The Pillar Project, intended as a generator of ideas, brought artists and architects together, with suggestions for the site exhibited in the General Post Office and discussed on the Late Late Show. Architects, planners and artists argued that the year of reflection on Dublin’s past presented an opportune moment to re-examine the Nelson Pillar site. The architect Yann Goulet brought forward a proposal for a monument that would contain over £150,000 worth of bronze, and which would stand taller than the neighbouring General Post Office, but Goulet’s larger than life tribute to Pearse was so controversial that Councillor Frank Sherwin raged “it should be thrown in the Liffey”, while another elected official described it as “the yoke”, refusing to even entertain the idea.ĭublin’s so-called millennium year of 1988 produced more than just commemorative milk bottles and Viking memorabilia. With the centenary of the birth of Patrick Pearse in the 1970s, proposals for a monument to the 1916 leader on the site once occupied by the Pillar flooded in.
The aftermath of the bombing of Nelson's Pillar in 1966. It wasn’t until 2003, with the unveiling of Ian Ritchie’s ‘Monument of Light’ that the debate was put to bed. Some suggested rebuilding the Doric column, others called for something radically different. Yet if Nelson was controversial, all proposals for replacing the monument proved likewise. Though the Pillar itself was gone, buses continued to advertise themselves as travelling to ‘Nelson’s Pillar’ in the centre of the city, perhaps clinging to the name in the hope something would, sooner rather than later, find a home where the monument had stood. In the Seanad, Senator Owen Dudley Edwards lamented the fact that he “as a Dubliner, felt a sense of loss, not because of Nelson – one could hardly see Nelson at the top – but because this pillar symbolised for many Dubliners the centre of the city”. THE BOMBING OF the Nelson Pillar on 8 March 1966 transformed the streetscape of Dublin forever, leaving a gaping hole in the centre of O’Connell Street where a foreign Admiral had watched events unfold since 1809.