O'Connell Street - Statues of O'Connell Street

Statues of O'Connell Street

Dubliners, who are famous for giving blunt nicknames to monuments, used to nickname the street 'the street of the Three Adulterers' because of the Victorian allegations of adultery made against the three principal figures on the street commemorated by statues; Parnell, Nelson and O'Connell. It was also noted humorously that the statue of Charles Stewart Parnell, on which appears his famous words "No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. To say to his country 'thus far shall thou go and no further", points to the Rotunda Hospital nearby, once Dublin's main maternity hospital, as though he was encouraging the Irish nation to outbreed its enemies.

The monuments on the O'Connell Street from south to north are:

• Daniel O'Connell: designed and sculpted by John Henry Foley and completed by his assistant Thomas Brock. Widely considered Foley’s finest work, the foundation stone was laid in 1864 and the monument unveiled to enormous crowds in 1882.

• William Smith O'Brien: by Thomas Farrell. Originally erected in 1870 on an island at the O'Connell Bridge entrance to D'Olier Street, it was moved to O'Connell Street in 1929.

• Sir John Gray: by Thomas Farrell. Both plinth and statue carved entirely of white Sicilian marble, it was unveiled in 1879. Gray was the proprietor of the Freeman's Journal newspaper and as a member of Dublin Corporation was responsible for the construction of the Dublin water supply system based on the Vartry Reservoir.

• James Larkin: by Oisín Kelly. An expressive bronze statue atop a granite plinth, the monument was unveiled in 1980. Originally Larkin's birth date was incorrectly incised into the plinth as '1876', and later altered to '1874' - hence the slight alteration marks to the text.

• Father Theobald Mathew: by Mary Redmond. The foundation stone was laid in 1890, and the monument unveiled in 1893.

• Charles Stewart Parnell: the Parnell Monument by Irish-American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The 57 ft high obelisk is made of solid Galway granite and was paid for through public subscription and unveiled in 1911 at the junction with Parnell Street, just south of Parnell Square for which Dublin Corporation re-routed the tram tracks to facilitate the siting of the monument.

• Nelson's Pillar, a 36.8 m (121 ft) granite Doric column erected in 1808 in honour of Admiral Lord Nelson, formerly stood at the centre of the street on the site of the present day Spire. Blown up by republican activists in 1966, the site remained vacant until the erection of the Spire in 2003.

Among the major buildings near to O'Connell Street are St Mary's Pro-Cathedral (popularly known as the Pro-Cathedral, which serves as Dublin's de facto Catholic cathedral, though it has never been raised formally to cathedral status, hence the name), the Rotunda Hospital, which serves as North Dublin's main maternity hospital, and several large modern shopping centres. South of the street, across O'Connell Bridge, lie Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland building, previously called (before the Act of Union in 1800) Parliament House, former home of the old Parliament of Ireland.