In the final panel, a white lily, a symbol of peace, is being crushed. The imagery of the flower is important in Rolfe's work, representing life and death, consolation and sympathy. Here, the fact that the hand is grasping the flower tightly may represent life being suppressed by the hand of man."

Not sure about this, as the flower being crushed is an Easter Lily, the floral metaphor for death itself, with an entire corpus of deathly mythology behind it, including, according to Google, [being] a badge in the shape of a calla lily flower, worn at Easter by Irish Republicans as symbol of remembrance for Irish Republican combatants who died during or were executed after the 1916 Easter Rising.

Whatever, I know this photograph better as the front cover of the Lament CD, being a compilation of those Irish tunes through which one can feel all the pain of the worst parts of Irish history. The death of Brian Boru, the arrival of Cromwell, the Battle of the Boyne, the failure of the 1798 rebellion and death of Wolfe Tone, the potato famine, the denunciations of Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, the Easter Rebellion, the assassination of Michael Collins, the Troubles, Bloody Sunday, James Joyce leaving for Europe and never returning, the closing of the Westmoreland Street Bewleys, and the illusion that was the Celtic Tiger.