The Daniel O’Connell statue on O’Connell Street is undoubtedly the grandest statue in our city centre, commemorating ‘The Liberator’ O’Connell and standing at the top of what was once Sackville Street in a Dublin gone. The statue of O’Connell himself dates to 1882, the work of John Henry Foley, and boasts some revolutionary bullet holes on close-inspection.
On the day of the laying of the foundation stone in 1864, the Lord Mayor of Dublin Peter Paul MacSwiney told the crowd of thousands that:
The people of Ireland meet today to honour the man whose matchless genius won Emancipation, and whose fearless hand struck off the fetters whereby six millions of his country men were held in bondage in their own land….
It is of course a great irony that O’Connell’s monument should contain the bullet-holes of Easter Week 1916 as it does, with O’Connell a constitutional nationalist opposed to the use of violence to bring about political ends. This statue quite literally saw Irish nationalism move from a constitutional movement to a insurrectionist one, when it found itself caught between the sniper fire of Sackville Street and the rooftops of Trinity College Dublin. One wonders what O’Connell would have thought of James Connolly, one of the leaders of that rebellion, giving the title A Chapter of Horrors: Daniel O’Connell and the Working Class to a chapter in his excellent Labour in Irish History!
Yet it is so often forgotten today that while Irish republicans put bullet holes into this great statue, Irish loyalists almost done away with it. On December 27 1969 an explosion at 4.30am damaged the statue representing the ‘Winged Victory of Courage’. This attack was later claimed by the Ulster Volunteer Force.
The figure of Courage in the statue ironically contains a bullet hole of Easter 1916 itself. She is shown strangling a serpent, with her left hand resting on a fasces. In the breast of this figure perhaps the bullet hole the most Dubliners are familiar with is found!
The explosion rocked the capital, with one taxi driver telling The Irish Press “the whole car and the bridge seemed to shake with the explosion. It was one tremendous wallop and then the crash of glass almost together.”
Incredibly, days following the bombing of the monument, an explosion would occur at Ship Street near Dublin Castle, neat to detectives HQ. It has stressed in media reports it was believed no connection existed between these explosions, yet reports into this explosion in the Irish Independent noted that:
A phone call received at Independent House on Saturday night named three of the five Belfast men who, the callers said, were responsible for the monument explosion. The anonymous caller said the men were all members of an illegal organisation and that two of them were explosives experts and ex-army sergeants who had been discharged three months ago from the Royal Rangers for suspected political activity.
The bombing of the O’Connell monument was not the first attack on an Irish nationalist monument in the south by Ulster loyalists, nor was it to be the last. Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown had been attacked too, the irony of northern protestants attacking the graveside of a leading United Irishman lost on many at the time. Later, in 1971, an explosion would destroy the Wolfe Tone statue at Stephens Green. Newspaper reports noted that “the statue was wrecked, leaving only the base. Huge slabs of the bronze sculpture were hurled 20 feet in the air.”
The attacks on O’Connell and Tone are interesting as much has been written on statues from the other political tradition which were attacked and destroyed in Dublin, but little is said of the attacks on Irish nationalist icons. It is undeniable attacks on monuments like the King William of Orange statue on College Green, Nelson’s Pillar, Lord Gough’s monument in the Phoenix Park and others represented a dangerous sort of cultural warfare, but it should be remembered loyalists too engaged in such attacks. Dublin is fortunate many lives were not lost while this dangerous game was being played over the iconography of the Irish capital.
At least, of the statues of the occupier, Geogh, above, left, a contribution to Dublin folklore, however inelegant. Check out the “Poem” on this page:
http://parent:allow@photopol.com/parental/gough/gough.html
[…] on the 28th of December 1969. The day before on the 27th the UVF carried out a bomb attack in Dublin […]
Loyalists by Peter Taylor as well as Andy Pollak and Ed Moloney’s biography of Paisley give some insights into the bombings carried out throughout the sixties by people mainly in the orbit of Paisley. In the early hours of New Years Day 1969 Loyalists blew up the Roddy McCorley Monument in Toomebridge just prior to the PD making it over as part of their Long March from Belfast to Derry.
There is some great footage of that march and of the wider Civil Rights Movement available here, especially of a young Mike Farrell of the Young Socialists who now is involved with the FLAC and Michael D’s Council of State:
http://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/1031-civil-rights-movement-1968-9/1039-peoples-democracy-march-belfast-to-derr/319658-student-civil-rights-organiser-interviewed-day-2/?page=1
The remnants of the statue ended up in the grounds of the Andytown Republican Club on the Glen Road in West Belfast (now known as Roddies) and the name was also immortalized by renditions by balladeers such as Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, The Pogues and The Dubliners although the same air was used for the Ballad of Sean South.
It can be seen briefly at 45 seconds into this footage of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising.
On a tangential but related topic. On the bus home this evening, I noticed that there is a statue-less plinth inside the gate at City Hall (west side, nearest the new concrete lump from which they are flying the presidency flags) with O’Connell’s name and some text, both as Gaeilge, on it.
[…] damaging the RTÉ Television Centre in Donnybrook. No injuries. 27 December – The UVF plant a bomb at the Daniel O’Connell statue on O’Connell Street. Little damage was done to the […]
A Chara, most of the bullet holes in O’Connell’s Monument that I have seen were fired from a southerly direction. Why then would one assume they were “revolutionary” bullets? Whether during the 1916 Rising or (less likely) the Civil War, those were almost certainly bullets from anti-Republican forces.
The very few from a northerly direction were probably stray bullets from Republicans firing towards and across the Liffey.