Come Here To Me!

The removal of Queen Victoria from Leinster House, 1948.

As a historian with a particular interest in the areas of memory, commemoration and the role of monuments in society, I’ve had more than a passing interest in what has been happening in the United States in recent weeks with the removal and destruction of a number of monuments to the Confederacy and the losing side of the American Civil War.

Interestingly, we’ve seen a noticeable spike in traffic to articles on this blog which looked at the historic issues around monuments in Dublin, and the destruction and removal of imperial monuments here in the aftermath of independence.

Writing in 1920, the Austrian writer Robert Musil joked that “monuments are so conspicuously inconspicuous. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.” Musil, an important modernist writer best remembered today as the author of the unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities, believed memorials to be an invisible feature in the landscape, but was writing at a time when impressive monuments were coming to redefine urban landscapes right across the continent and beyond, in the aftermath of events like the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

C.S Andrews, a veteran of the revolutionary period and an Anti-Treaty fighter in the Civil War, would proclaim that “there are no monuments to victory or victors, only to the dead.” Yet in truth, memorials have played a central role in trying to change historical narratives both here and abroad, and are rarely mere memorials to the dead. As Yvonne Whelan rightly notes in her study Reinventing Modern Dublin, “as powerful regimes and ruling authorities seek to underpin and legitimate their authority, the past and public memory play a crucial role and find tangible representation in the cultural landscape.” It isn’t only “powerful regimes and ruling authorities” who have sought to reshape the landscape through memorials however, as the Anti-Treaty IRA memorials dotted across the city remind us.

The Irish Times, December 18 1961. After the bombing of Lord Gough, only his pedestal remained.

Many monuments unveiled in Dublin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to create a cultural landscape that expressed Ireland’s place in the British Empire, and were condemned in the nationalist press as alien to the city. The Nation, a newspaper to which diverse voices like Thomas Davis and Lady Jane Wilde contributed, noted that:

 We now have statues to William the Dutchman, to the four Georges  -all either German by birth or German by feeling –  to Nelson, a great admiral but an Englishman, while not a single statue of any of the many celebrated Irishmen whom their country should honour adorns a street or square of our beautiful metropolis.

As monuments sought to redefine public spaces in Dublin in the interest of the British state, they also became frequent targets of political assault. The most divisive monument in the city for many years was that to King William of Orange, erected in 1701, a mere eleven years after the Battle of the Boyne where William had soundly defeated King James II. A publication in 1898 noted that:

This equestrian statue of William III stands in College Green, and has stood there, more or less, since A.D 1701. We say “more or less” because no statue in the world, perhaps, has been subject to so many vicissitudes. It has been insulted, mutilated and blown up so many times, that the original figure, never particularly graceful, is now a battered wreck, pieced and patched together, like an old, worn out garment.

Just as commemorations tell us more about the time in which they occur than the times they seek to commemorate, the choice of monuments in the city and their locations was shaped by contemporary political concerns. In 1898, with the centenary of the United Irish rebellion, republicans mobilised in their tens of thousands for the unveiling of a foundation stone for a Wolfe Tone memorial at Stephen’s Green. The veteran Fenian John O’Leary was given the honour on that occasion, unveiling a stone that symbolically had traveled from Belfast, where the United Irishmen were founded. O’Leary tapped the stone with his shovel six times, to represent each of Ireland’s provinces, America and France.  The site of the planned Wolfe Tone memorial did eventually witness the unveiling of a monument in 1907, but it was the controversial Fusiliers’ Arch, a memorial to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who had fought in the Second Boer War in defence of Empire. In less than a decade, the site at Stephen’s Green had taken on an entirely new meaning, and republicans would denounce the archway as Traitors’ Gate.

Talana, Colenso and other battles of the Second Boer War are recalled on Fusiliers’ Arch. It stands on what was the proposed location of a Wolfe Tone memorial.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go? Imperial monuments after independence:

Post independence, the question emerged of just what should be done with Dublin’s imperial monuments. P.S O’Hegarty, the nationalist writer and historian, outlined his belief in a letter to the Evening Herald in December 1931 that they should be left exactly as they were:

Nelson, and Queen Victoria, and other British statues are ancient  monuments, trophies left behind by a civilisation which has lost the eight centuries’ battle. The hand that touches one of them is the hand of an ignoramus and a vandal.

