Qualla: Nelson's Pillar

Nelson's Pillar: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit from a painting by George Newenham Wright - drawing by G. Petrie R.H.A., Public domain. At about 1:30 in the morning on 8 March 1966, the upper portion of Nelson's Pillar - the 134-foot granite column that had stood at the centre of Sackville Street, later O'Connell Street, since 1809 - came down in a single deliberate explosion. The statue of Horatio Nelson smashed to the pavement. The shaft of the column collapsed sideways into rubble. O'Connell Street was almost empty at that hour, although a dance at the Hotel Metropole was just ending and crowds were starting to spill into the street. A taxi driver parked nearby narrowly escaped. There were no casualties. Just a jagged stump, seventy feet high, where for a hundred and fifty-seven years there had stood a memorial to a British naval hero in the middle of a city that was no longer British.

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Image: from a painting by George Newenham Wright - drawing by G. Petrie R.H.A. | Public domain

Nelson's Pillar: After Trafalgar

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Snapshots Of The Past, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

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Image: Snapshots Of The Past | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nelson's Pillar: Wilkins, Johnston, and Kirk

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. 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)...

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Image: Public domain

Nelson's Pillar: The Long Argument

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. 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 th...

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Image: Public domain

Nelson's Pillar: The Easter Rising and After

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand, CC BY 2.0. 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 soldi...

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Image: Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand | CC BY 2.0

Nelson's Pillar: Up Went Nelson

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bedo2991, CC BY 3.0. 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 letter...

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Image: Bedo2991 | CC BY 3.0