Criticism
The building of Nelson's Pillar had been, from the outset, controversial. As early as September 1809 a paragraph appeared in Watty Cox's Irish Magazine, stating: "The statue of Nelson records the glory of a mistress and the transformation of our state into a discount office". Until 1922 most of the criticisms were due to aesthetic considerations or because it was considered an impediment to traffic. In May 1876 a letter to the editor expressed its author's feelings in verse:
| “ | In the centre of our city Where the lines of traffic meet - |
” |
In 1876 Dublin Corporation took up the question of removal, but found it did not have the power to remove it. In 1879 the Corporation argued that it should be removed as it was "an ugly traffic hazard". It tried again in 1891, causing much debate in the city and in Parliament, but did not succeed due to financial considerations. A writer on Dublin's history in 1909, Dillon Cosgrave, acknowledged the temporary nature of the Pillar, remarking that "For a very long time, the project of removing the Pillar, which many condemn as an obstruction to traffic, has been mooted, but it has never taken definite shape".
In 1923, the debate was renewed when famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats called for the pillar to be removed on aesthetic grounds, saying "It's not a beautiful object". The debate was renewed again in 1926 and again in 1928. Several attempts were made subsequently to have it removed, including by Taoiseach Seán Lemass, in 1960. He said " has no place in the centre of our capital city overshadowing our principal national monument, which is the GPO". There were proposals to keep the pillar but to replace the statue of Nelson with other statues.
On 7 April 1954, the Dublin Brigade Irish Republican Army (IRA) sent a letter to Dublin Corporation, asking that it "seek legislation for the removal of the Nelson Pillar".
Politician and former SIPTU president Des Geraghty argued that, by the 1960s, "not many people wanted Nelson there...he was a relic of the Empire". Independent Dublin TD Frank Sherwin said: "Although I view Nelson as a great Englishman ... I hold that there should be a great historic Irishman put in his place".
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)