Tourists in Dublin must stop groping the breasts of Molly Malone’s statue because it is “disrespectful” and “misogynistic”, campaigners have said.

Tourists traditionally touch the famous landmark, which represents a fictional street seller who died of a fever, for good luck.

But so many people have fondled her bronze bust that it has become discoloured.

Student Tilly Cripwell, who busks in the area for about 10 hours each week, has launched a campaign calling on people to “leave Molly mAlone”.

The 22-year-old singer said: “The majority of people will touch her boobs for good luck, that’s a misogynistic tradition.

“A lot of people clamour around her, kiss her on the cheek, kiss her boobs, it’s all inappropriate. It’s reducing her to this derision and not giving her the status of being a national treasure.”

“This tradition is notorious to those within and without Dublin, with the discoloration of Molly’s breasts being the visual representation of such harassment,” she told the Irish Independent.

Ms Cripwell pointed out that statues of men in Dublin were not manhandled in the same way as Molly’s prominent décolletage was every day.

“Where Molly Malone’s statue was created as a symbolic figure of pride and patriotism, it has become a landmark of objectification and mockery,” she said.

“The standard set is one where abusing women is normal, even traditional … I walk by the Oscar Wilde statue in Merrion Square every day. You don’t see people rubbing his crotch for good luck,” the Trinity student added.

The song Molly Malone, an unofficial anthem for the Irish capital, tells of a “sweet” street hawker selling cockles and mussels in Dublin who dies of a fever.

Such hawkers were often part-time prostitutes, but in some versions of the legend Molly is unusually chaste.

‘Seven years bad luck’

In the folk ballad, Molly’s ghost continues to “wheels her barrow, through streets broad and narrow, crying, ‘cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh’.”

The campaign comes after the busty statue of the fictional trader in Suffolk Street was vandalised last year.

“Please don’t” was written across its cleavage in September, and in another incident in August the words “seven years bad luck” were scrawled on the statue.

The statue, which was originally in Grafton Street, was unveiled in 1988 for the celebration of Dublin’s first millennium celebration.

Nicknamed “the tart with the cart”, it was relocated in front of the Tourist Information Office in 2014.