ANTRIM, United Kingdom: A new statue of Queen Elizabeth II has met mixed reviews, with one non-plussed critic assessing that it looks more like “an old lady buying potatoes at the market” than Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.
The statue of the queen, who died in September 2022 aged 96, was unveiled last week in Antrim Castle Gardens park in Northern Ireland, and also features her husband Prince Philip and two of her beloved corgi dogs.
Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council said at the unveiling that the work captures “Her Majesty in a dignified pose, reflecting her grace, steadfastness and lifelong dedication to public service.”
The local authority posted images of artist Anto Brennan’s work on its social media sites but switched off comments after adverse comments.
One online commentator even likened it to Robin Williams’s elderly female housekeeper Mrs. Doubtfire in the 1993 Hollywood comedy-drama.
But while the council conceded that art can prompt “diverse opinions,” it said it was “delighted” with the “generally positive” response.
Walking his dog at the gardens on Wednesday, Ivor Ritchie, 67, called the sculpture “terrible.” “It looks no more like her than the man-in-the-moon,” he said.
“I just don’t think it looks like her face,” added another passer-by, Eddie Smyth, a 52-year-old laborer also from Antrim, a half-hour drive northwest of Belfast.
English tourist Lorraine Barker, 58, agreed. “In fact the corgis are better than the queen I’d say,” she said.
The sculpture, one of the first of the queen in the UK since her death, is attracting increasing attention — and curious visitors to the 400-year-old gardens.
“We came over to see it as we’d heard people talking about it,” said Noel Wilson, 62, who drove from the nearby town of Ballymena with his wife Dorothy, 61, to have a look.
Hungarian tourist Gabor Laszlo, 50, struggled to see the queen’s likeness but conceded: “Prince Philip is OK.”
The queen, who ruled for 70 years, is depicted in a country jacket and tweed skirt, wearing a headscarf and carrying her trademark handbag.
Laszlo was unimpressed, saying it made her look “like an old lady at the market buying some potatoes.”
Yet the depiction still has its fans.
“It’s a really good replica of how warmly and fondly she is remembered by the British public, I think it’s an excellent job,” said English visitor Stephen Barker.
For 90-year-old Canadian tourist Roy Hill the work is “a wonderful depiction, very impressive.”
“It brings back a lot of memories, I am old enough to remember Queen Elizabeth as a young person, at the coronation,” he said.
Another local out for a walk in the park, Muriel McCandless, 81, expressed sympathy with the sculptor, who has yet to comment on the controversy.
“I actually think it’s quite good,” she laughed.
New Queen Elizabeth II statue panned in Northern Ireland
https://arab.news/pxmut
New Queen Elizabeth II statue panned in Northern Ireland
- Sculpture was unveiled last week in Antrim Castle Gardens park in Northern Ireland
- The sculpture is attracting increasing attention – and curious visitors to the 400-year-old gardens
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
