Nelson’s Pillar was a large granite column capped by a statue of Horatio Nelson, built in the centre of what was then Sackville Street in Dublin, Ireland. Completed in 1809 when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, it survived until March 1966, when it was severely damaged by explosives planted by Irish republicans. It remained in the city as most of Ireland became the Irish Free State in 1922, and the Republic of Ireland in 1949. After years of debate and numerous proposals, the site was occupied in 2003 by the Spire of Dublin.
About Nelson’s Pillar in brief
Nelson’s Pillar was a large granite column capped by a statue of Horatio Nelson, built in the centre of what was then Sackville Street in Dublin, Ireland. Completed in 1809 when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, it survived until March 1966, when it was severely damaged by explosives planted by Irish republicans. The decision to build the monument was taken by Dublin Corporation in the euphoria following Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It remained in the city as most of Ireland became the Irish Free State in 1922, and the Republic of Ireland in 1949. After years of debate and numerous proposals, the site was occupied in 2003 by the Spire of Dublin, a slim needle-like structure rising almost three times the height of the Pillar. Relics of the Pillar are found in Dublin museums and appear as decorative stonework elsewhere and its memory is preserved in numerous works of Irish literature. In 2000, a former republican activist gave a radio interview in which he admitted planting the explosives in 1966, but, after questioning him, the Gardaí decided not to take action. Although it was widely believed that the action was the work of the Irish Republican Army, the police were unable to identify any of those responsible. The first monument in Sackville Street was built in 1759 in the location where the Nelson Pillar would eventually stand. The subject was William Blakeney, 1st Baron Blakeny, a Limerick-born army officer whose career extended over more than 60 years and ended with his surrender to the French after the Siege of Minorca in 1756.
A brass statue sculpted by John van Nost the younger was unveiled on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1759. After Gardiner’s death in 1755 Dublin’s growth continued, with many fine public buildings and grand squares, the city’s status magnified by the presence of the Parliament of Ireland for six months of the year. The Acts of Union of 1800, which united Ireland and Great Britain under a single Westminster polity, presaged a period of decline for the city. The historian Tristram Hunt writes: \”he capital’s dynamism vanished, absenteeism returned and the big houses lost their patrons\”. In 1759, a brass statue of John van Nost was unveiled in Sackville Street, in honour of Lionel Sackville, who served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1731 to 1737 and from 1751 to 1755. In 1805, a Royal Naval fleet commanded by Lord Nelson defeated the combined fleets of the French and Spanish navies in the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson had been hailed in Dublin seven years earlier, as defender of the Nile, and later that day he died on the board of his flagship HMS Victory; by the time he later died, he was mortally wounded on November 8, 8 November. Nelson’s Pillar was a popular tourist attraction, but provoked aesthetic and political controversy from the outset. The chief legal barrier to its removal was the trust created at the Pillar’s inception, which gave the trustees a duty in perpetuity to preserve the monument.
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This page is based on the article Nelson’s Pillar published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
