The 1998 international design competition was launched as part of a multi-million-euro redevelopment of O'Connell Street during the Celtic Tiger years. Shop signs were being replaced. Traffic lanes were being narrowed. The committee, chaired by then-Lord Mayor Joe Doyle, sought 'elegant and dynamic simplicity bridging art and technology.' Out of hundreds of submissions they chose a design by the London architect Ian Ritchie: a single tapering stainless steel cone, three metres wide at the base, fifteen centimetres wide at the top, 120 metres tall. An Taisce, the heritage body, fought to have the height reduced. They lost. The contract went to SIAC-Radley JV; the steel sections were manufactured by Radley Engineering in Dungarvan, County Waterford. The first section was lifted into place on 18 December 2002 - then planning appeals and weather delays - then the final section on 21 January 2003. The Spire took five weeks to assemble and seventy-five years of nationalist memory to displace.

The structure is eight hollow stainless steel cones stacked on top of each other, the longest twenty metres, the whole assembly weighing 133.15 tonnes. The steel was shot-peened - bombarded with fine pellets - to give the surface a particular matte quality that catches light differently from polished metal. Two tuned mass dampers, designed by the engineering firm Arup, sit inside the fifth cone from the bottom. They sway in opposition to wind-induced sway in the spire itself, cancelling the motion. Without them the top of the spire would oscillate by up to several metres in high winds. The pattern bead-blasted around the lower ten metres of the base combines two motifs: the DNA double helix, and a core sample taken from the bedrock directly beneath the spire's foundation. Past and present, biological and geological, applied to a column of polished steel.

Dubliners do not let any piece of public art keep its given name. Within months the Spire had collected nicknames: the Stiletto in the Ghetto, the Pin in the Bin, the Stiffy by the Liffey, the Spike, the Spire in the Mire, the Erection at the Intersection. Some of these were affectionate, others were not. The journalist Desmond Fennell wrote, with reservation, that the monument was 'at least an honest statement of the Republic's state of mind after its prudent self-effacement during the Northern War and during the past-effacing enrichment of the Celtic Tiger boom. It stood for, represented, and said nothing.' Supporters compared it to the Eiffel Tower, also widely hated when new. Architecturally it has held up: nominations for the 2004 RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist, the 2005 Mies van der Rohe Prize, the 2003 British Construction Industry International Award. Twenty-two years in, it is no longer controversial. It is just where the city centre meets the sky.

In December 2015 a large prop lightsaber hilt was installed at the base of the Spire to mark the Irish premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens; for several weeks the entire 120-metre needle was lit blue at night. In May 2024 the Spire became the Dublin half of The Portal, an art installation that placed twin live video feeds in Dublin and Manhattan - a continuous open videolink showing each city's pedestrians to the other in real time. The Dublin Portal sat at the foot of the Spire, the New York Portal at the Flatiron Building. Dubliners and New Yorkers waved at strangers across an ocean. A handful of users had to be removed for inappropriate behaviour in front of the cameras. The installation closed for a few days, reopened with a few rules, and ran through that summer. The Spire watched all of it, polished steel, the sun moving over its eighth cone, doing exactly what its designer asked - reflecting whatever light fell on it, and otherwise saying nothing.

Stand at the base now and look straight up. The Spire tapers to a sliver against the sky. Look at it from the river, from O'Connell Bridge, and the whole column reads as a single silver line crossing the Dublin skyline - visible from kilometres away, sometimes only visible because of the way it catches an overcast morning's light. At night a small light at the top makes it a navigation reference for low-flying aircraft. The Liffey flows past two hundred metres south. The General Post Office, where Patrick Pearse read the 1916 Proclamation, stands fifty metres west, its facade still pockmarked from the shellfire of that week. Daniel O'Connell's nineteenth-century statue stands at the south end of the street; Jim Larkin's, arms raised, at the middle. Between them the Spire makes no statement, claims no history. Whatever Dublin decides it represents tomorrow, it will be willing to be.