When news of the Battle of Trafalgar reached Dublin on 8 November 1805 - three weeks after the action, three weeks after Nelson's death on board HMS Victory - the city celebrated. Up to a third of the sailors in Nelson's fleet that day had been Irish, including some four hundred from Dublin. The mercantile classes were grateful: the French invasion threat was lifted, the high seas were free for trade again, and Nelson had been hailed in Dublin seven years earlier after the Battle of the Nile as "defender of the Harp and Crown." On 18 November the city aldermen voted that a statue should commemorate Nelson. Within ten days a public Nelson Committee was formed, chaired by the Lord Mayor and including four city MPs and Arthur Guinness II, son of the brewery's founder. The site they chose was the centre of Sackville Street, the wide Georgian thoroughfare that had been laid out in the 1740s by the property speculator Luke Gardiner and named for Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The site already had history - a statue of Lord Blakeney, the elderly Limerick-born hero of the siege of Minorca, had stood there from 1759 until vandalism eventually removed it.

The Committee picked a design by William Wilkins, a young English architect at the start of a distinguished career: a tall Doric column on a plinth, topped by a Roman galley. When the fundraising fell short of the cost, Francis Johnston (architect to Dublin's City Board of Works) was brought in to cheapen the design. Johnston replaced Wilkins's delicate plinth with a heavy functional pedestal, and replaced the Roman galley with a statue of Nelson sculpted from Portland stone by Thomas Kirk of Cork. The foundation stone was laid on 15 February 1808, the day after the anniversary of Nelson's Cape St Vincent victory of 1797, by the new Lord Lieutenant the Duke of Richmond. When complete in autumn 1809, the Pillar stood 134 feet tall. A spiral stair of 168 steps ran up the hollow interior to a viewing platform under Nelson's feet. The final cost was 6,856 pounds, raised by public subscription. The Pillar opened to the public on 21 October 1809, the fourth anniversary of Trafalgar. For ten pre-decimal pence you could climb to the top and look out across what one early visitor called "a superb panoramic view of the city, the country and the fine bay."

From the day it opened, the Pillar was both a popular landmark and a political problem. The Irish Monthly Magazine in September 1809 sneered that "our independence has been wrested from us, not by the arms of France but by the gold of England." An 1818 history of Dublin called the proportions ponderous and the column itself clumsy. By 1830 nationalist sentiment had risen far enough that the Pillar, in Kennedy's phrase, "probably could not have been built at any later date." Successive proposals in the nineteenth century to remove or replace it foundered on the trust that had been established in 1811: the trustees were legally required "to embellish and uphold the monument in perpetuation of the object for which it was subscribed." Acts of Parliament in 1882 and 1891 briefly overrode the trust but lapsed before action could be taken. After independence, the Free State inherited the problem. Sackville Street was renamed O'Connell Street in 1924. The Dublin Metropolitan Police asked for legislation to remove the Pillar in 1925, with no result. W. B. Yeats, by then a senator, thought it should be moved rather than destroyed: "the life and work of the people who built it are part of our tradition."

On Easter Monday 1916, when the rebels seized the General Post Office a few doors down from the Pillar, one of the first actions of the Rising occurred at its base - British Army lancers from Marlborough Street barracks, sent to investigate, were fired on from the GPO. Four soldiers and two horses died. Through the week that followed, as British artillery turned much of O'Connell Street into burning ruins, the Pillar stood. The flames behind it were said to be visible from Killiney, nine miles away. The statue's nose, by some accounts, was clipped off by a stray bullet. Almost everything else along the street was destroyed. The Pillar remained essentially intact, a strange survivor of a battle that effectively ended its own ideological era. By the 1960s, with the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising approaching in 1966, it had become an obvious target for republican gestures. In 1955 nine UCD students had locked themselves inside with flame throwers and a poster of Kevin Barry. In 1956 Fianna Fail proposed replacing Nelson with Robert Emmet. Sean Lemass's government considered swapping the statue for one of Patrick Pearse in time for the anniversary. They were still considering when the explosives went off.

On 14 March 1966, six days after the first explosion, the Irish Army demolished the remaining seventy-foot stump with a controlled blast. A crowd watching from a safe distance gave what the press called "a resounding cheer." People scrambled for souvenirs. Pieces of carved lettering from the pedestal ended up decorating private gardens; some now stand in the Walled Garden of Butler House in Kilkenny. Nelson's head, recovered from the rubble, sits today in the Dublin City Library on Pearse Street. The mood in the city was largely celebratory - a Belfast schoolteachers' folk group recorded a hit called Up Went Nelson, set to the tune of John Brown's Body. President Eamon de Valera reportedly phoned the Irish Press to suggest the headline "British Admiral Leaves Dublin By Air." The Garda Siochana never identified the bombers. In 2000 a former republican activist gave a radio interview admitting he had planted the explosives in 1966; the gardai questioned him and decided not to prosecute. After thirty-seven years of debate and competing proposals, the site was occupied in January 2003 by the Spire of Dublin - a slim stainless-steel needle rising almost three times as high as the Pillar had. Whether the Spire is improvement, replacement, or merely the empty grammar of a sentence whose subject left long ago, depends on whom you ask.