History
O'Connell Street has its origins in a street named Drogheda Street dating from the 17th century. Laid out by Henry Moore, Earl of Drogheda, it was a third of the width of the present-day O'Connell Street, located on the site of the modern eastern carriageway and extending from Parnell Street to the junction with Abbey Street. In the 1740s, a wealthy banker and property speculator by the name of Luke Gardiner acquired the upper part of Drogheda Street extending down to Henry Street as part of a much larger land deal. He demolished the western side of Drogheda Street creating an exclusive elongated residential square 46m (150 feet) in width, thus establishing the scale of the modern-day thoroughfare. The new, more ordered western side featured modest two-bay houses to the south intended for merchants, and larger three-bay houses further north, while the eastern side had many mansions, the grandest of which was Drogheda House rented by the sixth Earl of Drogheda. Gardiner also laid out a mall down the central section of the street, lined with low granite walls and obelisks topped with oil-fuelled lamp globes. It was planted with trees a few years later. He titled the new development 'Sackville Street' after the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Lionel Cranfield Sackville, Duke of Dorset. It was also known as 'Sackville Mall', 'Gardiner's Mall' or simply 'The Mall'. However due to the limited lands owned by the Gardiners in this area, the Rotunda Hospital sited just off the street at the bottom of Parnell Square - also developed by the family - was not built on axis with Sackville Street, terminating the vista. It had been Gardiner's intention to eventually break this grand new street through to the river, however he died in 1755, with his son taking over the estate.
It was not until 1777 that the planning body in the city, the Wide Streets Commission, obtained a financial grant from Parliament and work could begin to realise this plan. For the next 10 years work progressed in demolishing a myriad of dwellings and other buildings, laying out the new roadway and building new terraces. Upon completion c. 1785-90, one of the finest streets in Europe had been created. The Wide Streets Commission had envisaged and realised marching terraces of unified and proportioned facades extending from the river as far north as Princes Street, their simple red brick elevations off-set with a major classical cut stone building near the centre (later to be the GPO built in 1814-18). The street became a commercial success upon the opening of Carlisle Bridge, designed by James Gandon, in 1793 for pedestrians and 1795 for all traffic.
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“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)