Nelson's Pillar – blown up in 1966

Overview

At 1.32am on 8 March 1966 a bomb sheared the top off Nelson’s Pillar, ending 157 years in which a granite column and a stone English admiral stood over the centre of Dublin. Walk the middle of O’Connell Street today and you are on the exact spot: a 40.8-metre Doric column that ran from 1809 to 1966, built to mark Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar and, for most Dubliners, valued more as a viewing platform and a place to catch a tram than as a war memorial. If you want to see anything of it now, walk five minutes south to the Gilbert Library on Pearse Street, where Nelson’s 13-foot head sits on a plinth. On O’Connell Street itself there is nothing of the pillar left but the space where it stood.

The pillar’s story

From subscription to summit (1805–1809)

News of Trafalgar reached Dublin in early 1806, and the city’s aldermen moved to commission a memorial. A public subscription raised £6,856. The architect William Wilkins produced an initial design that proved too ambitious, so the city architect Francis Johnston simplified it, settling on a solid plinth and a Portland stone statue of Nelson by the sculptor Thomas Kirk.

The foundation stone was laid on 15 February 1808, and the column was finished by October 1809. Visitors paid ten pence, later reduced to six, to climb 168 steps to a viewing platform that looked over the Liffey, out to the Wicklow Mountains and, on a clear day, as far as the Mournes. For nearly a century it doubled as a tourist draw and a practical landmark on a busy street.

A century of controversy

As Irish politics shifted through the 20th century, the pillar became a lightning rod for nationalist feeling. A trust set up in 1811 legally required its perpetual preservation, so removing it needed an act of the British Parliament – a legal knot that frustrated one Dublin corporation after another. Proposals from the 1920s to the 1950s ranged from shifting the whole column to Phoenix Park to swapping Nelson for an Irish figure. It came through the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, though stray bullets left marks on the stone.

Operation Humpty Dumpty

On the night of 8 March 1966 a bomb, planted by a fringe republican group and packed with gelignite and ammonal around the base, detonated at 1.32am and took off the statue and the upper column. The stunt was later nicknamed ‘Operation Humpty Dumpty’. It left a jagged 70-foot stump, which the Irish Army brought down with a controlled explosion on 14 March – and that second, official blast did more damage to nearby shopfronts than the bomb had. No one was hurt.

The public reaction ran to relief and black humour. The folk song ‘Up Went Nelson’ topped the Irish charts for four weeks, The Dubliners released ‘Nelson’s Farewell’, and Éamon de Valera reportedly proposed a newspaper headline: ‘British Admiral Leaves Dublin By Air’.

What to see and do today

The Spire and O’Connell Street

The stainless-steel needle now rising from the pillar’s old base is the Spire of Dublin, 120 metres tall and unveiled in 2003. You can’t climb it, but the base is open and free at any hour, and the pedestrianised street makes it easy to walk the pillar’s former footprint. The open space is wheelchair-friendly, with tactile paving along the footpaths.

Nelson’s head

The real reason to make a stop of this is the head. Nelson’s 13-foot stone head came through the 1966 explosion largely intact, and after years in storage and a few odd outings it now rests on a plinth in the Gilbert Library, the Dublin City Library and Archive on Pearse Street. Entry is free, Monday to Friday, 9.30am to 5pm, and it’s a five-minute walk south from the Spire. Other fragments of the column were dispersed after the demolition, and small pieces were sold off as souvenirs at the time.

Literary traces

The pillar features in James Joyce’s Ulysses, most memorably when Stephen Dedalus pictures two elderly women climbing the steps to eat plums. Many guided walks of the city still pause at the site to talk through its political weight, usually alongside the Abbey Theatre and the buildings on Kildare Street. If you like that kind of thing, bring a copy of Ulysses.

Practical information

Tips for visiting

• Photographing the Spire: early morning or late afternoon, when low light catches the steel and the reflections of the surrounding buildings.
• Make a loop of it: start at the GPO, walk the length of the old pillar footprint to the Spire, then carry on to the Gilbert Library for the head.
• Weather: the site is fully exposed and Dublin turns quickly, so pack a light layer or umbrella even in summer.