Qualla: O'Connell Street

O'Connell Street: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gannonp, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stand at the south end of O'Connell Street with your back to the river, and the boulevard opens out in front of you to a width that surprises people - one hundred and fifty feet wide, almost two thousand feet long, a scale of urban gesture that does not really fit a city of Dublin's size. The central pedestrian island runs the full length, studded with monuments. Daniel O'Connell himself stands at the south end, bronzed and orated, by John Henry Foley. Charles Stewart Parnell stands at the north end. James Larkin spreads his arms in the middle. The Spire of Dublin rises silver and almost weightless from the spot where Nelson stood for a century and a half. Behind that line of monuments, every important moment of modern Irish history has played out at some point on these stones.

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Image: Gannonp | CC BY-SA 4.0

O'Connell Street: From Drogheda Street to Sackville Street

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit engr. by Bartlett, W. H. (William Henry), 1809-1854, Public domain. Until the eighteenth century the boulevard did not exist. In its place ran a narrow seventeenth-century lane called Drogheda Street, named for Henry Moore, 1st Earl of Drogheda - about a third the width of the present street, occupying what is now the eastern carriageway and runn...

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Image: engr. by Bartlett, W. H. (William Henry), 1809-1854 | Public domain

O'Connell Street: Nelson, O'Connell, and the Long Quarrel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rodhullandemu, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1809 the Nelson Pillar went up in the centre of Sackville Street, a 134-foot Doric column topped by a statue of Horatio Nelson, paid for by public subscription after Trafalgar. It would dominate the boulevard for the next century and a half, both a beloved landmark and a perma...

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Image: Rodhullandemu | CC BY-SA 4.0

O'Connell Street: Lockout, Rising, Civil War

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeoR, CC BY-SA 4.0. Three times in the first quarter of the twentieth century, O'Connell Street was the stage on which Irish history was written. In August 1913, during the great Dublin lockout, the trade union leader Jim Larkin defied a police ban on assembly by speaking from a balcony of the Imper...

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Image: SeoR | CC BY-SA 4.0

O'Connell Street: The Spire

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeoR, CC BY-SA 4.0. After Nelson came down in 1966, the central reservation held a stump, then briefly a wooden cross at the spot, then nothing of consequence for thirty-seven years. The site was haunted by Nelson's ghost and a long succession of failed proposals - Patrick Pearse, Robert Emmet, the ...

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Image: SeoR | CC BY-SA 4.0

O'Connell Street: The Twenty-First-Century Street

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeoR, CC BY-SA 4.0. A long-term restoration plan begun in the late 1990s and largely completed in the 2000s widened the central pavement, repaved the carriageways, replanted trees, and reinstated nineteenth-century street furniture, much of which had been removed in mid-twentieth-century traffic sch...

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Image: SeoR | CC BY-SA 4.0