A Dublin man is refusing all media interviews after taking part in Ireland’s most bizarre wedding ceremony yesterday.

Albert Byrne of Knocklyon yesterday married a female bonobo monkey in the Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green in a private ceremony with just a few family and friends on both sides present.

Poo on a canvas - bought for €75,000

It is the first known wedding between a man and a jungle creature since the early 1800s when unions between men and female baboons were commonplace. Baboons were the mail-order brides of that time, brought to the capital in large containers by sailors.  A statue in Fairview Park, showing a man, his monkey wife and their halfbreed infant celebrates the old custom. Many of those offspring and their ancestors now populate the barren and idiosyncratic county of Leitrim, still almost inaccessible to outsiders.

However, cynics are saying this is not a marriage of love but of convenience as the bride is the latest big thing in the art world. Shimra, or Ooo-eee-eee-ooo-aaa as she is known in her own language, uses a mix of watercolours and her own faeces to create Jackson Pollock style works which sell for high prices in Dublin art circles. It is rumoured that Gay Byrne recently purchased a canvas for €75,000 which he plans to mount in his hilltop Howth mansion.

An unnamed art dealer told us “This is nothing more than coat-tailing by Byrne. He doesn’t love her, he merely wants to get in on her tax free artist’s exemption earnings. And with the lifespan of bonobo monkeys being far less than that of humans he’ll stand to inherit an absolute fortune. She doesn’t see it though as she’s so wrapped up in her work. Of course he can provide more for her than another monkey can but there’s more to marriage than having a nice car and being able to work the Sky+ remote control”.

The couple are believed to be leaving on honeymoon later this week in order to avoid the media scrum outside their George’s Street apartment. No pictures of the couple have ever been published and paparazzi from the Star, the Sun, the Daily Irish Mail and the Evening Herald have been involved in a series of punch-ups as they strive to get the money shot.

Critics of Shimra have also called the wedding a ‘farce’ and ‘publicity stunt’. Sexy Irish poet Cathal O’Searcaigh said the paintings were a disgrace to the artistic integrity of the nation while fellow artist Pauline Bewick is said by friends to be ‘apoplectic with rage’ that another female artist is capturing hearts, if not the Nepalese anuses, of the nation.

: We caught up with art critic Brian Sewer at the wedding reception in the Green Isle hotel on the Naas Road.

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