Hydro-Québec wants to buy Granby’s St. Patrick mural for Montreal park

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Hydro-Québec says it’s ready to pay $25,000 for a mural of St. Patrick by Quebec artist Alfred Pellan that seemed doomed to be demolished along with the Granby municipal office building where it is located.

The utility wants to transport the mural, a mosaic depicting the Irish patron saint and created in 1958, to a planned park in Montreal that will commemorate the city’s Irish community.

The mural’s fate was to be studied by Granby’s city council Monday night, but the issue was withdrawn from the meeting’s agenda. Granby Mayor Pascal Bonin said “new information” had led council to require another week to determine what to do with the mosaic and that a final decision would only be made next month.

Last week, the office of Quebec Culture Minister Nathalie Roy said it was monitoring the situation and was ready to intervene, although no official request had been made to the municipality.

Granby city manager Michel Pinault said only that council needed more time to consider the mural’s future and that their decision would not be based exclusively on the issue of money.

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An online auction on March 13 in Montreal saw several potential buyers express an interest in the mural and two offers of $15,000 were filed.

But last Friday, Hydro-Québec made its offer of $25,000 directly to the city. A total of $5,000 of that sum would be paid to the Iegor auction house for having preferred an offer outside those made during the auction.

The buyer of the mural would also have to cover the cost of removing the mural from the wall, a job that has been estimated to cost more than $56,000.

According to documents in Hydro-Québec’s offer, the mural would be part of a project to commemorate the 6,000 Irish immigrants who fled famine in their homeland only to die of typhus contracted as they sailed to Montreal in 1847.

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The memorial will be located on the Montreal side of the Victoria Bridge by the Black Rock monument, next to a Hydro-Québec power station.

The mosaic was created for the facade of a Granby elementary school that served the city’s Irish community. The school was later transformed into the offices of the regional municipal authority. Those offices are scheduled to be demolished and replaced this spring.

While the city originally wanted to preserve the mural, it decided that the costs of doing so were too high.