Qualla: General Post Office, Dublin

General Post Office, Dublin: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NateBergin, CC BY 4.0. Look closely at the six columns of the portico facing O'Connell Street. The Portland stone is pitted -- not weathered, pitted. Some of the marks are small, perfectly circular; others are torn elongated craters. They are bullet holes from the week of 24 to 30 April 1916, when a building designed for sorting letters became the headquarters of a republic. The General Post Office was the last great Georgian public building Dublin ever built, completed in 1818 at a cost of around £80,000. For 98 years it had been an ordinary post office, with stamps and parcels and the occasional newsworthy event. Then a 36-year-old schoolteacher named Patrick Pearse walked out of the front door on Easter Monday afternoon, unfolded a piece of paper, and read it aloud to whatever bemused Dubliners were standing on Sackville Street. Within six days the building was a roofless shell. Within seven years Ireland was independent. Within a century the bullet-pocked portico had become the most photographed wall in the country.

Image: NateBergin | CC BY 4.0

General Post Office, Dublin: Francis Johnston's Last Building

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MOs810, CC BY 4.0. The architect was Francis Johnston, the most prolific public builder of his generation -- responsible for Saint George's Church, the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle, and most of the surviving Georgian institutional architecture of the city. The foundation stone was laid by the Lord...

Image: MOs810 | CC BY 4.0

General Post Office, Dublin: Easter Monday

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. At around 12.45pm on Monday 24 April 1916 -- a bank holiday, with most of the Dublin Metropolitan Police off duty -- approximately 150 men of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army marched up Sackville Street and took the GPO. The defenders went without resistance; the p...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

General Post Office, Dublin: The Burning

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Sweeney, CC BY-SA 2.0. British forces brought up an 18-pounder field gun to the corner of Sackville Street and Henry Street and began shelling the GPO. They also fired from the gunboat Helga, anchored in the Liffey, which lobbed shells into the city centre over the rooftops. By Thursday the GPO was on ...

Image: Stephen Sweeney | CC BY-SA 2.0

General Post Office, Dublin: The Long Rebuild

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kaihsu Tai, Public domain. The granite walls of the GPO survived the burning. The interior did not. The roof collapsed; the offices were ash; the famous statues of Mercury, Fidelity and Hibernia still stood on the portico, charred but intact. For thirteen years the shell stood as a public monument to what ...

Image: Kaihsu Tai | Public domain

General Post Office, Dublin: Witness History

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smirkybec, CC BY-SA 3.0. An Post -- the Irish state postal service, descendant of the British Post Office that built the place -- kept its headquarters at the GPO for most of the century. The original copy of the Proclamation that Pearse read out is held nearby in the museum collection; only about 30 of ...

Image: Smirkybec | CC BY-SA 3.0