New states and old statues: Ireland’s monuments in an international context

The major memorials erected in Dublin between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 varied greatly in scale and in the political messages they were intended to convey. Initially they signaled support for the British crown. The earliest major secular monument was an equestrian statue of William III by Grinling Gibbons erected in Dublin in 1701, a year before the Protestant king’s death and only 12 years after he had defeated his Catholic father-in-law at the Battle of the Boyne. Following the Act of Union in 1800, which resulted in the dissolution of the Irish parliament, in front of which the monument stood, the British victory in the Napoleonic wars was marked by the erection in 1809 of Nelson’s Pillar on what was then Sackville Street and is now O’Connell Street, and the Wellington Monument, completed in Phoenix Park in 1861. Topping out at over 40m and 60m respectively, these were ambitious landmarks, although the length of time it took to complete the Wellington Monument suggests a certain lack of enthusiasm for one of the city’s most celebrated native sons.