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FOR THOSE FAMILIAR with Cork city, the restoration of the Shandon clock – or the Four-Faced Liar – wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.
It was eight months of work that saw the clock go through full restoration. From June 2025 to February of this year, St Anne’s Church, where the clock is housed, was shrouded in scaffolding for the first time in 90 years.
The job saw the clock, first installed in 1847, undergo intensive refurbishment and restoration to allow it to continue to tick along for hopefully another century.
The project was costed at several hundred thousand euro. Much of this funding was provided for the cost of keeping the scaffolding up for two-thirds of a year.
The work on the clock was undertaken by a small team of three: Cork horologist Philip Stokes, his son Robin, and his 92-year-old mother Sally. Their work on the restoration has been documented in an episode of RTÉ series Masters: Keepers of Tradition, which is to air on Monday evening.
It is inspired by the series Hands, which first aired on RTÉ in the late 70s and gave an insight into the lives and work of Irish craftspeople.
This series, made with the support of The Heritage Council and Coimisiún na Meán, aims to champion local master craftspeople, showcase their skills and trades, and show how they have endured and diversified since the series Hands finished, RTÉ said.
Installed in 1847 by Cork Corporation, and constructed by craftsmen from Mangan’s Jewellers, the Shandon Bells’ clock is known as ‘the four-faced liar’. This is because the four clock faces did not historically show exactly the same time.
Rest assured, this feature remains. The four clock faces only match up on the hour.
Over the years, Stokes would have serviced the clock, but once the local council received funding, it was agreed a full restoration would take place. Stokes, who is 63, said he likely wouldn’t have taken on the job if it were not the famous clock.
His Cork shop is only a 10-minute walk from the church, and his mother regularly attends mass there.
Stokes spoke to The Journal about the job during the week ahead of the airing of his episode of the series. He has yet to see it – he laughed that he would be hiding behind the couch as it premieres on RTÉ One.
“I’m being kept in suspense,” he said.
Unlike Stokes, The Journal has seen the episode. It depicts the full restoration of the clock, with a greater focus on the more delicate outside features. It also examines Stokes and his story as one of the few horologists working in Ireland.
“It was interesting; we didn’t know what we were getting into with the filming of it, but the project was interesting because it’s such an iconic clock in Cork,” Stokes said.
“It’s such a feature in Cork, and the fact that it had been stopped for a while; it was a great privilege to work on it, and to be associated with it – as long as it stays going.”
He said the project “consumed” him for the eight months, which was longer than he had bargained for.
A short while into the job, he received the offer of help from his son Robin, who decided to take a year out of his job in banking and return to Cork to help his father restore the iconic clock.
“It was an ambition of his to work with his grandmother more than his father, which was nice. It was great having him and he was a great help to me. You could get him to go the extra mile.
“We had to put a lot of other jobs aside to give it our full attention,” Stokes said. His shop was effectively shut for the duration of the project, and he is still playing catch-up with a few other projects.
His episode delves into his family’s history as horologists. Stokes is the third generation in the business. His grandfather repaired clocks in his spare time, and Stokes’s father then took the step to open up the family shop in Cork.
Stokes studied at a Swiss watchmaking school in Dublin when he was 15. Later, he went to his father and said he may need to emigrate for opportunities in the field – his father surprised him and passed the torch and the shop keys on to him.
His mother Sally was also involved in the shop, and even aged in her 90s, was all but up on the scaffolding for the restoration of the Shandon clock.
The job was long and tedious, but asked what the most difficult part of the restoration was, Stokes didn’t hesitate in saying it was the weather.
“It didn’t stop raining for the eight months,” he said. Other than the weather, it was time pressure – they were given a date the scaffolding was to come down and had little leeway with this.
“If it [the clock] does decide to give you problems, you need a damn long ladder to sort it.”
Stokes enjoyed working on the clock, despite these pressures. The mechanisms and its facings were of such high quality that it is possible to restore and maintain, he said.
Asked if he has many years left in business, Stokes said: “I’m looking at the clock ticking at the moment.
“The body will more or less tell me before the mind.” The job is physically intensive, with work required for the Shandon clock being the perfect example, and it requires a lot of time and attention to detail.
It remains to be seen if a fourth generation will take on the reins of the business.
Episode four of Masters: Keepers of Tradition, Horologist, airs on RTÉ One on Monday evening at 8.30pm.
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