Yet despite the pleas of O’Hegarty and some others in public life, several monuments were removed by the state, in some cases they were controversially given away or sold at low cost. The statue of King George I, which had originally stood on Essex Bridge before finding shelter in the Mansion House, ultimately ended up in Birmingham in 1937. The decision to allow the statue to leave Dublin was controversial at the time, as regardless of the political debate around it, it was seen as a fine example of the work of a celebrated sculptor, the wonderfully named John van Nost the Elder.

In some cases, it was the placement of the memorials as much as their subjects which made them controversial. In February 1933 for example,  some members of Fianna Fáil made it to the pages of the national media when they outlined their belief that they considered having a statue of Queen Victoria outside the Dáil  “inconsistent with the main objects of Fianna Fáil.” To them, it was baffling that “this relic of imperialism should still disgrace the precincts of our Parliamentary institution.”

Yet while the state did remove Victoria, King George I and others, the majority of imperial monuments removed from the streetscape after independence were removed by republican organisations, with George II, the prior mentioned William of Orange and the equestrian statue of Lord Gough in the Phoenix Park all destroyed by targeted bombings.  A popular song  at the time of the bombing of the later, entitled ‘Gough’s Immortal Statue’, even included a verse aimed at the O’Connell Street monument to Horatio Nelson, suggesting its destruction was an inevitability:

When Nelson heard about it, he shouted to Parnell.

“How long will I be left here, now Charlie can you tell.

For I don’t feel safe upon my seat,

for I may retreat down to the street,

like Gough’s immortal statue, up near the Magazine.”

The decision to place monuments like that to Admiral Nelson in Dublin in the first place was, of course, shaped by colonial desires to ‘mark’ Dublin as a loyal city. Nelson was unveiled only years after the United Irish conspiracy had brought two rebellions into the open, in 1798 and again in 1803. Nelson had never sat foot in the country, though no doubt the memorial meant something to many of those who had lost loved ones at battles like Trafalgar. Yet Nelson’s Pillar, the work of Dublin-based architect Francis Johnston and constructed primarily of Wicklow Granite, was in many ways a more Irish monument than that which would ultimately replace it,  with the Spire the work of the London-based firm of Ian Ritchie. Rarely was it proposed that such monuments be removed from sites of contention and placed elsewhere. Could Nelson and Victoria still be labeled controversial monuments if they sat in the National Museum of Ireland, placed in their proper context?

Just as many monuments were erected here after moments of rebellion and political crisis, it is telling that the monuments which are now being removed in the U.S were erected at particular moments of tension, illustrating that they too were more shaped by contemporary political concerns than anything to do with the past. One striking graphic shows that “the construction of Confederate monuments peaked in the 1910s and 1920s, when states were enacting Jim Crow laws, and later in the 1950s and 1960s, amid the Civil Rights Movement.”  Undeniably, these now controversial monuments tell us more about the 1910s and the 1960s than they do about the American Civil War.

The decapitated Seán Russell, Fairview Park.

Even today, memorials in Dublin remain controversial, and it is not merely monuments to those associated with Empire. Take for example Seán Russell, the IRA Chief of Staff who died on a German U-Boat during the Second World War having sought military assistance from Nazi Germany. His Fairview monument has been decapitated and vandalised in a remarkable variety of ways, firstly by conservative nationalists who found the original raised fist pose of the monument to be communistic, and later by anti-fascist activists who regarded the memorial as one to a Nazi collaborator. Russell himself maintained that “‘I am not a Nazi. I’m not even pro-German. I am an Irishman fighting for the independence of Ireland.” In many ways, he embodied a certain physical force tradition in Irish republicanism that has always been there, willing to seize upon the old mantra that ‘England’s Difficulty is Ireland’s Opportunity’, regardless of which doors it involved knocking upon. As people call for their removal even of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, it’s likely we’ll hear more about Russell’s memorial in times ahead.

I believe the decision to give away memorials like that to Victoria and George I was a mistake on the part of the Irish state, but so too was the decision to leave figures like Nelson in provocative places where they were first erected as imperialistic symbols of control. To my mind the controversial monuments in the United States today belong in museums, with proper contextualisation around not only the individuals depicted, but the context of their unveiling and the individuals responsible for their placement there.