Juliette Ronayne reminisced about childhood walks before Gerard Byrne's landscapes of Dalkey Island or Vico Road. (No inner-city childhoods here, then. ) "Juliette cuts pictures out of the catalogue and sticks them on her bathroom wall, " graphic designer Aisli Madden told Gerard.

"I'll convert the clippings to the real thing when I have the money, " Juliette added. Gerard is known as a ladies' man around Dalkey. How does that make him feel?

"Cool!" he said. "They all want to be immortalized, " he added, modestly.

Taking him at his word, I scanned his landscapes for nymphs hiding beneath the brambles.

As the sun cooled on Oscar Wilde below, clinging to the rock in Merrion Square like a limpid, somebody nosed Miriam Kavanagh's paintings of Michael Collins f and a horse.

"I recognise Colllins, " the viewer said, "but who's that, de Valera?" It was de Valera she didn't like, I told Miriam, not the horse.

"Who knows what would have happened if Collins lived or the 1916 Rising had never happened, " Miriam mused.

I asked her who couldah, wouldah, shouldah done a Gandhi. "I'm a huge fan of Roger Casement, who should never have been executed. Arthur Griffith never received the prominence he deserved."

We moved onto Sellafield and Chernobyl. "Collins was into wind energy, " Miriam added. "So much could have changed with the flick of a switch."

With the fictional TV series on a Sellafield nuclear disaster, my greatest fear is that they all have a safety regime like the one in Springfield.

I wondered what Homer Simpson would say about all of this? So, I snapped up another glass of white wine and off I went to find him.